Thinking Privacy with Intelligent Transportation Systems: Policies, Tools, and Strategies for the Transportation Professional

The importance of intelligent transportation systems (ITS) to the transportation planning and policy community has become increasingly clear, as it offers many potential benefits in areas such as transportation management, commercial transport, transportation safety, law enforcement, in addition to consumer products and services. Many of these new ITS technologies are also prone to producing new risks to privacy. Building upon portions of the 2006 University of Minnesota Transportation Research Conference which addressed Privacy and ITS, this paper discusses how major current and future ITS technologies may affect privacy, recommends a framework to address privacy issues when working with ITS, and looks specifically at a teen driving fatality reduction project, the Vehicle-Infrastructure Integration project, and Minneapolis’s Stop on Red program to examine the ways privacy concerns are addressed. Although not historically a major focus of transportation professionals, privacy considerations need to become increasingly important because the public’s acceptance of new ITS technologies is fully dependent upon the mitigation of their privacy concerns. The lack of comprehensive US privacy legislation make it imperative that transportation entities involved with ITS have a privacy policy including principles such as accountability, purpose identification at the time of collection, informed consent for collection, use limit and disclosure, individual access and opportunity for correction, data quality and security standards, retention limitation, in addition to analyzing privacy’s social effects.