“Rider solidarity means we look out for each other and keep each other safe. Our vision is a ride without fares and a world with no police.” (Unfare NYC)
A decade or two ago, it would have been unimaginable that so many of us would carry a small device in our pockets that can connect to the internet, take high-quality photos, and play videos and music. About 1.5 billion smartphones are now sold every year.1 They’re revolutionized every part of society—including transportation; services like Google Maps have enhanced our ability to find where we need to go via any mode of transportation.
Next-generation automotive companies have built on these technologies, not only with apps to summon rides but with integrated on-board computers. In a Tesla, you can now play video games or trigger fart sounds on command.2 Transit agencies haven’t managed to match these kinds of innovations. Compared to Elon Musk’s schoolboy humour, most buses and trains remain relatively boring.
The sleekness and sheer aesthetics of such next-generation automotive technologies can’t be underestimated. But neither can the role these vehicles are already playing in greatly expanding the amount of data and surveillance available to corporations and policing bodies. A 2019 investigation by Axios reported that all vehicles built by Elon Musk’s Tesla are generating an enormous amount of information including a driver’s speed, charging locations, and video clips from the car’s external cameras to capture footage of lane lines, street signs, and pedestrians.3 The article noted: “It’s not always clear who owns the data captured by vehicles and their networks, an issue that will only get fuzzier once shared, autonomous vehicles are here.”
Police departments are predictably eyeing such vehicles as tools to aid their surveillance of communities, with legal experts suggesting that police may not require a warrant to collect data from them.4 These technological marvels come with serious threats to our personal privacy.
In early 2019, Kia unveiled its Real-time Emotion Adaptive Driving system, which will cater the lighting and music in an autonomous vehicle to the perceived mood of the rider, determined using “bio-signal recognition technology.”5 Meanwhile, Audi showed off its Immersive In-Car Entertainment, which turns the interior of a parked vehicle into a private movie theatre of sorts.6 A recent feature in Automobile magazine boasted of a future of “energized glass coupled with augmented reality” that will display things like “information on history and culture” of an area and virtual reality depictions of various sites.7 Such innovations are what consulting firm KPMG once described as the fostering of a “Sexy Dynamic Experience,” with products constantly evolving and catering to the flexible desires of consumers and their environments.8
Car-generated data might become a $450 billion to $750 billion market by 2030.9 Insurance companies are also rolling out tracking programs using an on-board diagnostic port or smartphone app to help calculate assessments for auto insurance.10 These data-collecting ambitions also slot perfectly into, and are in many ways contingent upon, the development of so-called smart cities. Google’s Sidewalk Toronto project is a prime example of this thinking. Proposed for a twelve-acre neighbourhood called Quayside on Toronto’s eastern waterfront, the area is advertised as a high-tech hub combining autonomous vehicles, sensors and robotic delivery, and waste management systems.11
In 2016, Intel CEO Brian Krzanich stated that “data is the new oil,” specifically pointing to the autonomous vehicle as a data collector. The average person, he said, “generates” a mere 650 megabytes of data a day using computers and smartphones; by 2020 the figure will increase by 1.5 gigabytes per day.12 But an autonomous vehicle—with chips and hardware created through partnerships with Intel, of course—will collect data through cameras, radar, sonar, GPS, and lidar, generating an incredible 4,000 gigabytes of data per day. That includes technical data such as sensing pedestrian movement, “crowdsourced” data such as how a vehicle gets from one place to another in the most efficient way, and personal data, which Krzanich described as follows:
Data that tracks how many people are in the car, music preferences of each passenger, or even what stores or brands passengers prefer and, when you are near them, tees up sale items. Wearables and other sensors inside the car can also monitor behavior, focus, emotional and biometric status to increase safety and security. Whoever has the most personal data will be able to develop and deliver the best user experience.13
Private automobiles already collect enormous amounts of data about their drivers and passengers. As a New York Times feature explained, “cars have become rolling listening posts.”14 Newer vehicles can siphon information about everything from phone calls to music choices to diagnostic information about problems with a vehicle.15 These are called connected cars, in contrast to older vehicles that are not connected to the internet. By 2020, one in five vehicles on the road worldwide, or 250 million vehicles, are expected to have some kind of internet connection.16
It’s a situation that author Peter Norton is extremely concerned about—he goes so far as to call it a “nightmare scenario.” The current trajectory, according to Norton, “exactly parallels” conversations in the petroleum industry of the early to mid twentieth century, in which people who were not dependent on cars were effectively forced into them in order to generate revenue. “You and me in an AV are the oil well,” Norton says. “They are going to pump us for data. And they’re going to sell it.”
