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abuse of highway toll information
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Date: Sat, 1 Jun 96 14:16 PDT From: privacy@vortex.com (PRIVACY Forum) Subject: PRIVACY Forum Digest V05 #11
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Date: Sun, 26 May 1996 17:23:15 -0700 (PDT)
From: Phil Agre
The increasingly widespread use of automatic account-based systems for highway toll collection has led to equally widespread concerns for personal privacy. If individually identifiable toll records are stored in a database then perhaps they can be used for purposes beyond those originally intended. To my knowledge this has not yet happened in the United States. But it did happen a few years ago in France, and the story is worth telling. The details are available in English on Lexis/Nexis from an Agence France Presse bulletin of 17 August 1993, which I summarize in part here:
Jacques Mellick, mayor of the northern French town of Bethune and former cabinet minister, provided an alibi in the trial of politician and businessman Bernard Tapie on charges of trying to bribe a football coach to throw a match. He claimed that he and Tapie had met at Tapie's offices in Paris between 2:30 and 3:30 PM on the date when the offense had supposedly taken place. Doubts soon arose about Mellick's story. A photo claimed to have been taken 2:00 PM that day placed Mellick at a ceremony in Bethune. And, says the story, "the motorway toll booths between Paris and Bethune had no record of Mellick's car on the road that day". Mellick claimed that he had paid the toll himself because he had been traveling to Paris on private business. The article does not explain who had checked the records or who had made the information about them public. The toll booths in question used "smart cards", though the article does not say just which technology was involved.
The point is, even though no record of Mellick's travels showed up in the toll-collection system, the lack of a record was printed in the newspapers as circumstantial evidence suggesting that Mellick had committed perjury. Fortunately in this case other, more clear-cut evidence existed. But plenty of people are having their reputations dragged through the mud in scandals and pseudo-scandals these days by "opposition research" organizations with trained researchers and access to all the databases they can find. In this context, the very existence of individually identifiable toll records is a clear invitation to trouble. And it's completely unnecessary as well, given that proven technology exists to collect highway tolls anonymously.
Phil Agre, UCSD
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End of PRIVACY Forum Digest 05.11
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