> The police can access cellphone records but the process is cumbersome and privacy laws require a subpoena.
So in short, the phone company keeps records as does the phone and an increasing number of cars. However the author apparently feels that the police shouldn't even have to ask.
Frankly that is an insane take. With the amount of information being (secretly) kept about us by our own devices we risk putting the entire population under constant surveillance if we don't improve protections against law enforcement hacking devices.
It's an alignment of incentives. Interests who are against privacy align themselves with causes they would benefit from less privacy. See "think of the children"
Do you genuinely think that if you kill someone because you were driving on your phone, that information should be hard to access to an investigator?
Like, I understand that privacy is important. I agree that it is. But if you choose to drive a deadly machine, then you agree to give up a degree of that privacy.
All cars have license plates, identifying who it belongs to. Car drivers are subject to document checks by road security personnel. Car drivers are subject to alcohol tests if they're suspected of being drunk.
What makes phone usage more sacred than any of those things?
I'm not saying all your phone data becomes public if you're in a crash, the same way that an alcohol test doesn't tell the cops where, what, and with who you were drinking with.
How is society in any way worse, if phones recorded usage in the past 24 hours, and drivers had to provide that data if implicated in a crash?
If there's a tool that an officer can use that retrieves this information, I'd have a problem with that. If the phone is demanded as evidence with proper warrant/subpoena, then sure. However, in the cases of a car wreck, I think confiscating the phone as evidence does seem warranted. And admitting that has me in a weird state. With such little consequences for blatantly being distracted, it will not stop. But looking at history, draconian punishment is not a deterrent in other aspects. Addicts are going to do whatever for their fix. Admitting phone addiction exists is probably something too though.
Personally, I don't think calling for expanding the surveillance state helps this cause vs advocating for proper pedestrian infrastructure and road design. We've made it really easy to speed and give no heed to pedestrians and other forms of infrastructure.
I don't know what world you live in that a license plate on your car is ok in terms of privacy, but a phone that reports whether you were using it while driving is a surveillance state.
You seem to be insisting that such a feature can be mandated without collateral damage for a lot of phone users, including people who never use a phone while driving or even don't drive at all.
You say that as if people will no longer drive when they don't have a license. I can unequivocally say that this absolutely happens, and I'm not asking for a friend. Thinking someone not willing to commit one crime while being able to commit another seems like very strange logic to me.
so you're okay with someone being arrested for driving without a license, but not okay with their phone being seized as evidence after causing an accident. you don't think being arrested for driving without some little ID card is a bit draconian?
What constitutes usage? Is this a mandatory feature of phones, mandatory MITM root CAs, clipper chip style key escrow for device encryption? What's to stop the police from bumping into a suspect in a parking lot to do parallel construction?
> How is society in any way worse, if phones recorded usage in the past 24 hours, and drivers had to provide that data if implicated in a crash?
The requirement to record anything in a way useful for law enforcement would be pretty close to a ban of phones that can run a custom OS, which is in turn pretty close to a ban of phones that not spy on the user all the time, whether or not the user drives at all.
P.S. And I write it as a happy iPhone user. I want to hope I have options if I later decide that I value privacy or customizability over features!
> Do you genuinely think that if you kill someone because you were driving on your phone, that information should be hard to access to an investigator
Yes, if it's alleged you killed someone. There's a whole legal system and body of precedent about that stuff going back centuries or millennia. It's not even controversial.
This is discussed in the article, and you’re making a much more provocative claim which the author does not advance. They specifically mention civil liberties as a concern and the one proposal specifically mentioned would involve cameras identifying drivers visibly using their phones, which requires no hacking whatsoever. The obvious measure would be standardizing the process of police asking drivers about phone use in every crash, which again has no civil liberties concerns.
It also seems like Apple and Google should have a roll as trusted third parties. The phone could save a short activity log (basically the same things screen time apps record: was the device unlocked, active, last touch event, etc.) any time car play is active or the accelerometer records hard deceleration with a secure way to share that with the police so you can be confident all you’re giving them is evidence that you weren’t looking at Tik Tok 20s before the collision.
2. ...and should they? If a crash happens, and someone was on their phone, it would be pretty obvious that they were at fault. I just have a really hard time thinking that more device-related tracking would be better for society.
Also, the mention of cameras at the end of the article is another concern for me. I really don't think this country is better off with more internet connected cameras that are actively being used to surveil the populous. There have to be better ways to win the hearts and minds of people and convince them to not use their phones. Turning into a surveillance state doesn't seem to be the best way to do that IMO.
>If a crash happens, and someone was on their phone, it would be pretty obvious that they were at fault.
Accidents are so circumstantial that it's not always going to be "pretty obvious" someone involved was on their phone. Nor does being on your phone when involved in an accident necessarily mean that you caused it.
Accidents can also be caused by someone who didn't crash. If you have to take evasive action because of someone else you might crash. (in some cases you crashing is the best result for you)
I know someone who was rear-ended by someone who was reportedly on his phone. The person I know also admitted to me that they were on their phone but that didn't make it into the police report.
So, not only were they on their phone and reportedly didn't cause the collision, nobody even asked if they were on their phone and therefore nobody found out, presumably because they didn't cause the collision.
My step daughter was in a collision in the middle of an intersection. No cameras, no witnesses, no other vehicles than the two.
Police come along, ask her a bare minimum of questions. "Did you have a green light?" "Yes, I did." "Okay."
Walk over to the other driver, and talk to him, come back less than three minutes later. "The other driver said he definitely had a green light. I am issuing you a citation for failure to obey a traffic control signal."
That fell apart very quickly when we appealed it to court. "Definitely" in a statement adds nothing to the reasonable doubt equation.
The article discusses this: it’s often not obvious and largely on the honor system, just as police are often extremely deferential to drivers who claim a pedestrian “jumped in front” of their car. That means that we’re almost certainly significantly undercounting the number of times it’s a factor.