Autonomous vehicles will likely becomes a significant site of commerce, in which riders can buy all sorts of goods and services online while in transit.17 Such opportunities will in turn encourage automotive companies to increase reliance on their technology and invasive surveillance; the more time a rider spends in a vehicle, the more personal data can be collected.
Police departments will also benefit from the transition. After all, the rise of police departments in North America occurred in conjunction with the proliferation of the mass automobile; warrants are not being required for cars despite the Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable search and seizure.18 There’s little reason to believe that will change with the advent of a new generation of automobility; if anything, it will only strengthen police powers.
In 2014, it was reported that in-vehicle communication systems Ford SYNC and General Motors’ OnStar collected location data and call data, and shared them with business partners.19 Earlier that year, Ford’s global vice-president of marketing and sales said during a panel discussion: “We know everyone who breaks the law, we know when you’re doing it. We have GPS in your car, so we know what you’re doing.”20 He later had to walk back those comments, saying, “We do not track our customers in their cars without their approval or consent.”
That same year, Uber came under heavy fire for a series of infractions. Among them, the company’s senior vice-president had recommended the doxing of critical journalists, collection of private location data, and unauthorized tracking of users. Uber retained possession of users’ data even after the Uber app was deleted; a written request was required for complete deletion.21
The company was also busted for its use of the so-called God View, a software that allowed real-time tracking of passengers including celebrities, politicians, ex-partners, and journalists—and was sometimes unveiled as an entertainment of sorts at corporate parties.22 In 2017, as a result of the scandal, the company agreed to comply with twenty years of third-party audits.23
In late 2017, Uber announced that it was finally winding down a series of invasive programs, including a feature of its app that allowed tracking of a user for up to five minutes after a trip.24 Only a few months later, a letter written by the lawyer of Richard Jacobs—Uber’s former manager for global intelligence, who had previously worked as a director of intelligence for the U.S. Department of Defense—was unveiled as part of a legal investigation.
The investigation alleged that the company had spied on rivals to acquire trade secrets and collect intelligence about public officials, regulators, and taxi groups.25 Jacobs described the activities as “overly aggressive and invasive and inappropriate.”26 According to the letter sent by his attorney to the company, Uber hired ex-CIA field operatives to conduct such work and even bugged hotels.27 An investigation into Uber’s “Hell” spying program found that the company tracked Lyft drivers by creating fake driver accounts and finding out how many drivers were in a certain area before sending its own.28 “Hell” was also used to track drivers who drove for both Uber and Lyft in an attempt to lure them to work only for Uber.
In November 2017, Uber disclosed that hackers had stolen data from 57 million driver and rider accounts—which the company had failed to inform affected persons about—and that it had paid a $100,000 ransom to the hackers to delete the data.29 Formal investigations into the breach were launched in the U.S., Canada, U.K., and Australia. Only a few months later, allegations were made against Lyft that drivers were abusing customer data by collecting phone numbers and information about celebrities.30
In July 2018, an Uber and Lyft driver based in St. Louis was suspended after it was found that he had been secretly live streaming passenger trips—sometimes including names, home addresses, and conversations—without consent.31 He made about $3,500 by monetizing the livestreams on Twitch, where commenters would “rate” the attractiveness of passengers and make crude remarks. In early response to the revelations, Uber offered passengers a five-dollar credit and a pledge that they wouldn’t be paired with the driver again, while also noting that under Missouri law the livestreaming was technically legal.32
A guideline banning the broadcasting of video collected of Uber passengers was introduced in September 2018, with a potential loss of account access as the punishment. Only a month later, an Uber driver in Phoenix uploaded a video of seven professional hockey players from the Ottawa Senators insulting the team and one of its assistant coaches. This was an industry-wide scandal and the players issued an apology.33 Ontario’s former privacy commissioner said that she was “appalled” by the video recording and described it as an example of “total unwarranted surveillance.”34
Teresa Scassa, Canada Research Chair in information law at the University of Ottawa, told me that it’s not possible to use ride-hailing services without “very significant amounts” of personal information being collected. Some have argued that Uber’s addition of transit directions to its app was a PR stunt chiefly concerned with gathering trip data about how people get around cities.35 Uber spent $50,000 on lobbying against the proposed California Consumer Privacy Act, which would “require companies to disclose the types of information they collect, like data used to target ads, and allow the public to opt out of having their information sold.”36 Other companies that lobbied against the act included Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook, and Google.
