Marcus Wigan

You are where you’ve been: the privacy implications of location and tracking technologies

A decade ago, technologies that could provide information about the location of a motor vehicle, or a computer or a person, were in their infancy. A wide range of tools, processes and systems are now in use and in prospect, which threaten to strip away another layer of the limited protections that individuals enjoy. An understanding of the landscape of location and tracking technologies, and of the issues that they give rise to, depends on establishing a specialist language that enables meaningful and reasonably unambiguous discussion to take place. An outline of the familiar case of mobile phones, complemented by deeper assessments of road tolling and the surveillance of individual motor vehicles on the road, provides a basis for appreciation of the substantial threats that location technologies represent to free society. This investigation describes location-based systems’ generic privacy threats, and identifies such specific threats as psychological harm, social harm, behavioural profiling, political harm and actual repression. Controls and protections are identified to counter these threats to privacy.

Social Impacts of Transport Surveillance

Abstract The transport sector is a natural focal point for surveillance measures to combat the threat of terrorism. It is also a complex environment that offers many examples of the social impacts of contemporary surveillance. Surveillance needs to be assessed against the standards used to justify other forms of security measures. The efficacy of many surveillance schemes, however, is in serious doubt. Justification for these schemes is commonly either lacking entirely or is unpublished and hence has not been subjected to critical evaluation. A small set of mini‐cases is presented, in order to identify the social impacts of twenty‐first century surveillance schemes that have been implemented as fear‐driven responses to terrorist acts. Those impacts are argued to be seriously harmful to society. Trust is crucial to public acceptance of intrusive measures, but the absence of justification for surveillance, and of controls over abuses, is likely to see the rapid dissipation of trust, firstly in the assertions of national security and law enforcement agencies, and secondly in the politicians who have been rubber‐stamping their demands.

User Issues for Smart Meter Technology

Smart meters have become a matter of concern for many populations, although the technology is as always politically neutral. The focus on electricity rather than all metered services, water, gas, and electricity is one aspect of this public concern.

Financial anatomy of E4 Helsinki-Lahti shadow toll PPP-project

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to investigate the returns to the investors and the state in private finance of road infrastructure. It uses an empirical case of the E4 Helsinki-Lahti road, which was built in 1995-1999 in Finland as the first real PPP-project. Design/methodology/approach – The analysis adopts an approach based on cash flow modelling of the project and the analyses show how the cash flows are formed and divided between the various stakeholders. The pure cash flow based approach to compare the economics of PPP vs traditional procurement of road infrastructure projects produced results that pose challenges to the logic, and pros and cons of shadow toll PPPs. Findings – The analysis shows that potential win-win situations are hard to find in shadow toll arrangements. This is largely due to the different discount rates used by investors and state. It is argued that the state does not include all the true costs in its appraisal of projects. Private investors, in principle and as a rule, ...

Transport and Surveillance Aspects of Location-Based Services

Transport is a series of movements between locations, and considerable efforts are spent to secure details of such movements for planning and modeling purposes. This paper considers the issues raised when such information is secured too well, as well as the accompanying implications for surveillance and privacy. Location is a critical aspect of both privacy and surveillance. A detailed record of locations allows all sorts of other information to be linked together, adding to information about the subject and his or her associates in the same way that a unique identifier allows dataveillance to be expanded swiftly and extensively. In this case, the information comes from allowing the linking together of both the activities and records of many people. Location technologies have far outstripped both public awareness and legal and policy attention. Addressing this gap between the publics awareness and the technological possibilities will require careful use of precise language to ensure that unexpected side effects do not occur when the problem is finally faced. This paper explores both this essential language and some of the applications and linkages that need addressing. A wider public and policy understanding of the implications of expanding capacities to track, record, and monitor location is an urgent need, because it is difficult to reverse capacities once they are integrated into a wide range of commercial, enforcement, and intelligence systems–-as is already happening.