A good analogy would be DUI: Americans really loved their booze and there were many people who felt it was a core freedom to be able to drive after drinking, but eventually the death toll mounted high enough that our social norms changed to include things like designated drivers and doing roadside tests rather than trusting drivers’ claims. Phones will probably follow a similar arc because they are involved in many serious accidents and most people agree that driving safely is not an unreasonable request or a civil liberties violation.
The process being somewhat inconvenient ("cumbersome" is overstating it) is intentional. It's one of the few protections we have from abuse by law enforcement in the US. I'm glad we have at least that.
I'm talking about legalities, not technical capability. That said, given how much phone usage is collected about people by various (mostly ad) companies, I'm guessing that's where you could find some decent usage data.
I'm not a phone dev, but is there a second by second logging of what app was in the foreground? I assume it does, but just unfamiliar with how long it's retained blah blah. Is it also granular enough to show if it was actively being used and not just in the foreground? Or do they just look at the timestamp of last messages sent in various apps to see if they were texting? Doom scrolling while driving with no commenting is sadly something I've seen a driver doing while being a passenger.
The cases I've seen, I believe they looked at texts sent... so in that case, pretty sure the info is kept forever. But phones are data treasures so who knows what they do now.
That seems short sighted as you don't have to respond to a text to be distracted by it. If a text shows as read would be evidence that the driver was looking at it even if no response was sent.
Att had a whole ad campaign of peoples last texts before a crash. Seems cell providers have some interest in making a safer product in contrast to cellphone manufacturers who clearly don’t give a damn about the issue given the lack of any ui/ux change to combat this over a decade plus of smartphones.
Anecdotally, I have personally witnessed an incomprehensible rise in the amount of motor vehicle crashes in the past 15 years and the single greatest contributing factor seems to be smartphone distraction.
Just last fall I responded to a late-night crash where a drunk driver lost control and pinballed across the highway hitting both barriers and coming to a rest on the shoulder when a second vehicle whose driver was looking at their phone failed to notice the gigantic fire engine with flashing lights blocking the right lane of the three-lane road and braked just late enough to crash into our engine.
We found the phone, still playing a video, in the driver's side footwell.
Before cell phones existed, I commonly saw equally mind-blowing things including people putting on makeup, eating bowls of soup, and such while driving.
I'm not sure that things have really changed all that much, big picture.
You mostly beat me to comment the same — you could even doomscroll a newspaper 20 years ago just the same, it just wasn't convenient and common to doomscroll while driving — but…
> Bowls of soup also don't send you unprompted notifications.
Oh, if you carry a full bowl of soup in a moving car, I bet it does! If the soup is hot, the notifications can be even harder to ignore than a ringing phone.
This misses the reason that distracted driving happens though, which is because people are bored. They know ahead of time they’re going to be bored, so they plan other things to escape their boredom. Phones give you more options but many people would just find another equivalently dangerous way to fill the time.
I recall a taxi ride in the Chicago area where the driver had a portable black-and-white TV in the car.
I think you either care about driving safely or you don't. The phones are just the latest distraction.
But the phone can easily tell when it's in a moving car. It could be programmed to not be useable during those times, or maybe allow passively displaying a navigation map but no interactive use.
I don’t want to defend that too much but usually I see those people looking at the road a lot more than the phone users. It’s still a risk they shouldn’t take but at least they have a chance to step on the brakes.
I can kind of understand being temporarily distracted when a message comes in and your phone chirps, but wow... watching a video while you operate a 3000 pound machine is next-level idiocy.
I haven't been driving as much in recent years wasn't aware of this trend. (Except for Tesla drivers: 5 years ago, I remember looking over to see a Tesla on autopilot next to me, doing 60 on Seattle's 520 bridge with the driver totally checked out and watching a video.)
I think the root of it is.. the driving part is irrelevant. So many people have lost the ability to NOT be staring at a screen at any given time. If they are not maximally stimulated... phone is out. Driving just so HAPPENS to be a boring activity for many.
It seems bizarre that I can't choose to use the CarPlay user experience on my phone while I'm driving in my DumbCar. This seems like such obvious, low-hanging fruit.
It's still illegal to use your phone while driving in most countries. So by allowing you to use CarPlay on your phone while not connected to a car's media system, that could be interpreted as enticing phone usage while driving and thus open them up to potential lawsuits. The irony is that so many people disregard the law anyways that it would actually end up making roads safer. But Apple wont risk offending lawmakers for that.
> that could be interpreted as enticing phone usage while driving
This can't be true. Zooming the screen from the accessibility settings probably gets you half way there already. Every navigation app is enticing you to use it while driving. Touchscreens are enticing/forcing users to take the eyes off the road. The mere existence of the phone is enticing a driver to use it.
CarPlay "mode" would just be a slightly different GUI for what you can already do with the phone whether legally (by the passenger, or while stationary) or illegally (while driving). Every app in the phone is also accessible from the home screen.
At most Apple would have to issue a warning every time to use it correctly, like many cars already do.
>Zooming the screen from the accessibility settings probably gets you half way there already
It gets you there all the way. If some cop wants to screw you over, that's more than he needs. Taking your eyes of the road to look at some small smartphone is not just illegal, it's dangerous. People die because of it every day. Most cops just don't give a fuck because almost everyone does it. Doesn't make it legal though. That's also why all navigation apps tell you not to use them while driving. But while these apps have other legit uses, CarPlay literally only exists to be used while driving. So it makes no sense to offer it without integration into a car's systems that allow you (in theory) to use it without looking down. If someone screws this up it's the car maker's fault.
> If some cop wants to screw you over, that's more than he needs.
You are not making more sense than the first time and I already mentioned some reasons why.
"Phone icons too big" is not a thing a cop can "screw you over". Google had this feature for years. Whether this is "enticing" users to operate the phone while driving has to be legislated or judged before it can be policed. And Apple can get around it the same way everyone else: with a legal disclaimer.
In general it's absolutely legal to have a phone operating in the car as long as the driver isn't actively interacting with it while driving, and it isn't displaying videos to the driver. The size or shape of the icons is irrelevant. Anything that can be legally displayed on a car's display is also legal on a phone screen. Tl;dr: don't play with either or watch videos while driving.
