The DOT wants to know where you are
What could go wrong? The DOT has proposed that all new cars be required to broadcast their location and speed.
They claim that this data could be used to provide drivers with a warning if their vehicle might be getting too close to another vehicle. It will also be necessary to make driverless cars more reliable.
I wonder what other uses this information could have.
On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.
The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.
The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News
What could go wrong? The DOT has proposed that all new cars be required to broadcast their location and speed.
They claim that this data could be used to provide drivers with a warning if their vehicle might be getting too close to another vehicle. It will also be necessary to make driverless cars more reliable.
I wonder what other uses this information could have.
On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.
The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.
The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News
“There is no data in the safety messages exchanged by vehicles or collected by the V2V system that could be used by law enforcement or private entities to personally identify a speeding or erratic driver,” the report said. “The system — operated by private entities — will not enable tracking through space and time of vehicles linked to specific owners or drivers.”
I believe that almost as much as the fairness of the IRS as it grants statuses based upon political leanings, or the supposedly beneficent NSA collecting data on every American’s phone calls, or the supposedly protective DOJ making sure that Mexican drug cartels don’t buy guns from the US, take them across the border, and murder hundreds of people.
Or that I can keep my healthcare plan if I like my healthcare plan. Period. End of story.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qpa-5JdCnmo
So, no, I don’t trust some low-level employees’ opinion on what greedy, tax-hungry, lying governments will not do with information coming from any system.
Other uses:
1) The government could tax you for driving your car (where’s the freedom there?).
2) Automatically ticket you if the 10-meter-accurate GPS decides that you are going 1 MPH too fast (where’s the freedom there?).
3) Automatically ticket you if you park 1-minute too long in a parking space (where’s the freedom there?).
4) Blackmail you because they figured out you are having an affair (where’s the freedom there?) or went golfing instead of to work (presidents keep getting flack for that, so why wouldn’t they want to put that burden on the rest of us, too?).
5) Warn you that you are about to drive off a cliff (oh, wait, the government can’t even see it’s approaching its own fiscal cliff, so they don’t seem to care about driving off cliffs).
6) Some overly curious government employee could track you specifically for whatever nefarious purpose (where’s the freedom there?), such as setting the paparazzi on celebrities he doesn’t like.
And somehow I suspect that the project to warn us when we are too close will become just too difficult to implement (the FAA has been trying, unsuccessfully, to automate this same thing for airplanes since at least the 1970s). But the taxing, ticketing, blackmailing will remain.
Even if the car does warn us about driving “too close” (whatever that means), doesn’t that just add to the distractions we already have to overcome while driving?