In the last six months of 2015, Uber received over five hundred data requests about riders and drivers from law enforcement agencies, and complied with 84 percent of them.37 Uber’s historically strained stance on police departments, most notably failing to disclose to police information about crimes and developing software to lock down computers in the case of police raids, has veered sharply toward collaboration. The company now has a “global law enforcement team” that works directly with police on sharing of data.38 Retired NYPD detective Joseph Giacalone told Utah’s Deseret News in 2019 that police usage of data from smartphone apps, including Uber and Lyft, has increased “infinitely” in the previous half-decade “with no abatement in sight.”39
Scassa told me that the future of privacy and autonomous vehicles isn’t clear at all. In the case of autonomous vehicles being used to perform quasi-transit functions, data collection could feasibly be limited to only payments and routes, “which is already a considerable amount of information.” But she emphasizes that autonomous vehicles are explicitly meant to be much more than that: connected to the internet, with users checking their email, playing video games, and watching movies. “Of course, that will leave the kind of data trail that you don’t normally get with taxis or public transit, which would be related to entertainment, shopping, consumer preference that might be collected as well,” she says.
A district judge in New York ruled in early 2018 that software firm Vugo could advertise in the vehicles of Uber, Lyft, and other companies.40 At the time, Vugo had contracts with some 3,500 drivers to display ads that can’t be turned off and can only be “near” muted.41 Such setups could be expanded for autonomous vehicles and potentially customized for each user based on previously collected data, the way customized Facebook posts are promoted based on interests and likes. This is a future that Adrienne LaFrance of the Atlantic also predicted, noting that companies may be prone to take advantage of the low probability that riders will read through the entire terms of service prior to usage. “In this near-future filled with self-driving cars, the price of convenience is surveillance,” she warned.42
A start-up called Firefly is now mounting small billboards on the top of Uber and Lyft vehicles that have data-collecting sensors in them, collecting information about traffic, weather, and potentially noise. The company has already speculated about working with police departments on helping to identify where gunshots occur.43
Scassa says it’s too early to tell what will happen when autonomous vehicles are integrated with smart cities. Assurances of privacy are still very much up in the air. In August 2018, an agreement for Google to develop the Sidewalk Toronto neighbourhood came under criticism for lack of transparency about data collection, especially the lack of assurances that Google wouldn’t monetize the data.44 Google’s Waymo autonomous vehicles are considered frontrunners in the race for self-driving supremacy, and it’s likely that such a tech playground would serve as an attractive proving ground for the cars.
The trajectory of connected vehicles and ride-hailing services has included the unaccountable mass collection of personal information by private companies that will monetize it for profit. Why would the future be any different, given that the same players are involved with the same lust for as much sellable data as possible?45
Public transportation systems have serious Big Brother issues of their own. It’s becoming difficult to ride on transit anonymously with the proliferation of reloadable tap cards, which can generate a data trail including travel time, boarding location, and transfers. Metrolinx—which operates Toronto’s regional rail and motor coach services of GO Transit and the Union Pearson Express—has come under fire for sharing private Presto travel records with the police.46 The data didn’t include personal phone numbers and email addresses but did allow police to track a user’s movements.47
Beauceron Security, a Canadian company specializing in cybersecurity, explained that “the ease with which card data is being disclosed should be concerning”; both Metrolinx and the police should be required to follow due process, even in an emergency having to “thoroughly explain why the normal process of acquiring data was subverted.”48 Scassa says Metrolinx’s response to the public outcry was to claim that it’s a public agency that is allowed to conduct data sharing between branches of government. She says the company came up with a new privacy policy and provided better notice, but that doesn’t change the fundamental fact that they’re sharing information without warrants.
