Car-monitoring service allows you to be your own Big Brother

The way George Orwell imagined Big Brother was as a police state that imposed unrelenting surveillance on an unwilling public.

Orwell never imagined that people would actually make nice with Big Brother as a matter of convenience, but that’s one way to view the growing stream of data from automobiles that has attracted a lot of interest from the government and, so far, not a lot of suspicion from the public.

Some consumers actually are willing to pay for a service that lets the government know your car isn’t breaking the law.

For about a year, a La Jolla company has offered to provide remote sensing of a car’s systems and to post that data to a private Web page, along with verifying to state agencies that the car is in compliance with the emission laws of California and a few other states.

The service, which costs about $1,000 for the first year, is offered by Networkcar. It has attracted about 10,000 customers nationwide and is growing at a rapid clip.

Networkcar promotes its service as helping consumers monitor the health of their vehicles, reminding motorists when to change their oil, reporting fuel efficiency and alerting them to any mechanical problems or error codes that the car’s internal computer has identified.

“Some people say, ‘Oh my gosh, this is Big Brother,’ � said Networkcar President Dave Dutch. “But Networkcar is no more scary or Big Brotherish than any other kind of service you subscribe to.�

Dutch noted that people are more than willing to trust Internet access providers or cellphone providers that collect a wealth of private data on individuals.

Though your car’s coolant temperature is pretty boring, the system also can report information that probably would excite Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft.

The service monitors and records every physical location your car has visited during the previous 90 days. It does that with a global positioning system receiver embedded in a device that is installed under the dashboard of your car. The device also contains a wireless transmitter that sends the car’s location and other data to Networkcar’s computers.

If you don’t trust your teenagers or your spouse, you can easily use the service to check exactly where they have been driving in recent weeks. In other words, you can be your own Big Brother.

Networkcar’s chief financial officer, for example, uses one to keep track of his daughter, Dutch said. He added that he and his wife put systems “on both of our vehicles, and my wife knows I know where she has been.�

The tracking service is particularly attractive to fleet operators, such as pizza chains that worry that their drivers are using company cars for personal reasons. The Marine Corps, for another example, is using the system on its vehicles at Camp Pendleton.

The other important part of Networkcar’s service is the stream of data that it collects on your car’s emission system, measuring key pollutants the engine is producing.

The device plugs into your car’s main engine computer, better known in technical terms as “onboard diagnostic system two,� or OBDII.

OBDII was mandated by the California Air Resources Board to help implement the state’s tough emissions laws. There have been endless rumors that the board intended, or was considering, a new system that would continuously transmit data to regulators to show whether a car was in compliance with the law.

But Networkcar essentially puts that future government vision to work privately. In cooperation with the state, Networkcar continuously monitors the emissions of cars in its service to make sure they comply with state standards and lets the board know whether each car is in compliance.

If the car does comply, then the owner is excused from getting the biennial smog check by the Bureau of Automotive Repair. If the car does not comply, then the owner has 45 days to get it fixed or is dumped from the compliance program. Networkcar does not report illegal smog output to the state, but the owner does face getting a routine smog check in the future.

How private is all this information. Well, the company says it encrypts the data before they are transmitted from the car. And its Web page can be accessed only by a password held by the car’s owner.

Of course, if the police or other authorities want any of this information, particularly about places the car has been, a court order or a subpoena would force Networkcar to turn it over. So far, Dutch said, the company has not received any court orders to produce data.

And law-abiding citizens shouldn’t worry about the police or any government agency getting information they might need, right?

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