A case in the United States sheds light on a topic that will have ample space in the future: how to prevent road safety tools from being used for other purposes?
A case in the United States shines a light on what could be one of the most important points of debate in the future of mobility. A collective group – initially the complaint came from four women – managed to start a case against the county of Westchester, just north of New York City, guilty, according to the prosecutors, of having illegally used almost 600 automatic license plate markers for years. The county allegedly acted without ever having obtained all the necessary authorization to deploy the equipment, which, if proven, would constitute a violation of New York state law. Compounding the accusation is the fact that the information collected by the whistleblowers they would then be shared with over 50 police bodiesincluding the famous one Icewhich deals specifically with immigration. Westchester is not the first controversy to arise on American soil regarding automatic license plate markers and their potential use for mass monitoring purposes. Tools of this kind, but used only to record traffic violations, thus allowing the relevant sanctions to be imposed, also exist in Italy and Europe. The topic is therefore global and should not be underestimated: how can we manage the tools necessary to make roads safe with the advancement of technology? How can we prevent cameras designed to monitor our driving behavior from actually being used to monitor our movements or habits?
current systems
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In Italy, but essentially throughout the world, driving control systems capable of tracing citizens’ personal data are already in use. These are the speed cameras, the Tutor, the Vergilius, to name a few, which obviously require access to the driver’s details to guarantee the state police the possibility of imposing sanctions. As highlighted, for example, on the website of Motorways for Italy“the control Tutor system stores vehicle data but only for the purpose of verifying the infringement”, therefore the data of non-sanctioned vehicles is recorded. Instruments, such as the speed detector, whose presence must be specifically reported and fundamental to making our roads safer, as evidenced by the many data that highlight the reduction in accidents where certain devices are present. However, the advancement of technology means that increasingly smaller instruments are able to operate in an increasingly important manner, to develop more and more data, to communicate with multiple reference channels at the same time. Which can lead to ambiguous situations, such as those reported in the United States, in which tools dedicated to road safety can – or actually are – actually used for activities of a completely different type. How to prevent this?
legislation and future doubts
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Of course, they are the legislative systems of the various countries to establish which data collected and processed by a tool can be used by a police body, or law enforcement in general, and also what countermeasures must be implemented if these limits are exceeded. However, the road between saying and doing is tortuous: data, in fact, travels much faster than Parliaments or judicial controls. And this is a modern problem that does not only concern tools dedicated to road safety. In the future it will probably be increasingly complicated to know whether a camera used to monitor speed is – there is no doubt about the fact that they will have the possibility – also monitoring something else, even banal purchasing habits for example, without necessarily delving into science fiction scenarios. How to manage this phenomenon, even more so in a world where tools such as, to name one, the Tutor take it for granted and consider it fundamental for security purposes? Will we take steps backwards regarding road safety, giving up control systems in favor of our privacy or will we surrender to the idea that in addition to our cruising speed the various cameras also know where, for example, we are going on holiday?
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there are also risks inside the car
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Monitoring our data, however, may not only be cameras or control systems inserted into the environment, but also the actual vehicles. The warning always comes from the United States, but this time from the White House and not from a citizen collective. It was the Biden presidency, in fact, to ban cars with software And hardware Chinese (in addition to inserting 100% duties on Beijing’s electric cars) due, among others, to the risks related to the privacy of US drivers (the possibility of the vehicle being controlled remotely was also cited among the dangers). The ability to access and collect data from modern cars is therefore another aspect that legislators must consider, especially when the vehicles are produced in countries where companies, de factoare linked and controlled by the central state, such as the People’s Republic.
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