Phones track everything but their role in car wrecks
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
The fix for this is easy: pull people over. When I was a teenager, cops met their quotas by watching for people with a phone (back then folks were talking, not typing). This is a big part of what drove people to get bluetooth earpieces: you wouldn't get pulled over for having one and talking on the phone (and cars didn't have microphones yet, so there wasn't another option).
People will be pissed that they're getting pulled over for using their phone while driving. But if there's no expectation of punishment for breaking the law, people will continue breaking the law. And texting and driving is breaking the law. And if I can spot half a dozen people texting and driving on my way to the gym, cops can definitely spot folks texting. Hell, if I could apply for the special cop job of "pull people over for texting" and nothing else, I'd do it purely out of resentment for distracted driving.
I feel that the media is partially to blame too. They like to victimise drivers who are caught using their phones, or driving over the speed limit for that matter. Or maybe it’s just my point of view.
I get so sick of hearing people say "It's okay: my car lets me talk hands free!" It isn't just the hands that are a problem ... it's your brain being disengaged that's the problem. No hands-free phone fixes that.
The bottom line is, no one should be using their phone and driving. If you have to use the phone, pull over.
Usually holding the phone up in their hand, but sometimes with the phone in a holder on the windshield.
Or, as is currently being tested in many European countries, cameras above the road that automatically detect drivers on their phones.
But I am not optimistic about that taking off in the US, where even speed cameras are a rarity (although I do not really know why).
See the links on https://yro.slashdot.org/story/09/03/24/145247/mississippi-p...
I looked into the legality of receiving a ticket from someone who is not a cop and I was under no legal obligation to pay it. However, they can ruin your credit if you refuse to pay, so I just went ahead and paid it. I did not seek legal advice and maybe I should have, but the fee was less than a lawyer would have cost.
I think the biggest issue here is simply that the United States has created a transportation system that is inherently unsafe and ungovernable. By universalizing the automobile as the only de facto mode of transportation, we have made revoking a bad driver's license a hardship.
The only way to fix the problem is fixing the infrastructure which is extremely expensive, and politically would be wildly unpopular. We are currently doing the exact opposite -- increasing vehicle size and weight in a myopic arms race -- which means we will likely live with the scourge of traffic deaths (100+ dead per day) for the rest of our lives...
This would inconvenience passengers of all sorts but it would immediately eliminate all phone related accidents without getting people with bad impulse control license suspensions. Most people with license suspensions continue driving anyway.
It’s hard for me to see any other solution that really changes anything. Millions of people have a phone addiction and punishing them for using their phone while driving may be just but it won’t be effective. To me this is more than worth the very minor inconvenience of not being able to use my phone while riding in a bus, car, or train.
The comparison with drug use can only go so far. And even in that domain, despite what harm reduction purists will tell you, supply reduction DOES work to an extent, in that it dissuades casual users. Looking back at phone use, a casual distracted driver really only differs from an addict in how often they’re doing it. If you hear about your friend being raked over the coals by the cops because of distracted driving, I honestly do believe that you’d be less likely do to it yourself.
Where I live, cops routinely drive through lakes of traffic on motorbikes and will tap on your window and signal for you to take the next exit if they see you on your phone. It works.
Even with all the imperfections present, it’s still worlds better than less-than-half-baked ideas like disabling phones travelling beyond a certain speed. Christ. Guess I’ll just never catch a train again.
What I propose reduces the problem by 100%.l and is very easy and cheap to implement.
Is it really that burdensome to not use your phone on the train? I don’t now and it wasn’t that long ago nobody had phones.
You might want to think a little harder there. Phone conversations themself are a distraction and, per your own arguments in this subthread, would not be eliminated under this proposal.
Idiots who interfere with the normal operation of someone else's devices need to be locked up.
At least there’s things you can do to control or ameliorate situations like that. You can learn where the local hospitals are. You can use android auto or CarPlay. You can call 911. You can’t control the guy running a red because he’s on his phone and he’s much much more common. This is a minimally intrusive intervention on devices that already do all sorts of things to “interfere with normal operation” that would save thousands of lives for in the 99.99999% of other cases a minor inconvenience to everyone else. A return to the year 2005.
