Get ready for the mother of all traffic cameras, the one you won't be able to fool or get rid of. According to The Daily Mail, a new EU project partly funded by the UK, of course, might put a black box like device in every new car on the road. The purpose? Supposedly to improve road safety, to reduce congestion and even to lower carbon emissions and last, but by no means least, to watch your every move and learn where you are and how fast you are going.
The £36 million European Union project involves the aforementioned box being fitted to future cars and constantly sending a signal to mobile and wireless networks or to other devices operating in the short-range microwave or infrared spectra. This signal will inform the system, let's call it Big Brother or 1984, of your location, speed and direction of travel.
Obviously, privacy activists are quite upset by this project.
“If you correlate car tracking data with mobile phone data, which can also track people, there is the potential for an almost infallible surveillance system,” Privacy International's Simon Davies told the aforementioned source.
Fortunately for now, albeit it could have just been said not to alert people, the UK Department for Transport stated that “there were no plans to make the system mandatory in new cars”. Moreover, Paul Kompfner, manager of the Cooperative-Vehicle-Infrastructure Systems project, told the Daily Mail that its introduction will be on a voluntary basis.
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