BMWBMW

I just found out you can get a cash & carry EZ Pass at certain retail locations.

http://www.ezpassonthego.com/index.php

Nice, thanks for the heads up. I was just down in VA on the bike over the weekend and opted not to take the toll road cause it's such a pain to deal with gloves, change blah blah. Turns out, a retailer carries one of these EZ pass do-hickeys less than a few miles from home.

I haven't read the article but the headline looked intersting

http://autos.aol.com/article/e-zpass-privacy-invasion/

Chris

Meza44 wrote:I haven't read the article but the headline looked intersting

http://autos.aol.com/article/e-zpass-privacy-invasion/

Chris

It's worth a read. Probably no reason to cry murder yet, but always good to be aware of possibilities.

<rant>
I'd like to believe one day (before it's too late), We the People will realize that if we want our government to serve our needs (as oppose to our conforming to their ideals... which ironically should be our ideals but usually aren't), we'll have to make an effort to elect the right people into office. It seems we, as Americans, forget from election to election who did what and why. We don't hold them accountable, they get back into office and begin to stray far enough away from their campaign promises that the agenda has become their agenda and not ours.

Ultimately, they begin to do things that we don't want them to... which should never be the case since we're the ones who put them there in the first place.
</rant>

I know it's not really that simple, but some days when G. Orwell is tapping me on the shoulder, it feels like it should be.

Meza44 wrote:I haven't read the article but the headline looked intersting

http://autos.aol.com/article/e-zpass-privacy-invasion/

Chris

This definitely not the first time this has been brought up. Next time you head up the NJ Turnpike, look closely at the overhead signs. Many of them have EZ-Pass beacon receivers as well. So you're not just getting logged at entrance/exit, but also periodically along the route.

Who cares? So long as they are not giving tickets for it, who cars if they track you? They know you are starting somewhere, and ending somewhere, and they need that information to bill you, so who cares? Even before easy pass, and now with cash, they still know when you started, and when you end, so if you speed they know.

Again, who cares?



Jim

Because... They know. They know it all. They track us through our cell phones and our ez-passes. They follow us on video everywhere we go...It's a... It's a.....

radon222 wrote: They follow us on video everywhere we go...

Thats the UK, mate, not here (yet)

Wait, what is this thread about again?

--chiba

in all seriousness, check out the rates each state charges for the priviledge

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-ZPass

Black Wing wrote:Nice, thanks for the heads up. I was just down in VA on the bike over the weekend and opted not to take the toll road cause it's such a pain to deal with gloves, change blah blah. Turns out, a retailer carries one of these EZ pass do-hickeys less than a few miles from home.

I fastened rare earth magnets (bought off of Amazon) to the velcro strips on the EZ Pass transponder, so that bad boy pops right on my fuel tank. Of course that depends on having a metal fuel tank. (I also used rare earth magnets to mount my garage door opener on my Ztechnik windscreen bracket).

Black Wing wrote:It's worth a read. Probably no reason to cry murder yet, but always good to be aware of possibilities.

<rant>
I'd like to believe one day (before it's too late), We the People will realize that if we want our government to serve our needs (as oppose to our conforming to their ideals... which ironically should be our ideals but usually aren't), we'll have to make an effort to elect the right people into office. It seems we, as Americans, forget from election to election who did what and why. We don't hold them accountable, they get back into office and begin to stray far enough away from their campaign promises that the agenda has become their agenda and not ours.

Ultimately, they begin to do things that we don't want them to... which should never be the case since we're the ones who put them there in the first place.
</rant>

I know it's not really that simple, but some days when G. Orwell is tapping me on the shoulder, it feels like it should be.

It all starts out with the government finding ways to cut costs because afterall, we don't want to raise taxes. So instead of raising toll rates or taxes, they eliminate the need for toll booth operators and use easy pass. More efficient. THEN, they realize they are already collecting other useful information which they can sell, or use in new ways to bring money into the government. This offsets raising taxes from other funded programs. Afterall, we have to eventually pay for things like free healthcare, don't we?

R4R&R wrote:
It all starts out with the government finding ways to cut costs because afterall, we don't want to raise taxes. So instead of raising toll rates or taxes, they eliminate the need for toll booth operators and use easy pass. More efficient. THEN, they realize they are already collecting other useful information which they can sell, or use in new ways to bring money into the government. This offsets raising taxes from other funded programs. Afterall, we have to eventually pay for things like free healthcare, don't we?

It's actually worse than that. Excuses like "efficiency" or "cost cutting" or whatever are no longer needed.
Since 9/11 the Government doesn't need any justification other than "National Security" to collect information on the citizenry. It seems that a warrent is no longer needed by the Feds to do whatever snooping they care to do. The Bill of Rights has become a list of conditional privileges. With modern computer technology it is easy to store information on anybody and then pull up the files with a few key strokes.

Anyone who thought that Obama was going to correct the abuses of the Bush/Cheney "Unitary Executive" has been disappointed. Obama has instead embraced the Bush/Cheney view and extended it.

Welcome to the National Security State, a.k.a "The Homeland".

R4R&R wrote:It all starts out with the government finding ways to cut costs because afterall, we don't want to raise taxes. So instead of raising toll rates or taxes, they eliminate the need for toll booth operators and use easy pass. More efficient. THEN, they realize they are already collecting other useful information which they can sell, or use in new ways to bring money into the government. This offsets raising taxes from other funded programs. Afterall, we have to eventually pay for things like free healthcare, don't we?

It's not just the government. Private information can be sold in surprising ways. I bought a CARFAX subscription when I was shopping for used cars. Just for grins, I ran my older car's VIN and found out that Wilkins Subaru in Glen Burnie was giving (probably selling) my information to CARFAX. I expect to see accident reports and other public records in CARFAX, but I didn't expect to see my car maintenance records there. Those should have been private transactions between me and Wilkins Subaru.

Seems like they should have offered me a discount for the use of my information but they didn't mention it, let alone ask permission.