Those in power have obvious incentives to implement limitation to harm their opponents. Flagging political emails as spam is a well know example.
Once some limits are tolerated, tyranny becomes inevitable.
So yes, thousands of lives in exchange for millions of people not being able to doomscroll Facebook and Tiktok during their train commute seems OK. Driving while distracted is already a crime in lots of places, there's variable enforcement, but it's not making a big dent. Something else needs to be done.
It's bizarre to me how strong the reactions against this are. You're talking about suffering: I'm talking about returning to what was the status quo not that many years ago. This is addict behavior.
For what it's worth, I agree that distracted driving is a huge problem, which is a big part of why I would like to see a drastic reduction in the rate of car ownership, the number of cars in our cities, and extremely harsh punishments for drivers who kill people. We also should make it much, much easier to live far away from cars, but close to other people, in developments like https://www.bloommerwede.nl/ for instance.
This reminds me of how MADD looked at drunk driving and decided the problem was all alcohol and not, in fact, car dependency.
1. Two software companies making a software change.
2. Convincing (or forcing) hundreds of millions of people to stop driving, reorganizing cities, eliminating rural and suburban living to the greatest extent possible.
I too enjoy using my phone while traveling. But if I couldn't, it'd be no skin off my back most of the time. And, I mentioned only disabling the screen, not the whole phone.
Having phones disable themselves while moving fast is absolutely ridiculous, imaging if you're on a 4 hour bus ride and can't communicate with people you need to meet at your destination.
Not anyone can or is willing to carry a laptop or tablet with them everywhere, especially if you're taking a bus or are a passenger in a car
Also, there'd be nothing to stop you from saying "Hey Siri, call so and so." Only the screen would be disabled.
Until people decide that reality is better than the unreality of phones, this kind of willful ignorance will continue.
But willing to be wrong on the latter, so might as well watch as it plays out.
The adoption rate of other entertainment tech like television and video games makes me think that the trend you identify might just be human nature to some extent (with the help of consumerism). I’m not sure people will in fact choose “reality” over entertainment in large enough numbers to reverse that trend.
Calling phones/games/tv/social media/etc addictions just tells me that you have an authoritarian paternalist ideology.
Although I have never done meth, I had an addition to a type of amphetamine in my teens. It was not a physical addition, in the sense that there were no physical withdraw symptoms, but I can tell you from experience that it was a very "real" addition in the sense that it a) ruined my life b) I felt like I had no control over it and c) I needed professional help to overcome it.
A big part of the cycle was that the "down" felt like an overwhelming depression while the "high" felt like pure happiness coupled with the ability to hyper-focus on anything, which really fed into my personality type. It was that cycle that created a psychological dependency that was very hard to break. Every use created an incentive to use again as soon as the high started to wear off. I've never experienced that with anything else ... not even other types of drugs.
Basically after staying awake for an entire week because I was high on a stimulant 24/7, when I "crashed" I slept for days and that's when my mother realized that I had a serious problem and got me professional help because she was worried I was in a coma or something.
I've never experienced anything similar with video games, gambling, television, social media etc. So I have no idea if it's the same for people who develop "addictions" to those things. All I know is that you don't need physical withdraw symptoms to experience a very real addiction that you can't break on your own.
The word is used for deleterious behaviors that have become compulsive or the person has otherwise lost the ability to control.
"Deleterious" may depend on the person and their life circumstances. And inasmuch as "lost ability to control" relates to "willpower" -- or shall we say various executive functions -- it may be difficult for someone without those problems or limitations to understand. That doesn't mean it isn't real.
The modern world has become much more complex and the traps for our primate brains have increased. Our understanding of psychology also continues to deepen and better understand the problems.
In short: words change meaning. Addition as a term includes a history of positive definition in the 17th century of "devoting oneself to another person, cause or pursuit", to being "associated with excessive alcohol use" in the early 1900s, to "linked almost exclusively to excessive patterns of substance use" in the 1980s, to the modern medical definition—not made until 2013!—of "the most severe degree of the addictive disorders, due to pervasive/excessive substance-use or behavioural compulsions/impulses".
