Driving Privacy Away

The Minnesota DOT is looking for a few volunteers. The purpose is to test a proposed per-mile tax for your automobile. DOT hopes to eventually add this tax because many new hybrid and electric cars won't need much gasoline, and therefore won't pay their share of gasoline tax revenues. MnDOT says that they would like to implement a user fee for each mile driven instead of a per-gallon tax to make sure these revenues stay constant. I suppose this would mean a tax bill in the mail every month or so for each of your cars. (And I don't really think the current fuel tax would be removed. Existing taxes don't disappear, but that's another story.)

This just sounds fair, right? After all, everybody should pay their fair share- and I do agree we should seek equitable distribution of taxation. However, I have a problem with this tax. The volunteers will be given smart phones with GPS application to keep track of their location, which is transmitted to the state DOT. If this tax is enacted, every vehicle will have to have GPS transmitters so a record of the location at all times of every vehicle can be kept by the DOT as a basis for mileage calculation and tax assessment.

Maybe you don't care if the state keeps a record of everywhere you drive, when and how long you were at a given destination. Remember, though, the modern car knows if there was a passenger in a seat unbelted and how fast the car was traveling; it keeps a great deal of information. This is the computer age, and its hardly a stretch to imagine the state comparing location and speed data against a database of speed limits and stop signs. Are you prepared to receive speeding and stop citations in the mail every month, too? Remember, a rolling stop, or even 1 MPH over the limit is a technical violation, and lots of states are trying to figure out how to cash in on low-level traffic violations.

We already see security cameras everywhere; we have the TSA screening and groping everyone (except perhaps Muslims in traditional garb- we know they're not dangerous, and we can't profile, you know). Are we really prepared to give the state a record of our whereabouts at all times?