Follow the tail-lights out of the city

[venta]

One of these days I am going to get round to rigging up some LEDs in my rear windscreen so I can spell "BACK OFF" to the person driving way too close behind me.

I hate tailgaters :(

(Today's finally passed me when I was in the middle lane, pulling onto a roundabout to go straight on. He turned right, from the left hand lane, straight across my bows without a signal.)

Comments

[onebyone.livejournal.com]

What's to stop "people" (ie. the government) installing the non-anonymous system, and telling everybody that it's the anonymous one?

1) Someone would notice. In the same way, speed cameras could take a picture of every passing car and add it to a national tracking database, but we'd find out eventually. The police (or BT) can tap phones without warrants, but if it were automated on a large scale we'd find out eventually, because big secrets are quite hard to keep.

2) There's nothing in the anonymous system to prevent the gadget being implemented by a third party (or the individual user). According to the description I've seen of Chaum's work in digital cash, it doesn't compromise your anonymity for the government to control the shop where you buy credits and the tollbooth where you turn them over. So long as you trust the gadget, you're OK, and all the government knows is how many credits you're buying each week.

So, suppose that I could build the gadget myself out of off-the-shelf components, or buy one from a third party manufacturer. Likewise I could review the software and the crypto alogrithms involved. Then even though I'm not actually going to do all that, I can be fairly confident that a system so visible to the public will actually be the system claimed and not some other, incompatible system.

Obviously, this still assumes that "they" don't photograph me as I pass the tollbooth, but as I say, we'd know they were doing it and they'd have to admit that they were engaging in illegal mass surveillance of innocent people etc. etc.

Plus, of course, such a gadget would cost money

That is a nuisance, or course. But the usual use for similar non-anonymous gadgets at the moment is for toll roads, where you pay for the convenience of not having to stop at a booth and pay cash to raise a barrier. If you go through the "gadget" lane without a gadget, some machine notices and takes a picture.

Since the expense is acceptable to the public in the existing conditions, I don't see this as a major barrier to the adoption of an anonymous payment scheme. Toll roads are set to become more common regardless of the means used to actually collect the tolls. This system introduces a level of privacy impossible in a London-congestion-style "we'll photograph everyone and send them a fine in the post if they haven't phoned to pay us by the end of the day" effort.

No, the barrier to use is that no government is inclined to even explore such a means of ensuring privacy by technology as opposed to merely stipulating it by legislation.