This situation is even more concerning given the highly racialized nature of policing and incarceration. In the U.S. and Canada, a disproportionate percentage of Black, Indigenous, and Hispanic people are subjected to police violence and carceral punishment.
In recent years, transit agencies in both Canada and the U.S. have added video surveillance cameras to buses and trains. In the wake of the stabbing death of eighteen-year-old Nia Wilson at an Oakland transit station in 2018, board members of Bay Area Rapid Transit publicly discussed the possibility of introducing facial recognition technology to the existing 4,000 security cameras throughout the system.49
An investigation published in September 2018 revealed that data gathered by BART’s automated licence plate reader, installed to scan thousands of plates per minute and alert the police of any related to criminal investigations, was being sent to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE)—the agency that has become the subject of intense scrutiny for its detention of undocumented migrants.50 While BART claims that ICE didn’t access the data, the communication of it violated the transit agency’s own Safe Transit policy, which clearly states that it won’t “use any District funds or resources to assist in the enforcement of federal immigration law or to gather or disseminate information regarding release status of individuals or any other such personal information.”51 In response, Shahid Bhuttar of the Electronic Frontier Foundation said the technology “basically enables the government to create a time machine and uncover the historical locations of anyone, including for instance, undocumented workers and their families.”52
Policing of fare evasion is constantly escalating in scope and severity, such as New York City hiring five hundred more police officers to patrol its dilapidated subway.53 Toronto’s TTC launched an ad campaign in mid-2019 threatening $425 fines for fare evasion, and added an additional fifteen fare inspectors and twenty-one transit enforcement officers.54 This shift corresponded with implementation of all-door boarding on streetcars, with fares enforced through random checks rather than paying at the front of the car—but 18.5 percent of tickets given out by the TTC between 2008 and 2018 were to Black riders, despite Black people only making up 8.9 percent of the city’s population.55 The TTC’s upswing in enforcement followed Metrolinx’s addition of twelve fare inspectors to GO Transit lines only weeks earlier. In 2016, Toronto mayor John Tory said during a call-in show that he had suggested to the TTC the idea of publishing fare evaders’ pictures in local newspapers, later claiming that he was joking.56
“All of the surveillance technologies—as well as the implementation of transit police—very little of it is under the pretense of safety, the idea that they’re on there to ensure people are safe from violent assaults. It’s almost entirely around regulating public space with respect to people’s ability to pay and looking for fare evaders. The issues are connected in terms of free access as well as criminalization.”
—Harsha Walia, organizer with No One Is Illegal
In Washington, DC, 91 percent of citations and summons for transit fare evasion are of Black people, and children as young as seven have been stopped.57 A full 15 percent of citations and summons were issued at the Gallery Place station, a rapidly gentrifying part of the city.
In Brooklyn, 66 percent of people arrested for fare evasion are Black, and arrests are by far the most frequent at stations in high-poverty areas with a predominantly Black population.58 Failure to produce a $2.75 fare can lead to jail time of up to a year, high court costs, and a criminal record that can affect the ability to find work, housing, and education.
Such surveillance and criminalization of riders predictably results in actual violence against people of colour, especially Black and Indigenous people, by transit police. On January 1, 2009, Oscar Grant—a twenty-two-year-old Black man—was shot and killed by BART police officer Johannes Mehserle while pinned face-down on a station platform. In May 2019 it was revealed that the police officer involved repeatedly lied to investigators, had instigated the conflict, called Grant a racial slur, and hit him in the face.59
In July 2013, nineteen-year-old Sammy Yatim, whose family had migrated from Syria only a few years earlier, was shot nine times and killed on a TTC streetcar by Toronto police officer James Forcillo.60 In December 2014, twenty-three-year-old Gitxsan man Naverone Woods was shot and killed in a Surrey Safeway by a Metro Vancouver transit police officer.61 In August 2018, a thirty-three-year-old Black man was tackled and choked by two transit officers in Montreal after reportedly using his girlfriend’s transit pass to get through the turnstiles.62 That followed a similar incident in February 2018, when two TTC fare inspectors tackled and handcuffed a young Black man; he and his mother are suing for “unlawful detention, assault, battery, negligence, discrimination, and racial profiling.”63
Police violence and harassment can also have catastrophic effects on asylum seekers and undocumented migrants. Author and organizer Harsha Walia told me that Vancouver is unique in Canada for having a fully armed transit police force with the legal authority of law enforcement officers, including access to policing and immigration databases. In 2013, the transit police force reported 328 people to the Canada Border Services Agency, roughly 20 percent of whom were later deported from the country.64 In December 2013, Lucia Vega Jiménez—a forty-two-year-old Mexican migrant and hotel worker—was detained by a transit police officer at the Main Street SkyTrain station due to an expired fare.65 While in an airport holding cell at Vancouver International Airport staffed by private security guards, Jiménez hanged herself, and she died a few days later. Walia says the agreement between border services and the transit police was predicated on clear racial profiling; transit police only ask for immigration identification based on people’s skin colour and accent.
