Middle ground on GPS and privacy

Let's assume that GPS evidence becomes generally admissible in court. It's already worked a few times. Besides the case I mentioned, there has been a similar case in Australia (my thanks to two anonymous commenters for the pointer).

So how is this going to work? I get busted for speeding. I bring a printout to court from my GPS saying I was doing the speed limit. The judge says "and how do I know you didn't just fabricate this?" That's not going to work.

On the other end, we have the case I first mentioned, where the GPS coordinates are getting beamed back to some third party for perusal. The GPS itself is presumably tamper-resistant. I'm presuming this because the evidence stood up in court, and because there are existing GPS applications, such as monitoring commerce and monitoring people under house arrest, where tamper-resistance is at a premium.

That ought to work just fine, but who wants to run around with a GPS reporting their every move, just to get out of a possible speeding ticket? The stepson in the case certainly didn't. He just didn't have much choice.

Fortunately, there's a middle ground. A tamper-resistant (and probably tamper-evident) unit that can provide its logs if asked (ideally with proper authentication), but doesn't just broadcast them. As far as I can tell (and again I haven't done the legwork here), that's what happened in the Australian case.

This seems like a decent paradigm for Trusted-Computing-like devices that use techniques like strong encryption and special hardware to try to ensure that everything is what it appears to be. As with the music/video case, the trusted device performs a specialized function and doesn't need to be highly upgradeable.

Unlike the classic TC scenario, the trusted device is not in frequent communication with the mothership. Its job is to hold sensitive data and divulge it only when I ask. Or more accurately, when someone who can prove they know a particular secret asks. Much like a personal datastore.