- cross-posted to:
- acab@quokk.au
- cross-posted to:
- acab@quokk.au
A new Insurance Institute for Highway Safety study compared smartphone telematics with police reports for almost 17,000 crashes in Connecticut, Illinois, Ohio, and Texas. After excluding passive screen activity such as an untouched navigation display, the data still show a huge gap: phones detected active use before crashes far more often than police documented it.
What a creepy Orwellian system we’ve built, to have this kind of information down to seconds. In the next study they’ll be including what direction the driver’s eyes were pointed in at the time of the crash.
I love how drivers only care about orwellian overreach when it infringes in their right to text and drive and kill people…
It’s voluntary (for now). Not hard for a phone app to see you’re using the device just before the accelerometer detects a crash.
All cars built after September 2027 in the US must have surveillance technology on board to detect impaired drivers and restrict the operation of the vehicle if impairment is detected. This includes drowsiness. Which means they can track your eyes. Not a big step at all to not only detect if a phone is in use but to record that data.
It wasn’t voluntary for any of the people who had their rights violated by GM, OnStar and LexisNexis. And we know they aren’t the only ones doing this shit, they’re just the ones that got caught.
If we lived in a sane society, the people responsible for this shit would be occupying prison cells.
If I, as an individual, took it upon myself to install surveillance devices in peoples’ vehicles and collect behavioral data on them, without their knowledge and explicit consent, I would be (rightly) held criminally liable for that. But because this creepy stalking is being done by corporations, apparently that’s OK.
I drove someone’s new car the other day. Glancing to my right for maybe a second triggered a “keep your eyes on the road” notification and alarm. You know, I used to not understand older people’s fear of new technology. I get it now.
Yup. I don’t think you can approve of this kind of research without also giving tacit approval to the police state being built around us.