It doesn't take much thought to realize that if cars come plastered with giant screens and apps like Netflix, then a 5" screen with slightly larger icons is a non-issue.
You are intentionally missing the point, despite all the obvious evidence against your argument. You can deny or rationalise it like most people do, but using mobile phones while driving is bad and the lawmakers have every right to male it illegal. Companies like apple are not getting dragged into that. Neither is google btw if you look at their version.
Most places that have distracted driving laws ban use of hand-held devices. Some places bam all use based on age. I am not familiar with many places that ban all use for everyone.
Given that other large companies offer equivalent functionality, I really doubt that fear of lawsuits has determined when CarPlay is available.
If you read that article, or even the subtitle, you’ll see that it’s talking about Android Auto, which is importantly different from the Google Assistant Driving Mode I mentioned.
Amusingly apropos the main complaint that people seem to have with Driving Mode is that it isn’t designed to be screen-based, which would be quite dangerous, but rather voice-based which is comparatively safer.
Thank you, I didn't know they were different. Further Googling shows Google killed Google Assistant Driving Mode Dashboard on November 21, 2022, and is also killing Google Maps' Driving Mode in February. https://9to5google.com/2023/12/27/google-maps-driving-mode-g...
That’s correct, now that the full Driving Mode is ready and being rolled out they’re killing all the dangerous stopgap measures they previously created.
Edit: I think their strategy here confused people because most people seem to think that the goal is a zoomed touchscreen, whereas the actual goal was voice only with a nav screen if you’re navigating.
Apologies for yet another follow-up, but I'm trying to understand: If Google Maps' Driving Mode goes away in February as the article above suggests, and Driving Mode Dashboard went away in November, what's left?
Google Assistant Driving Mode will be left. Driving Mode Dashboard was a terribly named stopgap with large buttons. It’s almost entirely unrelated to Driving Mode.
Totally agree with the point that, as usual, the branding is awful. They need to have these names reviewed by people who don’t live and breathe the product, the small nuances here are lost on GenPop.
That’s working correctly. Stop looking at your phone while driving.
Buttons on a screen are a bad idea and should be highly discouraged for drivers. Big buttons almost make that worse because of licensing, i.e. people see a thing labeled car mode and assume that means it’s safe to use in a car.
Voice interfaces are generally safer, partly because of eye line but also because they significantly constrain the space of things your phone can do and thus use less attention.
My phone is in a mount in my field of view - it requires less looking away than the built in touch screens new cars have in the center console. Car mode is safer:
* It reads out texts to me, and asks me if I want to reply by voice.
* car mode UIs means it takes less attention to skip songs or whatever.
* It turns off some distracting notifications etc.
They let you have these features when navigating, why not when you don't need navigation?
That’s simply not the case. Read some studies, all of your assumptions here are incorrect.
Eyeline is slightly correlated with safety when compared with a device you need to locate, however with a constant position device the effect disappears. The actual problem is cognitive load.
Having your phone visible increases cognitive load even if you don’t use it. Composing text message by voice is equivalently distracting to typing one. Yes really, this has been rigorously studied. Texting by voice is only better than holding a phone and talking on it if you’re careful about using it in safer situations. And even then, the gains are pretty small.
Using a touchscreen with large buttons has higher cognitive load than an equivalent voice interface, even accounting for misunderstandings. The key intuition here is that you have to decrease amount you think about or interact with your device. Stop looking at your phone, it’ll be there when you get there.
I'm sure you're right that using a phone (in any way) is more dangerous than not using it at all. If I am optimizing 100% for safety I should turn it off, sure. But some messages are important. I don't want to complete a hour long drive, just to find out that the message I ignored means I needed to return to my start point. Pulling off the highway every buzz isn't a solution either.
Reducing cognitive load is why I want car mode to activate!
I tried one (maybe a terrible one? https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B09TP8RZRT/), but the connectivity was flaky and I couldn't find a good place to mount it in my Odyssey. (Ideas and product suggestions welcome! It's not bugging me enough to replace the head unit.)
Labor and parts for installation could easily bring the total cost of adding a CarPlay/Android Auto compatible head unit to $1,000. At least it did for me, and that was 3 years ago.
I bought one which cost under 200, ran full Android (a slightly older one, to be fair), and I was able to self-install with no real issues. Just unplug old stereo, and plug in all the same things into the new one. I have a 2013 Golf.
Mind you - it's a little janky after 5 years, but an awesome value for what it cost. I know what you're thinking: Yes it has Netflix and Retroarch. No, I don't ever use those.
Totally different. Android Auto is a passthru. Sort of like a docking station. Not having a separate OS/set of apps/data is the point. It's your device, not the horrible old thing in the car you grudgingly live with.
It's unique in that it's an addiction that enough people have that it's considered entirely normal. And that normalcy means it's not seen as a big problem to fix, it's just "how it is."
Until people decide that reality is better than the unreality of phones, this kind of willful ignorance will continue.
> Until people decide that reality is better than the unreality of phones, this kind of willful ignorance will continue.
The adoption rate of other entertainment tech like television and video games makes me think that the trend you identify might just be human nature to some extent (with the help of consumerism). I’m not sure people will in fact choose “reality” over entertainment in large enough numbers to reverse that trend.
Do people go into chemical withdrawal if they don’t have phones? Because they sure do if they are actually addicted to a substance like alcohol, cocaine, methamphetamine, or opioids.
Calling phones/games/tv/social media/etc addictions just tells me that you have an authoritarian paternalist ideology.
Although I have never done meth, I had an addition to a type of amphetamine in my teens. It was not a physical addition, in the sense that there were no physical withdraw symptoms, but I can tell you from experience that it was a very "real" addition in the sense that it a) ruined my life b) I felt like I had no control over it and c) I needed professional help to overcome it.
