Verbosities

Marginal Revolution: Road Pricing

Beginning early next year, drivers in six states will begin testing a new way to pay for roads and transit: Commuters will be charged for the miles they drive rather than paying taxes on gasoline purchased.

GPS will make road pricing and auto insurance by the mile common in the near future. Widespread road pricing will increase investment in private roads.

Paging Human Head to the white conspiracy phone.... Human Head to the white conspiracy phone please.

Seriously though, if government truly represented me, they'd figure out a way to prevent private companies from amassing quote-unquote-independent files of data that are only dubiously necessary in their ability to deliver me the services I require.

I say, "quote-unquote-independent" because, like any service which has any value to a business, if there is a way to utilize economies of scale in a delivery model, it's going to be done. That means that companies (like, say, ChoicePoint) will spring up to provide (say, insurance) companies the data on their consumers that will "help them profile customer risk" in a more cost-effective and agile way. Realistically then, if this idea of fitting cars with a GPS unit to upload data regarding miles driven (and, necessarily, where those miles have been driven) moves forward, this data won't be collected by Progressive and Allstate, but by a master collector/provider, and farmed out from a single pool.

For the companies, this makes a lot of sense. The more data accumulated, the less they need to rely on a statistical projection of behavior based on their sample size. Simply put, even if your neighbor is insured by another carrier, if they know his behavior they can project yours with more accuracy.

For Americans, this should be more troubling than it is. You are the sum total of your behaviors, and your behaviors are increasingly being tracked as points of data. More troubling, these data points are being consolidated by private companies, allowing a de facto sort of privatization of intelligence on American citizens (which is not currently restricted by laws and oversight). In fact, ChoicePoint has been allocated $130 billion in government contracts since 2001, and has had Richard Armitage, former NSA Deputy Director William Crowell, and John Ashcroft's lobbying group on their payroll.

The loss of privacy is a very real concern. We often have these issues framed for us by our media in terms of a laptop with customer data being swiped out of the back of someone's car, but the real concern for Americans should be whether or not we allow our lives to be captured, profiled and modeled by private companies to the extent that they are, especially when these companies work very closely with the government. It's going to take a big push from our representatives in Washington to stop this slow bleed, and I have very little faith that our elected officials have any real incentive from Americans to make that push.

To be clear, this has precious little to do with "terrorism," which has become the catch-all excuse for those that crave authoritarianism to push their agendas. There are already plenty of laws and courts in place to allow our government to track the movements, communications and spending habits of suspected terrorists. We should be doing our national security intelligence gathering in an above-board sort of way (which doesn't mean "letting the New York Times know what we're doing so they can put it on the front page - it means oversight by a court as our laws had [previously] intended). I'd be more sympathetic to the data-accumulation argument if companies like ChoicePoint had clear responsibility in their intelligence profiling to anonymize and/or purge any data that wasn't clearly requested by warrant, but that's not the way it works "in the post-9/11 world."

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