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Date: Sat, 1 Jun 1996 18:39:40 -0700 (PDT)
From: Phil Agre 
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Subject: abuse of highway toll information
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Date: Sat, 1 Jun 96 14:16 PDT
From: privacy@vortex.com (PRIVACY Forum)
Subject: PRIVACY Forum Digest V05 #11

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Date:    Sun, 26 May 1996 17:23:15 -0700 (PDT)
From:    Phil Agre 
Subject: highway tolls and privacy

The increasingly widespread use of automatic account-based systems
for highway toll collection has led to equally widespread concerns
for personal privacy.  If individually identifiable toll records are
stored in a database then perhaps they can be used for purposes beyond
those originally intended.  To my knowledge this has not yet happened
in the United States.  But it did happen a few years ago in France,
and the story is worth telling.  The details are available in English
on Lexis/Nexis from an Agence France Presse bulletin of 17 August
1993, which I summarize in part here:

Jacques Mellick, mayor of the northern French town of Bethune and
former cabinet minister, provided an alibi in the trial of politician
and businessman Bernard Tapie on charges of trying to bribe a football
coach to throw a match.  He claimed that he and Tapie had met at
Tapie's offices in Paris between 2:30 and 3:30 PM on the date when the
offense had supposedly taken place.  Doubts soon arose about Mellick's
story.  A photo claimed to have been taken 2:00 PM that day placed
Mellick at a ceremony in Bethune.  And, says the story, "the motorway
toll booths between Paris and Bethune had no record of Mellick's car
on the road that day".  Mellick claimed that he had paid the toll
himself because he had been traveling to Paris on private business.
The article does not explain who had checked the records or who had
made the information about them public.  The toll booths in question
used "smart cards", though the article does not say just which
technology was involved.

The point is, even though no record of Mellick's travels showed up
in the toll-collection system, the *lack* of a record was printed in
the newspapers as circumstantial evidence suggesting that Mellick had
committed perjury.  Fortunately in this case other, more clear-cut
evidence existed.  But plenty of people are having their reputations
dragged through the mud in scandals and pseudo-scandals these days
by "opposition research" organizations with trained researchers and
access to all the databases they can find.  In this context, the
very existence of individually identifiable toll records is a clear
invitation to trouble.  And it's completely unnecessary as well, given
that proven technology exists to collect highway tolls anonymously.

Phil Agre, UCSD

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End of PRIVACY Forum Digest 05.11
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