Independent Perspective News

By ADAM CLYMER

Drivers who use electronic passes to pay bridge tolls in the San Francisco Bay area will soon find themselves participating in a broad government traffic-watch program, with highway officials tracking their movements throughout the region to gather data on delays and driving times.

The Metropolitan Transportation Commission is to begin installing about 150 roadside transponders in November for a network that will eventually cover 500 miles of freeway.

Philip E. Agre, an expert on electronic surveillance, said he believed it was the first routine government use of the technology for any purpose other than collecting tolls.

While privacy advocates have said they are wary of the new system, commission officials insisted that it had many safeguards to ensure the anonymity of drivers and that it would never become a tool of law enforcement or other prying eyes.

The transponders are electronic devices that communicate with counterparts on car dashboards. The current system, known as FasTrak — the local equivalent of EZ-Pass in the Northeast — is used to charge drivers $2 tolls at eight bridges in the Bay Area. The new system, called TravInfo, will track the speeds and the locations of the cars of FasTrak users over a far wider area, sending the information to government computers, which will use the data to track the flow of traffic. More than 200,000 vehicles participate in FasTrak.

Motorists will be able to call a toll-free number to avoid delays on freeways, said Michael A. Berman, project manager for the $37 million system.

Mr. Berman said several layers of security would ensure the privacy of drivers when the system goes into operation in November — first on 17 miles of Interstate 80, between Oakland and Vallejo.

He said his system would be quite different from FasTrak itself, which sends customers monthly statements saying which bridges they have crossed, with the date, time and direction of travel. While the new transponders will read each car's FasTrak pass, they will immediately assign it a generic identity tag not linked to the car owner's name or to any other personal information, he said.

The system's encryption key will change daily, and all data about individual cars will be purged from the computers every 24 hours, Mr. Berman said.

He said the commission would sooner scrap the system than make private information available to the state police or the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

The commission would do so because it was aware that drivers had not signed up for FasTrak expecting "to have someone know where they are at all times," Mr. Berman said.

While several privacy experts praised the initial design of the system as considerate of the privacy of drivers, they said they worried that it could be altered later.

Jayashri Srikantiah, a staff lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union here, said: "In this environment, we're very concerned that a system, which initially installed has some checks for anonymity, would be expanded so that it is used to surveil innocent motorists. All it takes is a small tweak in the system."

Beth Givens, founder and director of the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse, an advocacy group in San Diego, said her initial hostility had been dimmed by the way the system planned to encrypt information and to purge it daily. "Given those two things, it's hard for me to be quite so negative," Ms. Givens said. But, she cautioned, "They can always change their policy."

Toll collection records have been used by the police in the New York area, Massachusetts and Florida. But tracking devices only on toll highways or at bridges and tunnels offer more limited surveillance than the Bay Area system would without privacy safeguards.

Dr. Agre, an associate professor of information studies at the University of California at Los Angeles, said the system's design made it appear unsuited for surveillance. "If they don't know who you are, they can't give you up."

Building privacy protection into the technology gives him some confidence that the authorities cannot change it immediately, he said.

But, he asked, "How hard is it for them to change the rules once the hubbub dies down or when some social imperative demands one more piece of information?"

Karen Coyle, speaking for a local chapter of a group called Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility, said she worried that someone could use bribery to get information from the system or hack into it.

"We have seen that once data exists, people do come up with ideas for other ways to use it, and some of those are very tempting," Ms. Coyle said.

Mr. Berman said the concerns were the reason the commission planned to install safeguards.

He added: "It's hard for me to sit here and prove a negative — that I'm not going to do what I say I am not going to do. We're not going to change the policies. We're not going to comply with the California Highway Patrol if for some reason they ask us to change the policies."

But if such assurances are not enough, he offers one more protection. All FasTrak users will be sent a simple device to keep the transponders from tracking their car: a Mylar bag. A driver can put his FasTrak pass into the bag, and the transponders will never know it is there.