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An Anonymous Coward writes:

If you’ve been out on the streets of Silicon Valley or New York City in the past nine months, there’s a good chance that your bad driving habits have already been profiled by Nexar. [ieee.org] This U.S.-Israeli startup is aiming to build what it calls “an air traffic control system” for driving.

Using the smartphone’s camera, machine vision, and AI algorithms, Nexar recognizes the license plates of the vehicles around it, and tracks their location, velocity, and trajectory. If a car speeds past or performs an illegal maneuver like running a red light, that information is added to a profile in Nexar’s online database. Nexar estimates that if 1 percent of drivers use the app daily, it would take just one month to profile 99 percent of a city’s vehicles.

Although ranking the driving performance of every vehicle in the United States might sounds legally dubious, Lior Strahilevitz,a law professor at the University of Chicago, says that it is probably legal: “Courts generally say that people generally have little or no expectation of privacy in the movements of their cars on public roads, as long as cars aren’t being tracked everywhere they go for a lengthy period of time.”

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