The electronics we now have in our cars have made them better, safer, more economical and more comfortable to be in. But I'm getting worried about privacy. I'm not paranoid about it (I think), but I do value it because there's less and less of it in a world where we have to be wired to get what we need to do done, writes Brian Byrne
The recent launch of Traksure by AXA insurance finally got me thinking through this whole monitoring thing. Sure, we've come to accept it on our phones, in our shops, on our streets. Those last we've particularly got used to, as part of the price we pay for safety from crime.
And the ability of people being able to use our phones to see where we are, or where we were, is a discomfort attached to the upsides of that particular technology. We can still switch the phones off.
But when I was asked to drive a car with the Traksure box attached, I actually didn't realise just how closely it was going to monitor my movements beyond compliance with speed limits.
A quick recap - the device, which operates with the Global Positioning Satellite (GPS) system, is being marketed with an offer of cheaper insurance for young people.
That's laudable as far as it goes. But once an organisation or an authority gets a start in enhancing information collection and control, it is a general experience that it will want to use it further.
So, once there's an acceptance that a young driver submits to such surveillance, what's to stop insurance companies from insisting that all of us use the devices, or our insurance premiums skyrocket?
All they have to do is cite any reduction in speeding or accidents in the first group, the young drivers, to move the concept up the line.
They might initially offer the same carrot, cheaper premiums, as they've been forced to do in return for being given access to penalty points records. But cheaper is relative, and it could be only a short time before the gap between the two premiums widens, with the cheaper one going to what would have been normal before, and the higher one well above that.
Maybe I'm just cynical. Insurance companies aren't like that, are they? My results from my Traksure test were not just the normal notification of my speed limit compliance over the period, but also included a detailed printout of every journey taken by the car.
This gave the time of starting the ignition, the time it was switched off again, and the geographic location of where the car began and ended its journeys. My wife could even work out when she had used the car to slip down to the shop to buy a birthday card!
Ordinary people taking up the Traksure option will not get all that detail, just the overall summary of speed compliance. But the detailed information is sitting in the computers of AXA, for instance.
And while it is a matter of confidentiality between AXA and the client, they admit that if the Garda want to see a particular record, they can do so, if they say they are investigating an offence and can specify a time and place.
Which means that if Brian Byrne is seen by a garda driving at a speed which the policeman believes is over the speed limit, but he doesn't have with him the camera or radar gun to do me, he could form an opinion that I had committed an offence, and ask AXA for that particular time record.
I'm not likely at the moment to be using Traksure. But there are already moves around the place to increase this kind of surveillance.
The British transport minister, for instance, says he wants every car in Britain electronically tagged. Our own transport minister, Seamus Brennan, also believes so-called "black boxes" installed in cars "have potential" for road safety, so that what the driver has been doing prior to any accident can be assessed in the same way air crashes are investigated.
In Singapore, they are already on the way to having every car in the state monitored by an "Intelligent Transportation System" (ITS) and expect to have it in place inside five years.
It is camera-based, but car rental car companies in the US now routinely use the GPS navigation system to monitor the location of their vehicles, in case they're stolen.
But one company "fined" a client after noticing that he had exceeded speed limits while driving their car, and it took a court case for the customer to get his money back.
Law enforcement agencies in the US have also been successfully using data from the sensing diagnostic module in modern cars to see what a driver had been doing before his car was wrecked.
This is the module by which your dealer checks the car's systems when it goes in for service. Its memory can detail such things as engine revs and speeds over the period since it was previously reset.
The State of Oregon is proposing to use satellite GPS technology to collect tax revenue from motorists based on the mileage they drive.
And that's because they expect petrol tax revenues to flatten or drop when more fuel-efficient cars come along.
But in London they've used a rather ham-handed digital camera numberplate identification system to identify vehicles which haven't paid their charges.
Has the Irish company operating the Tracksure system still got on their computer the record of my wife's trip to buy a birthday card? And if there turned out to have been a theft in that store around that time, could she become a suspect if the gardaí knew she'd been driving a Traksured car?
Paranoid I am. Definitely.
Maybe rightly so.
My car is - or used to be - my last really private space, in which I can travel to wherever I want in private.
And I would like it to remain that way, thank you.