Indeed, for most of the late 20th century, no one could agree what it referred to! "The word addiction was deliberately omitted from four consecutive editions of the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders [...] because it was considered a layman’s rather than a scientific term, pejorative, stigmatizing, and too difficult to define. There were simply ‘too many meanings’ (Alexander & Schweighofer 1988); the term lacked any ‘universally agreed upon definition’ (Buchman et al. 2011); the result of using it was ‘conceptual chaos’ (Shaffer 1986, 1997)."
So it hasn't been redefined to mean anything because it was never fully defined to begin with. Only in the last decade has it truly been formalized, and yes includes both chemical and behavioral dependency.
[1] https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/16066359.2018.1... [2] https://www.tn.gov/content/dam/tn/mentalhealth/documents/FIN...
Addiction does not exclusively refer to chemical dependency.
> Now it is being redefined to mean “people doing anything I don’t like and don’t think they should do”.
I don't know where you got that impression, if that were the case then I would expect there to be widespread disagreement about what is addictive. Why is it not possible that both dependency and addictive substances are often harmful?
> Whatever you call it there is a tremendous difference in type between alcoholism or opioid dependency and social media use.
What does difference in type mean? Are we distinguishing between alcoholism and opioid dependency or between material conditions and it's presentation in social media?
> Calling them the same word is grossly misleading if not outright lying.
They do share quite a few characteristics.
* slide to power off * Medical ID * SOS Emergency Call * Recent Phone Use
Report would be high-level -- has phone been unlocked in last 30 minutes, if so, timestamps showing when it was unlocked, for how long, how many finger taps occurred, etc.
That would give law enforcement a quick indication of whether phone was in use. Of course if there are passengers it could be contested. For more detail, they'd have to subpoena as they do now.
Now, it would be possible to use the same mechanism they use for digital drivers licenses to further restrict it but the nice thing about that idea is that not using sensitive information means there isn’t much concern of a leak.
Have you actually seen what amazing technologies are worthy of the name "privacy-preserving" these days? You can look up items in a database without the database operator knowing what you queried. You can let a server add two numbers without the server operator knowing what these two numbers are. These are worthy of the phrase "privacy-preserving" in this age.
The feature described would be a nice way to support those questions in a manner which does not reveal private information, require you to unlock the phone, or otherwise risk giving them access beyond what’s needed to answer the questions during an official investigation. You could of course choose not to use it but why you’d want to give them additional access to your device is beyond me.
Even the breathalyzer requirement seems irrelevant, considering that it only requires you to submit to a breathalyzer performed by a police officer, rather than mandating that your BAC be available to anybody with physical access to your property.
You can’t answer their question with anything but hearsay. This is why I brought up the DUI checks because we know some people are going to lie, and hard evidence can easily be acquired to sidestep that issue. The suggestion above would be similar in terms of having minimal privacy concern and because it’s cheap and easy it’d actually be done in non-egregious cases.
I also reject the comparison to DUI checks on the basis that those must be performed ASAP in order not to lose the evidence, thus necessitating urgency; the same doesn't apply to phones. As we've seen in, for example, the case of the Uber self-driving car operator who was using her phone when she killed a pedestrian, they were easily able to determine this after the fact, without such intrusive features.
If your phone is mounted and easy to reach, that's perhaps true. If you're holding it in your hand and looking down, it's less comparable.
If you want a dedicated gps or music player you can buy one.
In my area you can not use a phone at all while driving a motorcycle even for navigation.
You are allowed to buy a dedicated gps though.
It appears that new drivers are also forbidden from even looking at dash-mounted devices while driving. I get that they might be more easily distracted, and unable to give voice prompts while driving, but they presumably also need more help navigating, with advance lane change warnings, etc. Basically, these laws have not been especially well-calibrated, which is not surprising given that this is true for pretty much all laws regarding new technologies.
1: https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/does-california-law-...
Touch device with cellular radio physically attached to car: A-ok
Touch device with a radio not connected to the car? VERBOTEN.
Android let you enable Android auto on phone, but iirc the feature went away.
