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While gassing up his rented vehicle, a driver finds his debit card has been declined. Why? He's been hit with $450 in mysterious fees. A hidden on-board device, he learns, has caught him speeding three times.A woman becomes terrified by her ex-boyfriend's stalking. How does he always know where she is? Police find the answer under the hood of her car: a Global Positioning System (GPS) near the radiator.
A California commuter with a FasTrak tag zips along a Bay Area highway. Microchip readers log data from the tag, and it's sent to a database that monitors traffic, where it's presumably safe from hackers.
Welcome to the brave new world, automotive division, where a slew of gizmos -- from black boxes to GPS navigators to smart tollbooths -- is creating cars that don't just take us from point A to point B, but track how we get there.
Few would deny that technological advances like antilock brakes, air bags and traction control have made cars less dangerous. Now, computer tracking is making the driving experience even safer and more convenient. It's also helping law enforcement, and promising benefits for insurers and policyholders.
For all the good, though, some see the new technologies chipping away at personal privacy.
"We don't have much federal privacy legislation when it comes to these new technologies yet," says Pam Dixon, executive director of the World Privacy Forum, a research group. "And there's going to be a massive amount of info floating around."
One source of that info: vehicular-event data recorders (EDRs), the so-called black boxes that log everything from braking to seat-belt use when an accident occurs. They are now built into 25 million U.S.-made cars, and are standard in all GM and some Ford models. Police increasingly use them to decide who's to blame in crashes.
In May 2003, for instance, Edwin Matos, 48, was convicted of vehicular manslaughter for killing two teenage girls in Florida. Data from his 2002 Pontiac Trans Am's EDR showed him driving 104 mph at the time of the accident. Says Michael Horowitz, the Florida state attorney in the case: "I think [black boxes] are opening up possibilities in cases where there isn't a lot of physical evidence." You could say that the EDR holds the car's DNA.
And that's worrisome, because anyone can buy a device that taps into many EDRs. One popular model, Vetronix's Crash Data Retrieval System, goes for $2,495, and is used by forensic specialists hired by insurers to probe accidents. But a shady body-shop owner can get one, too, and then sell the data to an insurer, which could use it to rewrite a driver's policy.
Ohio-based Progressive Insurance has already tested a program -- dubbed usage-based auto insurance -- utilizing GPS data. In 1998 about 1,000 Texas customers allowed Progressive to outfit their vehicles with GPS collection devices, which pinpoint location data via a 24-satellite network. The devices tracked how far motorists drove, at what time of day and to what type of area (urban, suburban or rural).
Driving less, being careful and avoiding high-theft areas cut some drivers' bills by an average of 25 percent. Such a usage-based program hits high-mileage motorists with the steepest premiums. Drivers in that category -- long-distance commuters, for instance -- probably wouldn't embrace the concept. But others do, including the EPA, which sees it as a good way to cut emissions. Progressive says GPS technology's high cost halted a wider rollout at the time. With the cost falling, usage-based insurance could become common.
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