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.
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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.
Readers!
Every February I run a fund-raising drive during my birthday month. This year I celebrate my 72nd birthday, and hope and plan to continue writing and posting on Behind the Black for as long as I am able.
I hope my readers will support this effort. As I did in my November fund-raising drive, I am offering autographed copies of my books for large donations. Donate $250 and you can have a choice of the hardback of either Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8 or Conscious Choice: The origins of slavery in America and why it matters today and for our future in outer space. Donate $200 and you can get an autographed paperback copy of either. IMPORTANT! If you donate enough to get a book, please email me separately to tell me which book you want and the address to mail it to.
Please consider supporting my work here at Behind the Black. My analysis of space, politics, and culture, taken from the perspective of an historian, is almost always on the money and ahead of the game. For example, in 2020 I correctly predicted that the COVID panic was unnecessary, that the virus was apparently simply a variation of the flu, that masks were not simply pointless but if worn incorrectly were a health threat, that the lockdowns were a disaster and did nothing to stop the spread of COVID. Every one of those 2020 conclusions has turned out right.
Your help allows me to do this kind of intelligent analysis. I take no advertising or sponsors, so my reporting isn't influenced by donations by established space or drug companies. Instead, I rely entirely on donations and subscriptions from my readers, which gives me the freedom to write what I think, unencumbered by outside influences.
You can support me either by giving a one-time contribution or a regular subscription. There are four ways of doing so:
1. Zelle: This is the only internet method that charges no fees. All you have to do is use the Zelle link at your internet bank and give my name and email address (zimmerman at nasw dot org). What you donate is what I get.
2. Patreon: Go to my website there and pick one of five monthly subscription amounts, or by making a one-time donation.
3. A Paypal Donation or subscription:
4. Donate by check, payable to Robert Zimmerman and mailed to
Behind The Black
c/o Robert Zimmerman
P.O.Box 1262
Cortaro, AZ 85652
You can also support me by buying one of my books, as noted in the boxes interspersed throughout the webpage or shown in the menu above.
“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?