E-ZPass used for surveillance by various organisations in the US

There are a substantial number of toll roads and bridges in the north-east of the United States. There are very few in the west. The difference largely stems from the fact that the east built a large portion of its road infrastructure prior to the federal government getting into road building in a big way subsequently to the second world war, and in the east roads and bridges were built and belong to a wide assortment of state governments, city and county governments, peculiar specially constituted government authorities, and the like, which often charge tolls, whereas most roads in the west were built with federal government money and tolls are not collected.

Traditionally, the toll roads in the east have collected tolls using the low tech method of collecting cash at toll gates. As well as being expensive to operate, this method negates many of the benefits of having modern, fast moving highways, because motorists must stop to pay the toll, and at peak hours must often queue for some time in order to pay the toll. For this reason, there has been considerable pressure to introduce electronic methods for toll payment. If a motorist has an electronic tag in the front of his car that can be detected electronically even if he is driving at speed, then it is not necessary to stop. The driver can drive straight through and gain the full benefits of the road, and the toll collection agency does not have to employ people to collect the toll or deal with large amounts of cash. (It also allows the toll to be easily varied depending on time of day or day of the week, which allows intelligent traffic management on the road).

It is obviously best if a single tag will operate all toll roads that a motorist is likely to want to drive on, so in recent years fifteen toll collecting agencies in the US North East have standardised on a single system, called E-ZPass. Normally some lanes of the road going through the tollgates will continue to allow cash tolls to be paid, whereas others will be reserved for electronic E-ZPass users.

Now, the benefits to both motorists and the road owners of such a system are considerable. But there are also privacy implications. If you use such a system, records exist of where you drove to and when. Security of these records was not been considered to be of paramount importance when the system was invented, and data is shared between 15 different governments and agencies even before the possibility of data going to other organisations is considered. But, if data exists, people will try to use it for other purposes, and this is what is happening.

This article describes how in a considerable number of cases police have managed to sepoena E-ZPass records to help in solving crimes, often in cases where people have claimed to be in one place but the records have revealed their car to be in another. (One incident was an internal investigation in which police claimed overtime, but they were revealed to have gone home). There is at least one instance where the records have been used in divorce proceedings to help demonstate infidelity.

Now, at this point I don’t think the privacy implications are all that bad. Motorists are only giving away their location when they choose to – that is when they pay a toll. If they wish to avoid giving away their location, then they can still pay cash. There are a relatively small number of roads on which this system is used, and it provides a very imcomplete picture of their movements. Compared to the amount of information about yourself that you give away by carrying a mobile phone or using a credit card regularly, the information here is small. But there are one or two more worrying issues.

Firstly, the number of roads on which these types of systems are used is growing. The more it grows, the more complete a picture of movements will be established. Secondly, usage is growing outside just paying tolls. The E-ZPass tag can be used at Drive Through windows at a couple of McDonald’s restaurants and a couple of airport carparks in New York. The more this happens and the more the picture established becomes a picture of your habits as well as your movements. Apparently a couple of road bodies are using the tags to track traffic movements for congestion management even at times when tolls are not being paid, although they claim that the data is being used anonymously. Finally, when new toll roads are built there is a tendency to make the use of electronic tags mandatory if you wish to use the road. (There is a very similar system in use in Australia, and on the last couple of new roads to have been opened, there is no cash option). So some of the privacy implications are bad.

However, in most of the cases where people’s privacy has been violated, it has generally come from ignorance. People have allowed themselves to be tracked because they did not know it was possible. So one solution is to make sure that things like this are publicised and people are told about the privacy implications. Another is to try to retain opt-outs if at all possible. (An anonymous system akin to pre-pay mobile phones is relatively easily doable with such systems).

Finally, things could be much worse. This sort of opt-in system in which applications are created from the bottom up and slowly consolidate is in my mind far better from the point of view of privacy concerns than is the issue being proposed in Europe, which is satellite tracking of cars for road charging purposes. The American system is more along the lines of “We will find a way to charge people”, and then watching as it might or might not evolve into a surveillance system. The European system seems to be more along the lines of simply introducing a surveillance system and then trying to find excuses for having it. One is finding other applications for charging, the other is finding other applications for surveillance. (Actually, the European system seems alarmingly like a piece of gun-ho bureacratic inertia. Europe has decided that it wants its own equivalent of the American GPS location system. Once they have it, they need to find applications. This seems to be one. Whether this is an actual efficient or sensible way to charge people for road use doesn’t seem to have been discussed much.

And, as always in these sort of cases, we encounter the fundamental trade-off. Yes, these systems do reduce privacy. But at the same time the benefits that they provide are real. We have to find some kind of balance, and it isn’t simple. I for one did have such a tag in my car when I was living in Sydney. It meant that I didn’t have to queue when I was trying to get home when tired late in the evening. And it was worth this.

(Link via slashdot)