A big part of the cycle was that the "down" felt like an overwhelming depression while the "high" felt like pure happiness coupled with the ability to hyper-focus on anything, which really fed into my personality type. It was that cycle that created a psychological dependency that was very hard to break. Every use created an incentive to use again as soon as the high started to wear off. I've never experienced that with anything else ... not even other types of drugs.
Basically after staying awake for an entire week because I was high on a stimulant 24/7, when I "crashed" I slept for days and that's when my mother realized that I had a serious problem and got me professional help because she was worried I was in a coma or something.
I've never experienced anything similar with video games, gambling, television, social media etc. So I have no idea if it's the same for people who develop "addictions" to those things. All I know is that you don't need physical withdraw symptoms to experience a very real addiction that you can't break on your own.
What you think people don’t get addicted to things like gambling because there is no substance involved? You are standing against a tsunami wave of scientific evidence with this line you’ve arbitrarily drawn.
I’m saying addiction as a term referred to chemical dependency. Now it is being redefined to mean “people doing anything I don’t like and don’t think they should do”. Whatever you call it there is a tremendous difference in type between alcoholism or opioid dependency and social media use. Calling them the same word is grossly misleading if not outright lying.
That's a straw man for how people use the term "addiction" and I think you probably know it.
The word is used for deleterious behaviors that have become compulsive or the person has otherwise lost the ability to control.
"Deleterious" may depend on the person and their life circumstances. And inasmuch as "lost ability to control" relates to "willpower" -- or shall we say various executive functions -- it may be difficult for someone without those problems or limitations to understand. That doesn't mean it isn't real.
The modern world has become much more complex and the traps for our primate brains have increased. Our understanding of psychology also continues to deepen and better understand the problems.
This post sent me down a rabbit hole on entomology.
In short: words change meaning. Addition as a term includes a history of positive definition in the 17th century of "devoting oneself to another person, cause or pursuit", to being "associated with excessive alcohol use" in the early 1900s, to "linked almost exclusively to excessive patterns of substance use" in the 1980s, to the modern medical definition—not made until 2013!—of "the most severe degree of the addictive disorders, due to pervasive/excessive substance-use or behavioural compulsions/impulses".
Indeed, for most of the late 20th century, no one could agree what it referred to! "The word addiction was deliberately omitted from four consecutive editions of the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders [...] because it was considered a layman’s rather than a scientific term, pejorative, stigmatizing, and too difficult to define. There were simply ‘too many meanings’ (Alexander & Schweighofer 1988); the term lacked any ‘universally agreed upon definition’ (Buchman et al. 2011); the result of using it was ‘conceptual chaos’ (Shaffer 1986, 1997)."
So it hasn't been redefined to mean anything because it was never fully defined to begin with. Only in the last decade has it truly been formalized, and yes includes both chemical and behavioral dependency.
> I’m saying addiction as a term referred to chemical dependency.
Addiction does not exclusively refer to chemical dependency.
> Now it is being redefined to mean “people doing anything I don’t like and don’t think they should do”.
I don't know where you got that impression, if that were the case then I would expect there to be widespread disagreement about what is addictive.
Why is it not possible that both dependency and addictive substances are often harmful?
> Whatever you call it there is a tremendous difference in type between alcoholism or opioid dependency and social media use.
What does difference in type mean? Are we distinguishing between alcoholism and opioid dependency or between material conditions and it's presentation in social media?
> Calling them the same word is grossly misleading if not outright lying.
Alcoholism (or to be more precise, alcohol dependence) is a physiological condition. Gambling ‘addiction’ is a psychological condition. That is what I mean by difference in type. No amount of self control will stop Delirium Tremens but some amount of self control can absolutely stop you from gambling. But since a dominant political ideology wants to deny self control altogether it groups these two different situations together under the same word.
You can have a chemical dependency without ingesting chemicals too. In fact thats exactly the mechanism of addictions to things like gambling. You get a rush of neurotransmitter uptake pulling a slot lever the same way you do taking some drug.
What is the real value here? Man years in prisons equal a better society. Is anyone willing to reconsider how insane driving is in general for the average person?
It's one of the few areas where society basically demands we take on massive liabilities in order to live our basic lives. Then we also like to pretend it's a "privilege", and not necessary. My employer almost called the cops on me, because I didn't drive in one day and used uber.
Starting to get some real second thoughts about this culture. It seems we have taken an insane shift in perspective. In 1970 all car crashes were accidents, but in the 2020s, none are; and someone has to be obliterated.
Tackling "drunk drunk" driving eg. 10 beers, 0.10+ bac, etc. is one thing. All these calls to lock up more people for longer seem to be taking us down a crazy road... and they continue to use the same rules for other substances, even though the chemical testing doesn't work, and the number of cases are low (ie. not a lot of crashes happening).
That's a hell of an assumption from my car wouldn't start. Or my wife's car wouldn't start so I let her take mine. Or any number of reasons before jumping to that conclusion. Why even jump to a conclusion, and just let the person tell them why, to even WTF does it matter?
That's not to mention the reasons that could relate to not wanting to tell you. For instance, they could be complying with those great license bans everyone things are so swell. Or they could suffer from medical problems that would also make them responsible if they hurt someone.
Do you want to make everyone that has a severely limiting disability have to constantly explain themselves? Or maybe their fucking car is in the shop.
No it was nothing like that. It was basically their fault and they just verified my identity. It's literally just such an inexplicable activity that they have to investigate, and there's this weird pedestrian bias too IMO. (they thought I was a random weirdo in the building or stealing stuff)
It's honestly not something that's the most meaningful, but among other things it's made me distinctly aware how weird the culture is if you want to make driving not necessary to be a first class citizen. So while it doesn't prove my point, even prior I felt like "people are just gonna start calling the cops on me for not driving", and it basically was like that.
See how I'm now still kinda having to explain myself? I can't help but think this is a little proving my point. Now the notion of not-driving is such an inexplicable concept that it must be explained?
No it was because literally a person there with no car was strange. Is he some random wack-job snuck in the building? It wasn't really main work hours.
