Meeting privacy challenges while advancing intelligent transportation systems

As transportation engineers and practitioners continue to advance the scope and breadth of intelligent transportation systems (ITS) applications, privacy is a primary concern of transportation agencies in the United States (US) when tracking people, vehicles and goods within the nation’s transportation grid. As a number of technologies have rapidly advanced, including photo enforcement, electronic tolling, vehicle‐mile taxing, weigh‐in‐motion, and Connected Vehicle technologies, research examining the privacy implications of system applications has lagged. In a recent national survey to determine how state departments of transportation (DOTs) are meeting the privacy needs of the traveling public, it was determined that DOTs favor aggregating and masking data for protecting privacy of motorists while collecting travel times and speeds. For capturing video surveillance, abiding by legislation or agency policies was the preferred method of protecting privacy. Unfortunately, there are no national standards in the US for the privacy protection of travelers as most privacy information merely takes the form of poorly defined precepts. With the increasing use of ITS applications, which are becoming more interwoven into the US transportation grid, there is a need to develop a national policy and related standards to ensure the privacy protection of the traveling public to ensure broader acceptance of ITS applications. The findings presented in this paper aim to provide direction on how to address the current and future privacy challenges that face the transportation industry.