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Some voice unease as satellites take on safety role
February 2004
In both the US and Europe, satellite surveillance systems are being primed to play a key role in future traffic management. Privacy concerns and the very nature of a person's "relationship" with their car are now being debated.
Nonetheless an indication of where the trend is leading can be seen in tests now being conducted along one of Europe's longest bridges - the Vasco Da Gama Bridge across the Tagus near Lisbon.
There a joint venture group, drawing together Portuguese hi-tech companies and the European Space Agency, is trialing a new in-car safety system. The group hopes the system will eventually be "packaged" into a common set of standard components that will see every European car linked to a navigational satellite.
This will enable every driver in the EU to be automatically charged for road tolls or road taxes - and warned instantly if the satellite system identifies dangers on the road ahead.
The link with the satellite would not be a passive one. If a driver was in trouble, they could press an in-vehicle SOS alarm and the ever-watchful satellite would immediately alert authorities with their vehicle's precise location.
The trials above the Tagus are being conducted using the US GPS satellite system plus what is known as EGNOS (European Geostationary Navigation Overlay Service) which gives GPS greater precision.
However the aim is to eventually use Europe's yet to be launched Galileo satellite navigation network due to become operational in 2008.
In Ireland, the Transport Minister, Seamus Brennan, has signed an agreement with IBM and a New York-based company, Safety Intelligence Systems, to fit Irish vehicles with "black-box" data recorders.
They will each be linked to an emergency notification system that will receive details of both the GPS location and the severity of any incident. The boxes will also record the last few seconds of what was happening to a vehicle before a crash.
The Irish initiative is the first of what will be a European-wide system - with Ireland providing a central statistical collection point for all of Europe. In the US where GPS is used as part of General Motors' OnStar safety communication system, the new technology has begun to raise questions of privacy. More than two million vehicles are now equipped with OnStar and its ability to track vehicles has allowed Police to intercept some 400 car thieves a month.
But some observers believe such devices - coupled with "black boxes" that record a car's performance moments before a road incident - are changing the very nature of people's relationships with their cars. According to Beth Givens of the US Privacy Rights Clearinghouse, the car is now becoming "Big Brother".
