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Mix-Ansicht- Big Brother findet immer wieder einen neuen Grund für unsere Überwachung - CRASH_GURU, 19.10.2005, 07:34
Big Brother findet immer wieder einen neuen Grund für unsere Überwachung
-->STATES SEEKING TO TRACK CELL PHONES FOR TRAFFIC CONDITIONS
By David A. Lieb
Associated Press
October 8, 2005
http://www.kansascity.com/mld/kansascity/news/local/12849605.htm
JEFFERSON CITY, Mo. - Driving to work with your cell phone on, you notice
the traffic beginning to slow down. Instantly and unbeknown to you, the
government senses your delay and flashes a traffic congestion update over
Web sites and electronic road signs.
Other motorists take heed, diverting to alternative routes or allowing more
time for their trips.
Futuristic as it may seem, the scenario actually is pretty close to becoming
reality.
In what would be the largest project of its kind, the Missouri Department of
Transportation is negotiating with private contractors to monitor thousands
of cell phones, using their movements to produce real-time traffic
conditions on 5,500 miles of roads statewide.
Cell phone users won't even know anyone's watching them. But transportation
and technology leaders assure there is no need to worry -- the data will
remain anonymous, leaving no possibility of tracking specific people from
their driveway to their destination.
"There is absolutely no privacy threat whatsoever," said Pete Rahn, director
of the Missouri Department of Transportation.
But privacy advocates are uneasy.
"Even though its anonymous, it's still ominous," said Daniel Solove, a
privacy law professor at George Washington University and author of the
book,"The Digital Person.""It troubles me, because it does show this
movement toward using a technology to track people."
Cell phone monitoring already is being used by transportation officials in
Baltimore, though not yet to relay traffic conditions to the public. Similar
projects are getting under way in Norfolk, Va., and a stretch of Interstate
75 between Atlanta and Macon, Ga.
But the Missouri project is by far the most aggressive -- tracking wireless
phones across a whole state, including in rural areas with lower traffic
counts, and doing so for the explicit purpose of relaying the information to
other travelers.
"This will be the biggest system in the world, assuming our contract ends up
similar to what's in the request" from the department, said Richard Mudge,
vice president of Delcan NET, the Ontario, Canada-based company that won the
Missouri bid and is currently negotiating the contract details.
Governments have had the ability to measure traffic volumes and speeds for
years. They can embed sensors in pavement, or mount scanners and cameras
along the road. But those monitoring methods require the installation of
equipment, which then must be maintained, and can take only a snapshot of
traffic at that particular spot.
"The traffic community has been really excited for quite some time about the
possibility of being able to use cell phones to track vehicles," said
Valerie Briggs, program manager for transportation operations at the
American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials."Almost
everyone has a cell phone, so you have a lot of potential data points, and
you can track data almost anywhere on the whole (road) system."
Although some new cell phones come equipped with Global Positioning System
capabilities that can pinpoint the exact location of phones, the tracking
technology used for transportation agencies does not depend on that to work.
Instead, it takes the frequent signals that wireless phones send to towers
and follows the movement of the phones from one tower to another. Then it
overlays that movement with highway maps to determine what road the phones
are on and how fast they are moving. Lumping dozens, hundreds or thousands
of those signals together can measure traffic flow.
A Delcan NET demonstration Web site developed for Baltimore uses various
shades of green, yellow and red to show block-by-block whether vehicles are
moving at or below the speed limits. As rush hour started on a recent work
day, observers could watch as green turned to yellow and then red on roads
heading out of downtown.
The Baltimore project began this spring as a pilot program that monitors
Cingular cell phone users over about 1,000 miles of road. A Delcan NET
competitor, Atlanta-based AirSage Inc., has an agreement with Sprint to
monitor phones for its projects in Georgia and Virginia.
"What we're hoping and assuming is that we're going to be able to continue
collecting the information over time and eventually deploy it statewide,"
said Mike Zezeski, director of real-time traffic operations for the Maryland
Department of Transportation.
Rahn hopes to make a similar Web site available to Missouri motorists, and
to post estimated travel times on electronic road signs. The Missouri and
Maryland plans also assume the contractor will market more detailed
information to the private sector -- automakers that offer onboard
navigation systems, cell phone companies, shipping businesses or media that
broadcast rush-hour traffic reports.
The private sector marketing helps drive down the states' cost. Missouri
expects to spend less than $3 million a year on the service, Rahn said,
although the exact price won't be known until the contract is final.
Maryland is spending just $1.5 million, although the entire Baltimore
project costs more than $5 million, Zezeski said.
Although there apparently are no plans to do so, the Electronic Privacy
Information Center suggests that someone should notify cell phone owners
that their phones are being monitored for traffic data. Privacy experts also
worry that the traffic monitoring could later evolve into other uses --
perhaps to catch speeders or fugitives.
"It's a mission creep issue that would be of most concern to consumers,"
said Lillie Coney, associate director of Washington, D.C.-based electronic
privacy center."They may start out saying we want to know if there's a
traffic problem and then take that information and start using it for
different purposes."
Adds Solove, the privacy professor:"I look in the future and I see, `Wow,
this is just another one in the class of ways that people can be tracked.'"
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