It's not like proof of my point, but in the times I've not-driven, I've noticed it draws strange, weird attention. This was just the most outlandish.
It was just an honest misunderstanding. She should have been able to catch me on video and card swipe.
Btw, I know this isn't the slam dunk proof of my point. Just imagine you were thinking this stuff was weird, then someone finally threatens to call the freaking cops on you! (not really, she was nice we just cleared it up).
Why would someone be using their phone while driving? Is this something I'm too European to understand? Literally never occured to me to do that, and I haven't ever been in a car where someone did it.
Obvious exceptions being to look at a message while stopped at a traffic light or other safe location, or having the navigation app open with the phone fixed to the dashboard and otherwise not interacting with it.
"The EU mean percentages of car drivers self-reporting different mobile phone uses at least once while driving in the past 30 days are: 47.7% talked on a hands-free mobile phone, 28.6% talked on hand-held mobile phone, and 24.2% texted."
At least around me in CA I see folks every day looking at their phones while driving. I believe license requirements and overall driving safety is much higher in Europe vs the US. I have friends from Europe who are shocked at how easy it is to get a license in the US.
> Is this something I'm too European to understand?
My guess is: yes. I'm almost too "I look at the car, not the driver" to understand but I have actually seen this as a passenger in America. I drive myself places.
That's one thing that horns are for. Granted I hate using it, and other people hate it too, but I've gotten pretty good at a friendly beep-beep instead of a lean on honk.
I call something similar a "Facebook" stop. The light changes to green, the car sits there for awhile, the driver looks up and realizes the light is green, then accelerates faster than normal to recover.
I wasn't really thinking of a long browsing session, more like you got a ping so on the next stop pull out the phone for a couple seconds to see what it was and if it is really urgent so you can find a place to park.
A coworker was in an accident because some teenager cut 3 lanes of traffic from the left lane to the exit because he almost missed a Poke stop. It was his passenger playing, so the driver can still make horrible decisions based on a phone even if not the one personally operating the phone.
I realize this anecdotal story is not a 1:1 example. It's definitely more general into distracted driving in general, and just how teenage decision making isn't very mature at all.
I think this is a useful anecdote because it really underscores that the problem is distractions. There’s a fascinating body of research looking into how well humans perform repetitive tasks that generally require little thought but sometimes unexpectedly require quick reactions. The short synopsis is we’re ok in a carefully designed environment but dog water if left to our own devices.
Might be. Here in the US, as a cyclist who has to look at drivers to ensure that they see me, something like 1 in 10 are using a phone with one hand, texting or swiping Facebook/TikTok with their thumb while driving with the other hand. An even larger fraction pick the phone up at any stoplight to check messages or scroll, and occasionally need to be honked at to realize the light has turned green.
It's not quite a lethal problem when their peripheral can notice a car in front of them (which is probably moving with traffic), but it could be lethal for me. Car drivers are used to looking for cars, they're not looking for me on a bike - even with a florescent yellow backpack, flame orange helmet, and obscenely bright red blinky rear light.
I've given up hope on people not talking on their phone or occasionally dialing a call with their fingers or updating navigation apps or starting a voice-to-text or using their phones at stoplights. But could we at least get a few of the most-used OSes and non-driving apps to not work when they're being used by a driver? If there are no other phone Bluetooth beacons continuously in range (you're known to be not a passenger), there is a car stereo Bluetooth beacon, and GPS says you're in motion on a road at road speeds, don't play video. Don't allow new social notifications. Don't allow Tiktok or Facebook or Reddit to run. At least make an effort at it, stop the easiest 80%.
I'm convinced it's going to take a horrific accident going viral - someone plowing through a class of elementary students on a field trip while live-streaming or something like that - to cause change.
One difference is that manual transmissions are much more common in Europe (they are effectively gone in the US), so you're less likely to have an extra hand free to hold a phone with while you're driving.
I once drove 5 blocks behind someone with a tablet mounted to their windshield, big enough for me to discern they were attentively watching an MMA fight. After 5 blocks they turned the wrong way down a busy 1-way street.
There's not going to be a rational answer for 'why', it's just addiction.
The GPS app is doing something screwy and I’m getting lost so I look at the map to figure out where I need to go. Other than that I don’t use my phone in the car, if I get a call I can take it on my Apple Watch.
Obviously that means the solution is to treat talking to passengers in the car as an equivalent offense to drunk driving, according to the other commenters in this thread.
Why not display a Recent Phone Use option when both side buttons of an Apple device is pressed?
* slide to power off
* Medical ID
* SOS Emergency Call
* Recent Phone Use
Report would be high-level -- has phone been unlocked in last 30 minutes, if so, timestamps showing when it was unlocked, for how long, how many finger taps occurred, etc.
That would give law enforcement a quick indication of whether phone was in use. Of course if there are passengers it could be contested. For more detail, they'd have to subpoena as they do now.
I hate people who use their phones while driving as much as the next person, but I would not buy a phone that divulged my personal information in this way.
That is not divulging personal information in any case and the privilege of driving requires some compromises there. For example, having a medical condition actually is a private matter but the state has a compelling public safety interest to require you to disclose conditions which affect your ability to drive safely.
Then what safeguards does it have to ensure there is in fact a police officer and a traffic stop or an accident? None? Then it's a privacy nightmare that divulges your personal information to any stranger nearby.
The feature described does not give personal information. It would give information which is highly relevant during an official investigation in a privacy-preserving manner which does not open the possibility of giving other unintended information.
Now, it would be possible to use the same mechanism they use for digital drivers licenses to further restrict it but the nice thing about that idea is that not using sensitive information means there isn’t much concern of a leak.
The feature described divulges information such as "timestamps showing when it was unlocked, for how long, how many finger taps occurred, etc" which is absolutely personal information. And no, it is not privacy-preserving. It is an affront to all cryptographers to use the phrase "privacy-preserving" here given that it makes zero effort to preserve privacy.