This can't be true. Zooming the screen from the accessibility settings probably gets you half way there already. Every navigation app is enticing you to use it while driving. Touchscreens are enticing/forcing users to take the eyes off the road. The mere existence of the phone is enticing a driver to use it.
CarPlay "mode" would just be a slightly different GUI for what you can already do with the phone whether legally (by the passenger, or while stationary) or illegally (while driving). Every app in the phone is also accessible from the home screen.
At most Apple would have to issue a warning every time to use it correctly, like many cars already do.
It gets you there all the way. If some cop wants to screw you over, that's more than he needs. Taking your eyes of the road to look at some small smartphone is not just illegal, it's dangerous. People die because of it every day. Most cops just don't give a fuck because almost everyone does it. Doesn't make it legal though. That's also why all navigation apps tell you not to use them while driving. But while these apps have other legit uses, CarPlay literally only exists to be used while driving. So it makes no sense to offer it without integration into a car's systems that allow you (in theory) to use it without looking down. If someone screws this up it's the car maker's fault.
You are not making more sense than the first time and I already mentioned some reasons why.
"Phone icons too big" is not a thing a cop can "screw you over". Google had this feature for years. Whether this is "enticing" users to operate the phone while driving has to be legislated or judged before it can be policed. And Apple can get around it the same way everyone else: with a legal disclaimer.
In general it's absolutely legal to have a phone operating in the car as long as the driver isn't actively interacting with it while driving, and it isn't displaying videos to the driver. The size or shape of the icons is irrelevant. Anything that can be legally displayed on a car's display is also legal on a phone screen. Tl;dr: don't play with either or watch videos while driving.
It doesn't take much thought to realize that if cars come plastered with giant screens and apps like Netflix, then a 5" screen with slightly larger icons is a non-issue.
Given that other large companies offer equivalent functionality, I really doubt that fear of lawsuits has determined when CarPlay is available.
Amusingly apropos the main complaint that people seem to have with Driving Mode is that it isn’t designed to be screen-based, which would be quite dangerous, but rather voice-based which is comparatively safer.
Edit: I think their strategy here confused people because most people seem to think that the goal is a zoomed touchscreen, whereas the actual goal was voice only with a nav screen if you’re navigating.
Totally agree with the point that, as usual, the branding is awful. They need to have these names reviewed by people who don’t live and breathe the product, the small nuances here are lost on GenPop.
Buttons on a screen are a bad idea and should be highly discouraged for drivers. Big buttons almost make that worse because of licensing, i.e. people see a thing labeled car mode and assume that means it’s safe to use in a car.
Voice interfaces are generally safer, partly because of eye line but also because they significantly constrain the space of things your phone can do and thus use less attention.
* It reads out texts to me, and asks me if I want to reply by voice. * car mode UIs means it takes less attention to skip songs or whatever. * It turns off some distracting notifications etc.
They let you have these features when navigating, why not when you don't need navigation?
Eyeline is slightly correlated with safety when compared with a device you need to locate, however with a constant position device the effect disappears. The actual problem is cognitive load.
Having your phone visible increases cognitive load even if you don’t use it. Composing text message by voice is equivalently distracting to typing one. Yes really, this has been rigorously studied. Texting by voice is only better than holding a phone and talking on it if you’re careful about using it in safer situations. And even then, the gains are pretty small.
Using a touchscreen with large buttons has higher cognitive load than an equivalent voice interface, even accounting for misunderstandings. The key intuition here is that you have to decrease amount you think about or interact with your device. Stop looking at your phone, it’ll be there when you get there.
Reducing cognitive load is why I want car mode to activate!
> Pulling off the highway every buzz isn't a solution either
I don’t know if you’re American, but you’d make a good one. Putting small conveniences over others safety is kind of a national pastime here.
https://www.bestbuy.com/site/sku/6283607.p?skuId=6283607
Labor and parts for installation could easily bring the total cost of adding a CarPlay/Android Auto compatible head unit to $1,000. At least it did for me, and that was 3 years ago.
Mind you - it's a little janky after 5 years, but an awesome value for what it cost. I know what you're thinking: Yes it has Netflix and Retroarch. No, I don't ever use those.
https://9to5mac.com/2022/11/08/ios-16-2-custom-accessibility...
