I heard about this on the radio (while driving, naturally). I haven't run down all the details, but it brought to mind the "good driving monitor" and the case of the teen driver with a GPS:
The state of Maryland is currently doing a pilot program in which hundreds of teen drivers are getting DriveCams installed in their cars. The DriveCam is a webcam/accelerometer assembly that sits quietly on the rear-view mirror until it registers g-forces it doesn't like. At that point, it records 20 seconds of video and beams it up to the mothership for analysis. A driving expert then assesses the video and sends The Man (in this case the teen's parent/guardian) an email.
The intent (at least in this pilot) seems more educational than punitive; mail tends to be more "You should allow more time to slow down before corners." than "Get this stoplight-running drag-racing menace off the streets," and is aimed at reducing teen driving deaths. Given that teen driving deaths account for a disproportionate fraction of both teen deaths and driving deaths, this seems at least worth consideration [I'm dodging the privacy issues for the moment -- maybe I'll get back to them in a later post].
What do the teens make of it? The teen in the radio piece initially accepted it on the grounds that erm, there wasn't really any choice, but a few months down the road seemed to appreciate the pointers and had learned how not to set it off more than every couple of days. Avoiding an email to Mom and Dad is pretty powerful incentive for a teen -- whether that's incentive to drive carefully or to find a way to disable the device is a different matter.
Showing posts with label teen driving. Show all posts
Showing posts with label teen driving. Show all posts
Friday, February 6, 2009
Sunday, November 11, 2007
One teenager's dilemma (and ours)
I heard this on the radio the other day ...
The stepfather of a teenage boy, concerned about the stepson's driving, has a GPS installed in his car. The GPS reports back to its mothership and Dad can log in to check up. It will also email Dad if the car exceeds a given speed. This happens once, resulting in a 10-day loss of car keys.
Not surprisingly, the stepson is not entirely thrilled with the arrangement.
Then one day the stepson gets a speeding ticket. Radar has him going 60+ in a 45. GPS says he was doing the speed limit. As the radio story airs, Dad is in the process of challenging the ticket in court, on the grounds that the GPS is much more reliable than radar. The stepson still hates the GPS, but admits that, just this once, maybe it's not such a bad thing.
And there's the whole privacy dilemma in a nutshell: We'd love to have the cameras running when it benefits us, but the rest of the time, whether we're misbehaving or just being or normal boring human selves, we'd just as soon be left alone.
This is not an entirely new problem, of course. Privacy concerns have been around as long as people have lived around each other, which is pretty much as long as there have been people.
Modern privacy concerns are not so much about whether your neighbor knows what you're up to, but about who gets to be your neighbor and the balance of power between eavesdropper and eavesdroppee. From time to time, technology disrupts that balance (anyone remember party lines?) and society has to work out new rules to reclaim it.
One could make a reasonable theoretical argument that in a rational society, everybody benefits if everybody knows everything about everyone. But society is made up of people and people aren't rational. If the only choices are complete surveillance and complete privacy, I would tend to side with the stepson on this one and go for privacy. Those aren't the only choices, though.
The stepfather of a teenage boy, concerned about the stepson's driving, has a GPS installed in his car. The GPS reports back to its mothership and Dad can log in to check up. It will also email Dad if the car exceeds a given speed. This happens once, resulting in a 10-day loss of car keys.
Not surprisingly, the stepson is not entirely thrilled with the arrangement.
Then one day the stepson gets a speeding ticket. Radar has him going 60+ in a 45. GPS says he was doing the speed limit. As the radio story airs, Dad is in the process of challenging the ticket in court, on the grounds that the GPS is much more reliable than radar. The stepson still hates the GPS, but admits that, just this once, maybe it's not such a bad thing.
And there's the whole privacy dilemma in a nutshell: We'd love to have the cameras running when it benefits us, but the rest of the time, whether we're misbehaving or just being or normal boring human selves, we'd just as soon be left alone.
This is not an entirely new problem, of course. Privacy concerns have been around as long as people have lived around each other, which is pretty much as long as there have been people.
Modern privacy concerns are not so much about whether your neighbor knows what you're up to, but about who gets to be your neighbor and the balance of power between eavesdropper and eavesdroppee. From time to time, technology disrupts that balance (anyone remember party lines?) and society has to work out new rules to reclaim it.
One could make a reasonable theoretical argument that in a rational society, everybody benefits if everybody knows everything about everyone. But society is made up of people and people aren't rational. If the only choices are complete surveillance and complete privacy, I would tend to side with the stepson on this one and go for privacy. Those aren't the only choices, though.
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