Have you actually seen what amazing technologies are worthy of the name "privacy-preserving" these days? You can look up items in a database without the database operator knowing what you queried. You can let a server add two numbers without the server operator knowing what these two numbers are. These are worthy of the phrase "privacy-preserving" in this age.
If you're suggesting that the state should make driver's licenses contingent on owning a phone with a feature like this, I guess I'll just have to give up my car or my phone, then.
I’m saying that it’s reasonable for a police officer investigating a collision to ask the driver about a very common cause of collisions, just as we allow them to check for alcohol and require you to take a test if you appear to be impaired.
The feature described would be a nice way to support those questions in a manner which does not reveal private information, require you to unlock the phone, or otherwise risk giving them access beyond what’s needed to answer the questions during an official investigation. You could of course choose not to use it but why you’d want to give them additional access to your device is beyond me.
Sure, lots of people disagree with things but the law is what matters, not vibes. There’s a long-running precedent that investigating accidents makes it reasonable to ask what the operator of the vehicle was doing immediately before the crash.
I don’t see how that precedent applies. I can already easily answer their question without unlocking my device, and if they want evidence, they can get a warrant.
Even the breathalyzer requirement seems irrelevant, considering that it only requires you to submit to a breathalyzer performed by a police officer, rather than mandating that your BAC be available to anybody with physical access to your property.
> I can already easily answer their question without unlocking my device, and if they want evidence, they can get a warrant.
You can’t answer their question with anything but hearsay. This is why I brought up the DUI checks because we know some people are going to lie, and hard evidence can easily be acquired to sidestep that issue. The suggestion above would be similar in terms of having minimal privacy concern and because it’s cheap and easy it’d actually be done in non-egregious cases.
I reject your insistence that making an activity log, however opaque, visible to anybody with physical access to a device is a "minimal privacy concern." Repeating it as though it is settled fact does nothing to convince anybody. Perhaps if you'd ever had to deal with an abusive partner you'd see the obvious implications.
I also reject the comparison to DUI checks on the basis that those must be performed ASAP in order not to lose the evidence, thus necessitating urgency; the same doesn't apply to phones. As we've seen in, for example, the case of the Uber self-driving car operator who was using her phone when she killed a pedestrian, they were easily able to determine this after the fact, without such intrusive features.
That data is practically useless because I'm using Google Maps and Spotify connected to my AUX neither of which I think most people consider using your phone while driving.
In CA, the rules are now the same for cellphones and dedicated GPS units. The only exception is for "manufacturer-installed systems that are embedded in the vehicle". Taken literally, this means that if you have an aftermarket CarPlay-compatible head unit, it's illegal to touch it at all, other than to turn it on or off. [1]
It appears that new drivers are also forbidden from even looking at dash-mounted devices while driving. I get that they might be more easily distracted, and unable to give voice prompts while driving, but they presumably also need more help navigating, with advance lane change warnings, etc. Basically, these laws have not been especially well-calibrated, which is not surprising given that this is true for pretty much all laws regarding new technologies.
Using your phone is demonstrably less safe than not. What I find most interesting is how skewed human psychology can be to risk.
People have phobias about all sorts of things eg flying. Flying on a commercial airplane is demonstrably safer than driving. So why isn't there a more prevalent fear of driving? Some will point to the illusion of control. I can buy that to some degree.
Phone use by driving should make people more fearful of driving. Even if you personally don't use your phone while driving, other people do. And that increases your own risk. Yet that doesn't seem to be the case.
What makes this worse is that everything from marketing to public relations to politics is built around stoking irrational fears that aren't based in fact. A classic example is child abduction even though in reality in the United States ~8 children are actually abducted every year. Figures like "800,000 per year" are heavily inflated with custody disputes.
> Flying on a commercial airplane is demonstrably safer than driving
Can you give me some stats on this? I was under the impression that it's maybe a little bit safer in terms of distance traveled.
But the people who think their driving is 50% safer than the average person's don't care about this. And this is probably near 100% of people who drive.
People have no sense of actual risk and how it affects them. They fixate on emotional rather than rational assessments that perverts their understanding of risk and above all believe they are personally invincible.
It's one of my pet peeves. I see people with their phones in front of their faces on pretty much every road trip I make. And that's in spite of a 140 euro fine here where I live.
I ride a motorcycle ~daily. I'm acutely aware of drivers on their phones. Probably one in six drivers that I see are holding their phone, looking at their phone, or otherwise distracted by their phone. Besides being aware of what folks are doing around me, I routinely use my shoulder checks to peek at whether the drivers adjacent to me are distracted so I can be more prepared if they do something stupid.
The fix for this is easy: pull people over. When I was a teenager, cops met their quotas by watching for people with a phone (back then folks were talking, not typing). This is a big part of what drove people to get bluetooth earpieces: you wouldn't get pulled over for having one and talking on the phone (and cars didn't have microphones yet, so there wasn't another option).
People will be pissed that they're getting pulled over for using their phone while driving. But if there's no expectation of punishment for breaking the law, people will continue breaking the law. And texting and driving is breaking the law. And if I can spot half a dozen people texting and driving on my way to the gym, cops can definitely spot folks texting. Hell, if I could apply for the special cop job of "pull people over for texting" and nothing else, I'd do it purely out of resentment for distracted driving.
They pull people over in Norway and give them hefty fines (~1000 USD). We don’t have any statistics for number of car accidents where the driver was “probably” using their phone, so it’s hard to say if it works. So same issue was the article brings up.
I feel that the media is partially to blame too. They like to victimise drivers who are caught using their phones, or driving over the speed limit for that matter. Or maybe it’s just my point of view.
I can guess with a very high probability that a driver in front of me is on their phone just by the way they move in their lane. I hate driving behind distracted drivers -- they tend to do things suddenly (stop, steer, or crash).
Don't forget about the back though: I had a driver slam into me while stopped at a light. She wrecked 4 cars including her own and sent me to the hospital with a $25K ER bill. Took 2 years to resolve that.