0: https://support.apple.com/en-hk/guide/assistive-access-iphon...
People have phobias about all sorts of things eg flying. Flying on a commercial airplane is demonstrably safer than driving. So why isn't there a more prevalent fear of driving? Some will point to the illusion of control. I can buy that to some degree.
Phone use by driving should make people more fearful of driving. Even if you personally don't use your phone while driving, other people do. And that increases your own risk. Yet that doesn't seem to be the case.
What makes this worse is that everything from marketing to public relations to politics is built around stoking irrational fears that aren't based in fact. A classic example is child abduction even though in reality in the United States ~8 children are actually abducted every year. Figures like "800,000 per year" are heavily inflated with custody disputes.
Can you give me some stats on this? I was under the impression that it's maybe a little bit safer in terms of distance traveled.
But the people who think their driving is 50% safer than the average person's don't care about this. And this is probably near 100% of people who drive.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transportation_safety_in_the_U...
I have seen cases where they went back and look at phone use history after accidents.... not sure how often they do it though.
> The police can access cellphone records but the process is cumbersome and privacy laws require a subpoena.
I wish it was just a default step in figuring out fault nowadays. An not handing over that data should put that driver at a disadvantage.
More enforcement is what we tried with drugs, how’d that go?
If you want to race, that's fine, but don't do it on public roads. Go to a race track that's designed for that.
And also agree on drugs, we should just legalize everything IMO. Prohibition has never worked, anyone who wants to do drugs are going to do them, and we're better off helping than harming people by filling up the prisons.
Really? That's your argument?
Obvious exceptions being to look at a message while stopped at a traffic light or other safe location, or having the navigation app open with the phone fixed to the dashboard and otherwise not interacting with it.
So it's just you I'm afraid.
My guess is: yes. I'm almost too "I look at the car, not the driver" to understand but I have actually seen this as a passenger in America. I drive myself places.
This exception is "obvious" until you've sat through an entire cycle because the car in front of you didn't notice the light turning green.
I realize this anecdotal story is not a 1:1 example. It's definitely more general into distracted driving in general, and just how teenage decision making isn't very mature at all.
It's not quite a lethal problem when their peripheral can notice a car in front of them (which is probably moving with traffic), but it could be lethal for me. Car drivers are used to looking for cars, they're not looking for me on a bike - even with a florescent yellow backpack, flame orange helmet, and obscenely bright red blinky rear light.
I've given up hope on people not talking on their phone or occasionally dialing a call with their fingers or updating navigation apps or starting a voice-to-text or using their phones at stoplights. But could we at least get a few of the most-used OSes and non-driving apps to not work when they're being used by a driver? If there are no other phone Bluetooth beacons continuously in range (you're known to be not a passenger), there is a car stereo Bluetooth beacon, and GPS says you're in motion on a road at road speeds, don't play video. Don't allow new social notifications. Don't allow Tiktok or Facebook or Reddit to run. At least make an effort at it, stop the easiest 80%.
I'm convinced it's going to take a horrific accident going viral - someone plowing through a class of elementary students on a field trip while live-streaming or something like that - to cause change.
There's not going to be a rational answer for 'why', it's just addiction.
It's one of the few areas where society basically demands we take on massive liabilities in order to live our basic lives. Then we also like to pretend it's a "privilege", and not necessary. My employer almost called the cops on me, because I didn't drive in one day and used uber.
Starting to get some real second thoughts about this culture. It seems we have taken an insane shift in perspective. In 1970 all car crashes were accidents, but in the 2020s, none are; and someone has to be obliterated.
Tackling "drunk drunk" driving eg. 10 beers, 0.10+ bac, etc. is one thing. All these calls to lock up more people for longer seem to be taking us down a crazy road... and they continue to use the same rules for other substances, even though the chemical testing doesn't work, and the number of cases are low (ie. not a lot of crashes happening).
What was their reasoning behind this? Unknown car at a secure facility?
Do you want to make everyone that has a severely limiting disability have to constantly explain themselves? Or maybe their fucking car is in the shop.
