Using Cell Phones to Track Traffic 246
msh210 writes "The AP has reported (with additional information from KMOX-AM) that the Missouri Dept. of Transportation will be teaming up with a private company to track in-use cell phones on Missouri highways and state roads in an effort to monitor traffic flow. Individual information will not be stored, they say -- only the aggregate will be studied, using "sophisticated" math. (See also findlaw.com's commentary on privacy concerns. "
How about using "search" to track dupes? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:what? (Score:3, Informative)
EZ-Pass aleady used for this... (Score:5, Informative)
Here it is in the service agreement (search onpage for 'monitoring'):
https://www.ezpass.csc.paturnpike.com/paturnpike/
Re:what? (Score:4, Informative)
http://www.mddailyrecord.com/pub/5_398_friday/bus
MMTIS uses the movement between towers, without collecting personal information, and uses that data to determine speed and movement in specific areas.
Re:Slippery Slope (Score:5, Informative)
CIRCUMSTANTIAL EVIDENCE - Circumstantial evidence is best explained by saying what it is not - it is not direct evidence from a witness who saw or heard something. Circumstantial evidence is a fact that can be used to infer another fact..
Circumstantial evidence is generally admissible in court unless the connection between the fact and the inference is too weak to be of help in deciding the case.
You need a lot more than a single circumstantial fact to "prove" that someone committed a crime. Rather, you need a large number of such facts that close in on the case and provide a single, inescapable conclusion. Even if you have done that, be prepared for the defense to argue each point under a "hypothetical" context, thus convincing the jury that the "evidence" is nothing more than a set of coincidences presented in such a way as to make the defendent look guilty.
Re:Does powering off work? (Score:4, Informative)
Dupes (Score:1, Informative)
Re:hypocritic (Score:5, Informative)
Not hypocritical at all.
A cell phone is trackable even when its owner is not talking on it.
This article [howstuffworks.com] provides a good outline on what happens. Basically, there's a control channel, through which your phone communicates whenever it's got a battery in it. Your phone listens for an SID (System Identification Code) on this channel, and tells the appropriate MTSO (Mobile Telephone Switching Office) "Hi, I'm here". The MTSO has to know where you are, so that it can route incoming calls to the device.
All that's happening here is that the traffic monitoring folks are listening in on the back-channel communications between a large number of cell phones and base stations, and using the changes in location (as averaged over a large number of devices) to guesstimate the average speed of traffic. Individualized cell phone tracking is useless for a traffic flow application, so it's actually highly likely that the traffic folks are telling you the truth when they say that individual data isn't being logged, and that only aggregate data is being recorded.
The technology's nothing new - a system like this is necessarily a part of any wireless phone system, otherwise your phone couldn't ring when someone called you. No such agency is now permitted to do such a thing domestically (a sentence that can be parsed in at least eight ways, all of which are true), but they probably don't, because everyone else who's also interested in individualized tracking, is already doing this, has been doing this for years, and is using other tricks in software to locate their targets to within a few meters, all in real-time. They aren't using the traffic-control folks' data, because they don't need it.
Re:My state makes me sad (Score:3, Informative)
Case in point — Interstate 74 [upgrade74.com] in Peoria, Illinois. Worst urban highway I've ever driven on. The signs specifically tell you to keep left so that you don't collide with merging traffic. This is after you have to keep right... so that you don't collide with merging traffic coming in from the left. This is because the ramps in this area are about 500 feet long (most modern Interstates give you about a quarter of a mile... 1600 feet) because of space issues in the 1970's. A handful of ramps were marked as 15 mph exit ramps. One of the ones I frequented had a 10 mph dead-man's U-turn.
3/4ths of the way into rebuilding, I can already tell that, thanks to modern highway design, there will be far fewer accidents, injuries, and fatalities on the road because drivers won't have to do crazy things to get on and off the highway.
cellphones WAY less expensive (Score:3, Informative)
With modern cellphones reporting GPS coordinates, you get computer-measured flow data from the roadways. This is where a program can actually be written to give real-time routing suggestions to emergency vehicles. If you need to get to the hospital quick, coordinating a bunch of civil servants watching monitors 8 hours a day to decide on the best route is not what I think is the best method.
Seth
Re:what? (Score:3, Informative)
From TFA:
Although most new cell phones come equipped with Global Positioning System capabilities that can pinpoint their locations, the tracking technology used for transportation agencies does not depend on that. Instead, it takes the frequent signals that wireless phones send to towers and follows the movement of the phones from one tower to another. Then it overlays that data with highway maps to determine where the phones are and how fast they are moving. Lumping thousands of those signals together can indicate traffic flow. To keep from being tracked, motorists could turn off their cell phones. A Delcan demonstration Web site developed for Baltimore uses various shades of green, yellow and red to show block-byblock whether vehicles are moving at or below the speed limits. As rush hour started on a recent workday, observers could watch as green turned to yellow and then red on roads heading out of downtown.