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| Citation | Presented to the AAAS Science & Technology in Society
Graduate Conference, Washington DC, April 2005
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| Author | Michael T. Zimmer
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Recent advances in wireless technologies have led to the development
of intelligent, in-vehicle safety applications designed to share
information about the actions of nearby vehicles, potential road
hazards, and ultimately predict dangerous scenarios or imminent
collisions. These vehicle safety communication (VSC) technologies rely
on the creation of autonomous, self-organizing, peer-to-peer wireless
communication networks so-called ad-hoc networks connecting vehicles
with roadside infrastructure and with each other. In these networks,
vehicles transmit, collect and process data with each other to provide
real-time safety information about the immediate surroundings. Data
messages, which are automatically transmitted by your car 10 times per
second, include such information as a car's location, speed and
telemetry data, and potentially a unique vehicle identification
number.
As the technical standards and communication protocols for VSC
technologies are still being developed, certain value and ethical
implications of these new information technologies emerge
including the privacy of a driver's personal information. Coupled with
the predicted safety benefits of VSC applications is a potential rise
in the ability to surveil a driver engaging in her everyday activities
on the public roads. Most importantly, since VSC technologies are
still in the developmental stage, it becomes crucial to understand how
the engineers can be proactive in their technological designs to
support existing norms of personal information flow in the context of
highway travel. By approaching the problem of privacy in public
through the theory of contextual integrity, the paper will
discuss how the design of VSC technologies might alter personal data
flows in politically significant ways, and reveal how close attention
to values might inform and guide the design decisions of such
technological systems.