It's honestly not something that's the most meaningful, but among other things it's made me distinctly aware how weird the culture is if you want to make driving not necessary to be a first class citizen. So while it doesn't prove my point, even prior I felt like "people are just gonna start calling the cops on me for not driving", and it basically was like that.
See how I'm now still kinda having to explain myself? I can't help but think this is a little proving my point. Now the notion of not-driving is such an inexplicable concept that it must be explained?
It's not like proof of my point, but in the times I've not-driven, I've noticed it draws strange, weird attention. This was just the most outlandish.
It was just an honest misunderstanding. She should have been able to catch me on video and card swipe.
Btw, I know this isn't the slam dunk proof of my point. Just imagine you were thinking this stuff was weird, then someone finally threatens to call the freaking cops on you! (not really, she was nice we just cleared it up).
Even when I just call someone on the phone (not that often these days) and find they're in the car I always ask, "Hey, should I just call you later?" and, perhaps surprisingly, people will usually say "yeah, we can talk XXX". This is common when they will get to their destination in not so long a time. I'm nore likely to get a "naah, I'll be on the road for a couple of hours so let's just talk now" than I am, "I'll be driving for another 10 minutes so let's just talk now"
I park myself in a meeting before driving and then use CarPlay mute/unmute as needed. It works ok. If I lose the call, it's impossible to get back in, as I need to use the phone.
Well they’re not laughing when their children are involved. /gruesome
The amount of added background commute stress caused by almost everyone on the road ignoring their turn signal these days is infuriating. It makes everything take longer, and every delay gets magnified multiple times by multiple people in a causal chain not doing it.
This increases stress, road rage, increases commute times, gridlock, everything connected with driving decision that involves meshing with the moves of the cars around you, which now defaults to the worst case defensive scenario- i.e. that everyone who, say, could swerve into your lane when you try to merge, is likely to do so, so you wait multiple times longer to get on to a highway or turn onto a two or three lane thoroughfare, than you would have to if people would just perform what has to be the simplest yet most beneficial gesture of productive cooperation. Even navigating a 7-Eleven parking lot turns into a needlessly guessing game.
And yet if you try to raise the subject among casual friends, even in a joking manner, they look at you like you're some kind of anachronistic Barney Fife character.
Maybe the initial version of this camera that requires human intervention will barely abide by the already overreaching law, but face-reading cameras everywhere will soon be abused.
Despite talk about authoritarianism we rarely discuss its cultural roots.
Notice how the article puts the burden on authorities & companies to add more surveillance and penalties for people to improve their behavior.
Every ill in society can be fixed with enough surveillance, by this reasoning.
People often worry that we will become like the 20th century authoritarian states (e.g the 3rd Reich, GDR , USSR, etc) and I tell them that we've far surpassed their surveillance and control capacity.
So let's not keep adding to it, shall we?
Transcription of messages is utterly broken when having conversations in different languages with different people. Why is it still bad with so many advances in LLMs and machine learning?
I very much like that US treats me as an adult when driving. I am fine with cops pulling me over.
I just legit hate the idea cameras always watching me waiting for me to make the tiniest mistake and chew up a significant chunk of my monthly income.
Speed and red light cameras are a big business raking in millions per camera.
2. ...and should they? If a crash happens, and someone was on their phone, it would be pretty obvious that they were at fault. I just have a really hard time thinking that more device-related tracking would be better for society. Also, the mention of cameras at the end of the article is another concern for me. I really don't think this country is better off with more internet connected cameras that are actively being used to surveil the populous. There have to be better ways to win the hearts and minds of people and convince them to not use their phones. Turning into a surveillance state doesn't seem to be the best way to do that IMO.
Accidents are so circumstantial that it's not always going to be "pretty obvious" someone involved was on their phone. Nor does being on your phone when involved in an accident necessarily mean that you caused it.
So, not only were they on their phone and reportedly didn't cause the collision, nobody even asked if they were on their phone and therefore nobody found out, presumably because they didn't cause the collision.
Police come along, ask her a bare minimum of questions. "Did you have a green light?" "Yes, I did." "Okay."