SIMPLIFIED ESTIMATION OF DEMAND FOR NONMOTORIZED TRAILS USING GEOGRAPHIC INFORMATION SYSTEMS

Estimating off-road trail usage by nonmotorized modes is of increasing interest to the transportation community due to the rising importance of both recreational and nonmotorized travel. Demand patterns for two substantial off-road trails in Melbourne, Australia, were examined using survey and modeling methods to establish the potential for higher levels of demand. The two trails were different in two major respects: one was well promoted, well connected, and a destination in its own right; the other had similar potential, but the linkages and promotional activity to market its assets had not yet been undertaken. The characteristics of these two markets were examined using geographic information systems (GIS) methods and demand estimated on a differential basis using GIS tools. The simple method adopted highlighted the critical nature of marketing a connected series of off-road trails as a single unified route and an easily recognized destination area. The study had to be done using existing data, and it provides a means of combining transportation, GIS, and special-purpose off-road trail usage information to estimate potential demand.

Measuring pavement maintenance effectiveness using Markov Chains analysis

Abstract This study assesses the effectiveness of road network pavement maintenance using Markov Chain analysis based on historical costs and road roughness progression data. The analysis is based on a database developed by the State of Victoria, Australia, consisting of 2197 road sections. The analysis measures maintenance effectiveness using the criterion of whether road sections remain in the same condition state or move to the next worst state based on a predefined roughness value. Principal inputs for the stochastic models, such as the development of transition probability matrices and associated cost functions, are discussed. Results show that, within the current budget envelope and when undertaking only routine maintenance, the probability of road sections remaining in the same condition state, which is a determinant of maintenance effectiveness, exhibits a declining tendency from good to worst condition states. This finding prompts the discussion on when to begin intervention using high types of maintenance together with their respective higher expenditure levels. The method discussed in this paper, provides tool for road authorities to select the appropriate maintenance action for each condition state of pavements based on the comparison analysis of the results of Markov Chain for different types of maintenance actions.

Integrating Information About Complex Systems: Role of Metadata in the Acceptability of Results from Models

Opus is a project funded by the European Union Statistical Agency (Eurostat). The project is developing a methodology for the coherent and consistent integration of information from multiple sources about complex systems (based on Bayesian statistical models) and a series demonstration of this approach. Most, but not all, of these are transport applications. Alongside the modeling frameworks being developed, the project has developed a framework for storing a complete audit trail, covering the specification and fitting of statistical models, and making use of a formal metadata specification to represent statistical models. This framework builds on ideas about metadata for processes that have been developed in other statistical projects. Practitioners are often skeptical about results derived from models. In practice, all analysis of survey or sample data involves some form of model, even if it is hidden in implicit assumptions. The approach to this skepticism is to open up the model to scrutiny and to present information about the reliability of results, under the title of provenance and reliability. All this comes from the metadata about the statistical model. The approach is generic, but the presentation needs to be domain specific and tailored to the level of expertise and understanding of the user of the results. This paper presents the motivation behind this approach and outlines the metadata structures and functionality being built to deliver this support to users of results from the Opus methodology.

DEVELOPING DATABASE OF NATIONWIDE FREIGHT FLOWS FOR AUSTRALIA

Data on freight vehicle and commodity flows in Australia are poorly covered by official statistics, yet for many strategic purposes the analyst requires a nationwide picture of commodity flows. FreightInfo satisfies this requirement. FreightInfo is a database based on a combination of assembly techniques: the expert development of secondary data from existing national data collections, the systematic identification of major flow sources and sinks, and a rolling program of field data collection from freight consignors, consignees, and carriers. These are integrated into a coherent and consistent database covering the whole of Australia by all modes. A description of FreightInfo is presented, its creation is described, and some aggregate results relating to Australia are presented.

Contestability, Democracy, and Trust in the Anti-Terror Age

Checks and balances in government are always difficult to resolve, and as both societal and governmental complexity have increased, the degree to which expertise and policy reside within government has declined. The rise of evidence-based approaches to policy in most areas of government has raised the bar for those wishing to gain access and influence with government, in that technically sound and fact-based materials now form an essential component of approaches to government.