I get so sick of hearing people say "It's okay: my car lets me talk hands free!" It isn't just the hands that are a problem ... it's your brain being disengaged that's the problem. No hands-free phone fixes that.
The bottom line is, no one should be using their phone and driving. If you have to use the phone, pull over.
Because Americans have a right to face their accuser, making it easier to just send the cop that caught them. That's the short version. There's been plenty of "scamera" activism and cases won if you want more info. Try 4409
Camera traffic law enforcement in the US has historically been abused to generate revenue rather than used to increase safety. There was, for example, a wave of states and municipalities that banned red light cameras about a decade ago because cities were illegally shortening the yellow light timing to catch more red light runners.
Some places in the US use third-parties to enforce traffic laws. I was once in a park and I got a ticket for not coming to a complete stop at a stop sign by a third-party company employed by the park.
I looked into the legality of receiving a ticket from someone who is not a cop and I was under no legal obligation to pay it. However, they can ruin your credit if you refuse to pay, so I just went ahead and paid it. I did not seek legal advice and maybe I should have, but the fee was less than a lawyer would have cost.
People say this all the time, but I've yet to see this demonstrated. I am extremely skeptical of it, since it seems to comport with people wanting it to be true.
I think the biggest issue here is simply that the United States has created a transportation system that is inherently unsafe and ungovernable. By universalizing the automobile as the only de facto mode of transportation, we have made revoking a bad driver's license a hardship.
The only way to fix the problem is fixing the infrastructure which is extremely expensive, and politically would be wildly unpopular. We are currently doing the exact opposite -- increasing vehicle size and weight in a myopic arms race -- which means we will likely live with the scourge of traffic deaths (100+ dead per day) for the rest of our lives...
I do not want more automated law enforcement by surveillance. On balance, I think that would be a fix worse than the problem, even if the problem is this bad. These things creep.
Phone use should be treated just like DUI. You don't need a chemical intoxication for your attention and reaction time to be impaired. In CA, this means first offense: 1 year suspension of license, second offense: 2 years, third offense: 3 years. Honestly, I don't understand why people shouldn't lose their license permanently for such repeat offenses but I'm not a lawmaker.
I can tell you that the Tavern League in the state of Wisconsin plays a huge role in why DUI's are enforced like shit here: they want people in bars, drinking. Not necessarily driving but they're fine with it if it means their member establishments make more money.
Rather than draconian punishments that ruin people’s lives for something that millions of people evidently have little executive control over, we could just have a technological solution: have Android and iOS disable the screen on any phone moving faster than 5mph.
This would inconvenience passengers of all sorts but it would immediately eliminate all phone related accidents without getting people with bad impulse control license suspensions. Most people with license suspensions continue driving anyway.
It’s hard for me to see any other solution that really changes anything. Millions of people have a phone addiction and punishing them for using their phone while driving may be just but it won’t be effective. To me this is more than worth the very minor inconvenience of not being able to use my phone while riding in a bus, car, or train.
The increased likelihood of negative consequences, like police action, is a deterrent.
The comparison with drug use can only go so far. And even in that domain, despite what harm reduction purists will tell you, supply reduction DOES work to an extent, in that it dissuades casual users. Looking back at phone use, a casual distracted driver really only differs from an addict in how often they’re doing it. If you hear about your friend being raked over the coals by the cops because of distracted driving, I honestly do believe that you’d be less likely do to it yourself.
Where I live, cops routinely drive through lakes of traffic on motorbikes and will tap on your window and signal for you to take the next exit if they see you on your phone. It works.
Even with all the imperfections present, it’s still worlds better than less-than-half-baked ideas like disabling phones travelling beyond a certain speed. Christ. Guess I’ll just never catch a train again.
What you purpose reduces the problem by some relatively low percent. We already know lots of people do not change behavior when faced when this exact deterrent. It’s also very expensive.
What I propose reduces the problem by 100%.l and is very easy and cheap to implement.
Is it really that burdensome to not use your phone on the train? I don’t now and it wasn’t that long ago nobody had phones.
You might want to think a little harder there. Phone conversations themself are a distraction and, per your own arguments in this subthread, would not be eliminated under this proposal.
I hope it all came out well. I can understand the frustration. But many, many more people are killed by distracted drivers on their phones.
At least there’s things you can do to control or ameliorate situations like that. You can learn where the local hospitals are. You can use android auto or CarPlay. You can call 911. You can’t control the guy running a red because he’s on his phone and he’s much much more common. This is a minimally intrusive intervention on devices that already do all sorts of things to “interfere with normal operation” that would save thousands of lives for in the 99.99999% of other cases a minor inconvenience to everyone else. A return to the year 2005.
They're suffering a very minor inconvenience. They could read a book, pull out a tablet or a laptop, read the newspaper, do nothing, talk to their fellow commuters, etc.
So yes, thousands of lives in exchange for millions of people not being able to doomscroll Facebook and Tiktok during their train commute seems OK. Driving while distracted is already a crime in lots of places, there's variable enforcement, but it's not making a big dent. Something else needs to be done.
It's bizarre to me how strong the reactions against this are. You're talking about suffering: I'm talking about returning to what was the status quo not that many years ago. This is addict behavior.
I do not own a car, but I do take the train lots of places, and I enjoy being able to communicate with people while I commute.
For what it's worth, I agree that distracted driving is a huge problem, which is a big part of why I would like to see a drastic reduction in the rate of car ownership, the number of cars in our cities, and extremely harsh punishments for drivers who kill people. We also should make it much, much easier to live far away from cars, but close to other people, in developments like https://www.bloommerwede.nl/ for instance.
This reminds me of how MADD looked at drunk driving and decided the problem was all alcohol and not, in fact, car dependency.
1. Two software companies making a software change.
2. Convincing (or forcing) hundreds of millions of people to stop driving, reorganizing cities, eliminating rural and suburban living to the greatest extent possible.
I too enjoy using my phone while traveling. But if I couldn't, it'd be no skin off my back most of the time. And, I mentioned only disabling the screen, not the whole phone.
