The privacy and safety impact of technology choices for command, communications and control of the public highway

ABSTRACT

Monitoring, and command,communications and control of private vehicles on the public highway is now high on the political agenda. This is both because it is becoming feasible, and because it may be desirable. From the economic perspective, more efficient se of road resources may be achievable. From a safety perspective, it would clearly be good to reduce road injury and death statistics below the current "9/11"'s-worth per year in the UK (and other similar sized European countries).Various prototypes, proposals and projects are being undertaken. There are a number of technologies that interact as well as numerous legal, political and economic stakeholders. In this note, we pay particular attention to the impact on privacy and safety of di .erent approaches to the overall problem.The purpose is to draw attention to the potential unintended consequences that result from decisions being made at the time of writing, in this arena.

REFERENCES

• 1: David D. Clark , John Wroclawski , Karen R. Sollins , Robert Braden, Tussle in cyberspace: defining tomorrow's internet, Proceedings of the 2002 conference on Applications, technologies, architectures, and protocols for computer communications, August 19-23, 2002, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA
• 2: John Doyle. Highly optimized tolerance. http://www.physics.ucsb.edu/~complex/,2005.
• 3: Transport for London. Transport for london congestion charging technology trial report. http://www.tfl.gov.uk/tfl/downloads/pdf/congestion-charging/technology-%trials.pdf, 2004.
• 4: Royal Academy of Engineering. Transport 2050. http://www.raeng.org.uk/policy/reports/pdf/Transport_2050.pdf, 2005.
• 5: Bryan Parno and Adrian Perrig. Challenges in securing vehicular networks. In Proceedings of Worksho on Hot Topics in Networks (HotNets-IV),November 2005.
• 6: Heathcote Williams. Autogeddon. Jonathan Cape, 1991.

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  J. Computer Applications
  J.7 COMPUTERS IN OTHER SYSTEMS
      Subjects: Command and control

Additional Classification:
  C. Computer Systems Organization
  C.2 COMPUTER-COMMUNICATION NETWORKS
      C.2.0 General
          Subjects: Data communications
  C.3 SPECIAL-PURPOSE AND APPLICATION-BASED SYSTEMS
      Subjects: Real-time and embedded systems

  K. Computing Milieux
  K.4 COMPUTERS AND SOCIETY
      K.4.1 Public Policy Issues
          Subjects: Human safety

General Terms:
Design, Economics, Human Factors, Management, Performance, Reliability, Theory

Keywords:
policy, privacy, safety, transport