Walk over to the other driver, and talk to him, come back less than three minutes later. "The other driver said he definitely had a green light. I am issuing you a citation for failure to obey a traffic control signal."
That fell apart very quickly when we appealed it to court. "Definitely" in a statement adds nothing to the reasonable doubt equation.
A good analogy would be DUI: Americans really loved their booze and there were many people who felt it was a core freedom to be able to drive after drinking, but eventually the death toll mounted high enough that our social norms changed to include things like designated drivers and doing roadside tests rather than trusting drivers’ claims. Phones will probably follow a similar arc because they are involved in many serious accidents and most people agree that driving safely is not an unreasonable request or a civil liberties violation.
Just last fall I responded to a late-night crash where a drunk driver lost control and pinballed across the highway hitting both barriers and coming to a rest on the shoulder when a second vehicle whose driver was looking at their phone failed to notice the gigantic fire engine with flashing lights blocking the right lane of the three-lane road and braked just late enough to crash into our engine.
We found the phone, still playing a video, in the driver's side footwell.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/12/11/upshot/nightt...
I'm not sure that things have really changed all that much, big picture.
Things have changed a lot. The biggest thing that changed is how common this kind of driving is.
> Bowls of soup also don't send you unprompted notifications.
Oh, if you carry a full bowl of soup in a moving car, I bet it does! If the soup is hot, the notifications can be even harder to ignore than a ringing phone.
I think you either care about driving safely or you don't. The phones are just the latest distraction.
But the phone can easily tell when it's in a moving car. It could be programmed to not be useable during those times, or maybe allow passively displaying a navigation map but no interactive use.
(I obviously don't do that when driving… I even avoid podcasts because that uses too much attention.)
I haven't been driving as much in recent years wasn't aware of this trend. (Except for Tesla drivers: 5 years ago, I remember looking over to see a Tesla on autopilot next to me, doing 60 on Seattle's 520 bridge with the driver totally checked out and watching a video.)
I am guilty. It’s easier for me to fast for a day, but a digital fast feels very very unconfortable.
I tried not using my phone or a screen for an entire day. By evening I got proper anxiety.
So in short, the phone company keeps records as does the phone and an increasing number of cars. However the author apparently feels that the police shouldn't even have to ask.
Frankly that is an insane take. With the amount of information being (secretly) kept about us by our own devices we risk putting the entire population under constant surveillance if we don't improve protections against law enforcement hacking devices.
Like, I understand that privacy is important. I agree that it is. But if you choose to drive a deadly machine, then you agree to give up a degree of that privacy.
All cars have license plates, identifying who it belongs to. Car drivers are subject to document checks by road security personnel. Car drivers are subject to alcohol tests if they're suspected of being drunk.
What makes phone usage more sacred than any of those things?
I'm not saying all your phone data becomes public if you're in a crash, the same way that an alcohol test doesn't tell the cops where, what, and with who you were drinking with.
How is society in any way worse, if phones recorded usage in the past 24 hours, and drivers had to provide that data if implicated in a crash?
1) phones that allow installation of a custom free OS;
2) phones that are already in use now.
Most of Asia has very strict laws against drug use, even weed. If you look at rate of usage, it's a lot lower than more liberal places.
But I'm not even saying put people in jail. Just take away their license. They've clearly proven they're not responsible enough to handle driving.
I don't think this discussion is gonna go anywhere.
The requirement to record anything in a way useful for law enforcement would be pretty close to a ban of phones that can run a custom OS, which is in turn pretty close to a ban of phones that not spy on the user all the time, whether or not the user drives at all.
P.S. And I write it as a happy iPhone user. I want to hope I have options if I later decide that I value privacy or customizability over features!
Yes, if it's alleged you killed someone. There's a whole legal system and body of precedent about that stuff going back centuries or millennia. It's not even controversial.
It also seems like Apple and Google should have a roll as trusted third parties. The phone could save a short activity log (basically the same things screen time apps record: was the device unlocked, active, last touch event, etc.) any time car play is active or the accelerometer records hard deceleration with a secure way to share that with the police so you can be confident all you’re giving them is evidence that you weren’t looking at Tik Tok 20s before the collision.