In May 2017, Minnesota transit cop Andy Lamers was filmed questioning a man about his immigration status during a $1.75 fare check; a day later, ICE detained the man, who was an undocumented migrant from Mexico, and deported him within a week.66 Lamers resigned from Metro Transit under public pressure but went on to work as a full-time police officer in New Hope. Months after the incident, Lamers received a $50,000 settlement from Metro Transit.67
In July 2019, Naomi Ramirez Rosales—a thirty-four-year-old undocumented trans woman—was arrested by police at a train station in Phoenix, Arizona, and later transferred to ICE custody. Rosales spent at least six months in detention, but migrant organizations said in late 2019 that she’s being held in an all-male detention centre under threat of deportation to Mexico.68 Stephanie Figgins of Trans Queer Pueblo said during a press conference: “Rosales’s case is not unique: As a migrant community, we actually have fear of riding the light rail.”69
Walia says about the practice of questioning transit riders: “It increasingly criminalizes people and makes it almost impossible for undocumented people to survive if they’re not able to actually be mobile within the city.”
These are horrific situations that exemplify the confluence of white supremacy, police violence, incarceration, and xenophobic anti-migrant policy. Many transit agencies have institutionalized policing and security regimes. But in publicly owned services, such racist and privacy-compromising incursions can be resisted and beaten back. This is the very point of the “right to the city,” anchored in anti-racist and working-class struggles.
Following the death of Jiménez in Vancouver in 2013, local migrant rights organizers launched a campaign called Transportation Not Deportation to demand that the memorandum of understanding between the transit police and the Canada Border Services Agency be cancelled.70 Some forty organizations and more than 1,500 people signed the petition to support the effort. In February 2015, the transit police announced that they were terminating the agreement, only days after meeting with members of Transportation Not Deportation.71 Walia emphasized to me that the cancellation of the agreement wasn’t enough. She advocates for the elimination of policing and surveillance that instills fear in communities of colour—as well as free fares, which would have prevented the arrest of Jiménez in the first place.
Crystal Jennings of Pittsburghers for Public Transit says their organization recently won a campaign to prevent the introduction of more armed officers onto buses. The proposal to issue citations and check riders who don’t have a fare for criminal warrants was feared to lead to residents getting detained by ICE.72 “We knew that was going to turn out pretty bad for a lot of our residents and immigrants here in the city,” Jennings told me.
