BDS hits Fark

I Like Fark, Fark is a good website but when Fark commented on this article I read the ensuing traffic in their bulletin board section it made me angry.

To find out why this made me angry I need to take you back to my friend Drew’s wedding. Drew’s brother works for a Auto Insurance company which handles corporate fleet insurance. At Drew’s bachelor party I brought this news item up for discussion (Hey it was an English Styled pub no less… it fit) and his brother told me a story. And as I’ve come to learn more about how things work I have come to believe much more passionately now that this is entirely the truth.

The U.S. Department of Transportation has been handing millions of dollars to state governments for GPS-tracking pilot projects designed to track vehicles wherever they go. So far, Washington state and Oregon have received fat federal checks to figure out how to levy these "mileage-based road user fees."
Now electronic tracking and taxing may be coming to a DMV near you. The Office of Transportation Policy Studies, part of the Federal Highway Administration, is about to announce another round of grants totaling some $11 million. A spokeswoman on Friday said the office is "shooting for the end of the year" for the announcement, and more money is expected for GPS (Global Positioning System) tracking efforts.
In principle, the idea of what bureaucrats like to call "value pricing" for cars makes sound economic sense.

When I tell him this he says with a smile it isn’t for the government at all. While the government is going to benefit from knowing what roads get used and how fast people drive on those roads, he said with a smile, it’s for the insurance companies and the car companies. He told me his company and several others when this technology became hot researched the idea. The Insurance companies would break down your data and personalize your rate based on how you drive and where you drive (as new cars have other computers that could be linked into this networked system which is far more then GPS.

The problem he said was the infrastructure. It would cost them far more then it is worth to build it. It wouldn’t give them the gain they needed to justify the cost.

Ahhhh… but why pay for a technology when you can make the government pay for it?
This is why people should be angry; this is why people should be seething about the use of E-Tracking technology. Not that their GPS being free and uninhibited information isn’t bad enough. But that the government is intruding for your life on behalf of the Insurance and car companies so they can get all this data, all this researched material for FREE.
We should be angry that this has been in the mix under more then one white house as politicians of both parties got lubricated to feed the car insurance and car companies again from the public purse.
Do not have BDS…. Have a brain and realize there are much more important reasons to be angry.