Originally published November 25 2005
Privacy advocates wary of Missouri traffic plan
by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, NaturalNews Editor
The Missouri Department of Transportation will track thousands of cell phones, in an attempt to map traffic conditions on all 5,500 miles of Missouri's major roads.
Officials say there's no Big Brother agenda in the Missouri project -- the data will remain anonymous, leaving no possibility to track specific people from their driveway to their destination.
"Even though it's anonymous, it's still ominous," said Daniel Solove, a privacy law professor at George Washington University and author of The Digital Person.
Similar projects are getting underway in Norfolk, Virginia, and a stretch of Interstate 75 between Atlanta and Macon, Georgia.
But the Missouri project is by far the most aggressive -- tracking wireless phones across the whole state, including in rural areas with lower traffic counts, and for the explicit purpose of relaying the information to other travelers.
In fact, it would be the biggest system of its kind in the world, said Richard Mudge, a vice president at Delcan, the Canadian company that won the Missouri bid.
The contract is expected to be completed within several weeks, and a cell phone monitoring system tested and implemented within six months after that.
But those monitoring methods require the installation of equipment, which must be maintained, and can take only a snapshot of traffic at a particular spot.
In contrast, "almost everyone has a cell phone, so you have a lot of potential data points, and you can track data almost anywhere on the whole (road) system," said Valerie Briggs, program manager for transportation operations at the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials.
The Baltimore project began this spring as a pilot program that monitors Cingular users over about 1,000 miles of road, but Maryland officials hope to eventually create a statewide version.
Maryland is spending $1.9 million, although the entire Baltimore project costs nearly $5.6 million, said Mike Zezeski, director of real-time traffic operations for the Maryland Department of Transportation.
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