Automobile black boxes nail speeders and dangerous drivers by recording speeds and driving habits

Public awareness of automobile black boxes surged recently when a Canadian teenager driver who collided with another vehicle (killing the occupant) was busted by black box data that revealed he was traveling at 157kph. Canadian courts accepted the black box data as evidence, and the teen was convicted.

This is a good thing. When dangerous drivers are caught by smart technology, convicted of their crimes, and taken off the streets, the world is a safer place for us all. If anything, good drivers should want black boxes in their vehicles to prove their own innocence in automobile accidents.

By the way, these black boxes aren't tracking devices. They don't upload data to the police or satellites. They simply record the vehicle's speed, acceleration and other data, just like airplane black boxes. They can only be analyzed AFTER the fact, where they can be used to bolster the driver's claims of what really happened. Much the same can be accomplished with a car video camera, too.

Vehicle black boxes represent good technology that offers the potential for greatly improving the safety of public roadways without violating the privacy of drivers. People who drive dangerously do not have the right to keep that fact private, since they are publicly endangering the lives of other drivers. Likewise, people who speed or who run red lights do not have the right to keep those driving practices secret. It should all be on the record as far as I'm concerned.

• Montreal's Stephanie Perrin, head of Digital Discretion, a privacy advocacy group, says people just don't understand how far surveillance of our daily lives can go.
• Many Canadians became aware that late-model cars are equipped with "black box" technology during a recent high-profile trial in which a motorist was jailed in the death of a university student in Montreal.
• The scheme uses radio frequency identification (RFID), one controversial technology or software application that is trickling into North America, particularly in the marketplace.
• Simply put, RFID tags -- microchips as small as a grain of sand -- contain a unique 96-bit code chock full of information that can be read and stored by RFID readers.
• One of the people tracking RFIDs most closely is Katherine Albrecht, founder of the New Hampshire-based Consumers Against Supermarket Privacy Invasion and Numbering.
• Even if RFIDs only tracked purchases, they'd generate huge databanks ripe for abuse, says Albrecht, who also objects to supermarket loyalty cards, in part because of the databanks they generate.
• A grocer in New Mexico turned over -- under subpoena -- a customer's records to Drug Enforcement Agency investors who were interested in his purchases of small plastic bags, she says.
• In the United States, Wal-Mart has claimed that RFIDs are now being used only on cases or pallets in warehouses but Albrecht has found live RFID tags on individual items on store shelves.
• Last November, Wal-Mart and Procter & Gamble photographed unsuspecting consumers as they selected lipsticks.
• You book your flight with Credit Card A.
• You call the toll-free number of a hotel chain, using your a loyalty card for a discount rate.