In September 2018, after revelations that BART police had been sharing licence plate data with ICE, the transit agency’s board of directors approved a new policy that requires public notice and debate if any surveillance technology is considered in the future.73 An attorney from the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) said that “this surveillance ordinance holds BART accountable to the community it serves and gives riders a seat at the table.” The government relations co-ordinator of the Council on American-Islamic Relations said, “The passage of this ordinance will empower community members to have a say in the spaces they occupy—which will increase public safety in and of itself.”74
Eight months later, San Francisco voted to ban the use of facial recognition technology by police and other government agencies, in a partial rebuke to the idea by BART’s board to introduce it on the transit system. In July 2019, Oakland followed suit by banning facial recognition; Somerville, Massachusetts, banned it a month before.75
Transit agencies across Canada rely heavily on video surveillance technologies for investigating sexual harassment or assault. However, there are strict guidelines about how long that data can be stored. The TTC, for example, requires destruction of camera footage after seventy-two hours, while in Vancouver it can be reviewed for up to a week.76 On the data-sharing front, Metrolinx in Toronto disclosed information in response to 37 percent of requests from law enforcement in 2018, down from 47 percent in 2017. The agency now publishes an annual report of such requests, which privacy expert Brenda McPhail told the Toronto Star is a positive step—although such reporting fails to state how many fulfilled requests lead to charges being laid. McPhail said having such information would “help determine whether law enforcement requests for Presto data are generally reasonable.” 77
These are far from ideal situations, and much more work needs to be done to corral the ability of transit agencies to collect and share personal data. But the rules around these issues are far clearer and more transparent than for their private counterparts—who have neither a responsibility nor the desire to disclose data collection and usage. In a similarly positive vein, cities across the country are considering the decriminalization of fare evasion, including in New York City, Portland, and Washington, DC. The latter voted in late 2018 to issue a $50 fine, instead of a $300 fine and potential jailtime.78 In Oregon, transit riders pressured the local agency to allow people caught without a fare to perform community service, appeal the citation, or apply for a reduced-fare program. It would be considerably easier, of course, to simply abolish fares altogether.
In response to increased policing in New York City’s subway and a string of viral videos in late 2019 documenting NYPD violence against transit riders (including police pointing loaded guns at a crowded subway and arresting a churro vendor for selling food in a station), several organizations including Swipe It Forward and Decolonize This Place organized mass protests and coordinated turnstile jumping to fight back. 79 Unfare NYC, an organization that provides alerts about fare enforcement on subways and buses, told Patch: “Rider solidarity means we look out for each other and keep each other safe. Our vision is a ride without fares and a world with no police.”80
Fake ads made to look like official MTA marketing encouraged riders with unlimited monthly cards to swipe people into the subway system: “Maybe they don’t have $2.75,” one of the guerilla ads read. “Maybe they were laid off. Maybe there’s an emergency and no time to refill. Maybe the ticket machines are broken. Don’t snitch. Swipe.”81
Nassim Moshiree of the ACLU of the District of Columbia told the Washington Post: “Activism like the Movement for Black Lives has had a positive impact on raising awareness that policing—and the explicit and implicit bias in policing—means that certain communities are impacted in unfair ways. Even when it comes to something like fare evasion.”82
Concerns about public safety should be addressed by providing public housing, harm reduction, community services, and resources for mental health and substance use, not by reinforcing reactionary policies that do nothing to address root causes of criminalized behaviours. The racist and anti-poor policing of “disorder” must also be abandoned. Such efforts can unite struggles by transit and anti-police organizations that can collectively campaign for free transit and less policing. This is a politics of “excarceration,” or funding services that help keep people out of contact with police and imprisonment.83
The response to the massive threat of surveillance and data collection by connected, ride-hailing, and autonomous vehicles isn’t to pretend that public transit is doing a much better job on this front. Serious issues of policing and security endanger the lives of many low-income people, especially Black and Indigenous people. The promise with public transit, however, is that communities can effectively exert power over the institutions that govern them. The growing demand for free transit, motivating campaigns around the world, is the best example of this: abolishing fares and decommodifying transportation, although it’s only one part of a broader struggle, is a powerful tool to limit the ability for police to stop and detain riders.
“Three revolutions” companies have lengthy histories of profound disregard for privacy standards and have faced only minor punishments for infractions like God View. Autonomous vehicles are by design intended to collect as much information as possible about their users, which will inevitably end up in the hands of police. While there are surely ways to limit the worst manifestations of that behaviour, the immense profit motive guiding some of the biggest companies in the world to perfect this technology should not be underestimated. Increased privatization of public transportation is making these fights increasingly difficult. Public transit agencies and the bodies that inform their policies are by far the best places for us to spend our time and resources protecting ourselves from increased surveillance.
The entrance of more ride-hailing and autonomous vehicles onto streets almost guarantees that any remaining semblance of privacy—beyond that which has already been compromised by our smartphones—will be commodified. The solution, once again, is a massive buildout of public transportation that keeps the control of transportation in the hands of the public.