Social Choice about Privacy: Intelligent Vehicle‐highway Systems in the United States

Abstract

Broad coalitions of companies, governments, and research institutions in several countries are currently designing massive electronic infrastructures for their roadways. Known collectively as intelligent vehicle‐highway systems (IVHS), these technologies are intended to ease toll collection and commercial vehicle regulation, provide drivers with route and traffic information, improve safety and ultimately support fully automated vehicles. Although many aspects of IVHS are uncertain, some proposed designs require the system to collect vast amounts of data on individuals′ travel patterns, thus raising the potential for severe invasions of privacy. To make social choices about IVHS, it is necessary to reason about potentials for authoritarian uses of an IVHS infrastructure in the hypothetical future. Yet such reasoning is difficult, often veering towards Utopian or dystopian extremes. To help anchor the privacy debate, places IVHS privacy concerns in an institutional context, offering conceptual frameworks to discuss the potential interactions between IVHS technologies and the computer design profession, standards‐setting bodies, marketing organizations, the legal system and government administrative agencies.