BY KEVIN SAWYER – New research out of Rutgers University details how easy it is for anyone, especially the government, the police and the insurance companies, to track everywhere you go when you are behind the wheel. While, for the most part, such government entities as the FBI or the NSA aren’t all that concerned with privacy invasions, legal or not, often people actually surrender their privacy voluntarily.
According to the research team at Rutgers, one of the simplest ways people surrender their privacy is by agreeing to allow the insurance companies to track them everywhere they drive. What the insurance companies do, essentially, is to bribe their customers into allowing them to be spied on when they are driving. By offering discounts and incentives on premium payments, drivers give their permission for the insurance companies to attach tracking devices to their vehicles.
“What these drivers may not know,” the study states, “is that they could be revealing where they are driving, a privacy boundary that many would not consent to cross.”
Even computer engineers at Rutgers demonstrated how companies, or other agencies, wouldn’t even need such things as GPS tracking devices. All they would really need to track you is knowing the speed of your vehicle and from where you began your journey. The companies, for the most part, install devices that constantly monitor speed and continuously feeds data to their servers on your driving habits.
Again, the study found that, “The companies claim that this doesn’t compromise privacy because all they are collecting is your speed, not your location, but we’ve shown that speed data and a starting point are all we need to roughly identify where you have driven.”
The researchers techniques for tracking a vehicle may end up being too costly for the insurance companies to duplicate but they warn that the police and other federal agencies may subpoena this data in a effort to spy on or to try and link someone to a crime. The researchers also stated that the insurance companies shouldn’t be implying, and they all do, that their sensitive data gathering is so that the customers privacy will be protected when, in reality, it is not protected at all.
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