Data privacy and surveillance issues in telematics use: a study in young German drivers

Young drivers are among the most vulnerable road users worldwide. Their overrepresentation in road accident statistics has already been observed more than half a century ago. Since then, researchers and policy makers have been striving towards gaining a better understanding of how to protect young drivers in road traffic and to drastically reduce their accident rates – ideally to levels that are close to zero. In Germany, the longer-term trend for crash rates of young drivers has shown a steady decrease. However, the fatality statistics from 2019 reveal that the number of 18- to 24-year-olds killed in car crashes increased by almost 9%. One explanation that is given for this critical development is the increased likelihood of young people to perform distracting activities while driving. Furthermore, in the last decade, especially the proliferation of smartphone use has significantly increased the number of potential distractions when young people operate a car. Focusing on Germany, this research aims to provide policy makers and practitioners with comprehensive scientific data and a set of arguments to further decrease young people’s crash rates in future transportation environments. First, we developed an updated and extended German version of the Behaviour of Young Novice Drivers Scale (BYNDS) originally developed by Scott-Parker et al. in 2010. This internationally applied measurement tool allows for gathering reliable information about young people’s risky driving behaviour on a self-reporting basis. More specifically, we applied the BYNDS in a stratified sample of 700 young drivers located throughout Germany to test its reliability and to compare the German version of the BYNDS with other internationally applied versions. Subsequently, we analysed the information gathered about young people’s risky driving. Central to our statistical analysis was a correspondence analysis performed to illustrate behavioural patterns regarding young people’s smartphone use while driving. In this context, we uncovered a sub-group of ‘problem young drivers’ that showed an increased likelihood to engage in high-risk driving behaviours including talking on a hand-held device, drunk driving or skipping red lights. With a more forward-looking perspective, evidence from the BYNDS application was used to design an interdisciplinary safe-by-design (SbD) heuristic. The heuristic developed allowed us to assess the future role of driver monitoring systems (DMS) to cope with the risk of young driver distraction in future transportation environments. A key recommendation of this research is that the triangulation of DMS Type 1 (i.e. car motion data) and DMS Type 2 (i.e. cameras and acoustic sensors) data is critical to reliably identify the occurrence of distracting activities. This outcome paved the way for a concluding theoretical discussion centred on questions around data privacy and surveillance regimes implicit in DMS. In particular, we focused our discussion on outputs from the EU Horizon 2020 project Vision Inspired Driver Assistance Systems (VI-DAS). This project posited the idea of a 720-degree observation technology that allows for gathering comprehensive information from both the inside and outside of the car to facilitate an optimised Human-Machine-Interaction (HMI). In this context, Nissenbaum’s four theses framework of Contextual Integrity (CI) enabled us to introduce structure and a degree of precision to our thinking on the regulation of information flows to protect privacy and increase safety, and (partially) to escape limited panoptical thinking. Chapter 2 to Chapter 6 of this thesis presents peer-reviewed journal articles that have been published in upper Q1 quartile journals that focus on the field of transportation or technology in society. According to Scimago Journal & Country Rank (SJR), the mean four-year journal impact factor of all journal articles is 4.6205.