People commuting by train, bus, taxi, ridesharing...
Having phones disable themselves while moving fast is absolutely ridiculous, imaging if you're on a 4 hour bus ride and can't communicate with people you need to meet at your destination.
Not anyone can or is willing to carry a laptop or tablet with them everywhere, especially if you're taking a bus or are a passenger in a car
At my last job, subsidiary of a pretty large corporation, it was not only against company policy to use a phone while driving on-the-clock , it was forbidden to text or even call someone if you knew they were driving. Not very enforceable, but at least it established the intent.
I wonder if anyone has done any studies about lack of turn signal use being tied to phone in the hand that normally operates the turn signal.
The amount of added background commute stress caused by almost everyone on the road ignoring their turn signal these days is infuriating. It makes everything take longer, and every delay gets magnified multiple times by multiple people in a causal chain not doing it.
This increases stress, road rage, increases commute times, gridlock, everything connected with driving decision that involves meshing with the moves of the cars around you, which now defaults to the worst case defensive scenario- i.e. that everyone who, say, could swerve into your lane when you try to merge, is likely to do so, so you wait multiple times longer to get on to a highway or turn onto a two or three lane thoroughfare, than you would have to if people would just perform what has to be the simplest yet most beneficial gesture of productive cooperation. Even navigating a 7-Eleven parking lot turns into a needlessly guessing game.
And yet if you try to raise the subject among casual friends, even in a joking manner, they look at you like you're some kind of anachronistic Barney Fife character.
Phones are easy to blame here, but nobody wants to talk about speeding and dangerous driving, which seems to have become totally normalized. People treat speed limits as a minimum speed suggestion. There's also close to no enforcement of traffic laws from what I've seen, yet lots of people are outraged about too many bicycles (even though the number of people killed by bicycles is a tiny fraction of those killed by cars).
Do you also believe the laws of physics are just an opinion? If physics is an opinion, then I believe that F = ma, which means that more of m and a means more F, which means more injuries and death.
Speed limits aren’t the problem because people ignore them and drive by feeling. The correct solution is not more enforcement but rather better design to reduce the speed that feels right. Narrower lanes, chicanes, barriers between pedestrians and vehicles, roundabouts instead of stop signs, the usual playbook that people ignore because it’s expensive.
More enforcement is what we tried with drugs, how’d that go?
If you look into what those metric changes are related to, you’ll find that it’s almost entirely uncorrelated with stiffer incarceration and zero tolerance policies, which was my point.
I agree with you, for example, traffic calming devices (speed bumps, roundabouts, chicanes) are incredibly effective. However I think enforcement needs to be rethought, cars are essentially just computers now and they know what the speed limit is, so why don't they automatically limit the speed of cars?
If you want to race, that's fine, but don't do it on public roads. Go to a race track that's designed for that.
And also agree on drugs, we should just legalize everything IMO. Prohibition has never worked, anyone who wants to do drugs are going to do them, and we're better off helping than harming people by filling up the prisons.
The people doing that don’t care about the speed limit already. Set it whatever you’d like you aren’t making the road any safer or affecting these people’s speeds.
I refuse (I'm polite about it) to allow people on my zoom meetings who are calling in from their car unless they are parked. But I am frequently on zoom mtgs run by other people who don't seem to care.
Even when I just call someone on the phone (not that often these days) and find they're in the car I always ask, "Hey, should I just call you later?" and, perhaps surprisingly, people will usually say "yeah, we can talk XXX". This is common when they will get to their destination in not so long a time. I'm nore likely to get a "naah, I'll be on the road for a couple of hours so let's just talk now" than I am, "I'll be driving for another 10 minutes so let's just talk now"
Even when the link is handy, the stupid Zoom UI is horrible to use from a car.
I park myself in a meeting before driving and then use CarPlay mute/unmute as needed. It works ok. If I lose the call, it's impossible to get back in, as I need to use the phone.
> Several ideas ... without stepping on civil liberties. One idea... would involve using roadside cameras
Maybe the initial version of this camera that requires human intervention will barely abide by the already overreaching law, but face-reading cameras everywhere will soon be abused.
Despite talk about authoritarianism we rarely discuss its cultural roots.
Notice how the article puts the burden on authorities & companies to add more surveillance and penalties for people to improve their behavior.
Every ill in society can be fixed with enough surveillance, by this reasoning.
People often worry that we will become like the 20th century authoritarian states (e.g the 3rd Reich, GDR , USSR, etc) and I tell them that we've far surpassed their surveillance and control capacity.
It makes no sense to me that we don't have, in the US, cameras everywhere giving tickets like they do in Europe. I assume that it's just a matter of time before we get over our collective stupidity. But it's also possible that personal driving will become illegal (only robo-cars allowed) before that happens.
When we put cameras up usually groups try and take them down for the worst reasons, e.g. a “never mind fatalities went down, we are now burdening the low income community with tickets” sort of irrational emotionally driven argument.
Seeing how many hidden speed cameras there are in Australia to catch someone going slightly over on a plain straight road with steep fines, no thank you!
I very much like that US treats me as an adult when driving. I am fine with cops pulling me over.
I just legit hate the idea cameras always watching me waiting for me to make the tiniest mistake and chew up a significant chunk of my monthly income.
Speed and red light cameras are a big business raking in millions per camera.
My experience with phone and driving is it would be much better if Siri was remotely useful… Half of the times doesn’t understand what I ask, can’t take me somewhere when I ask her to, and can’t read the top hit of a search when asked a question, only answering with “Can’t show you the result while in the car”. I got to stop to reconfigure more often than not.
Transcription of messages is utterly broken when having conversations in different languages with different people. Why is it still bad with so many advances in LLMs and machine learning?
I'd like to remind everyone clamoring for law enforcement that the person who arrests you will be driving to jail at 70 miles per hour, in a 35 mph zone, while using a laptop.
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[ 3.7 ms ] story [ 253 ms ] threadSo in short, the phone company keeps records as does the phone and an increasing number of cars. However the author apparently feels that the police shouldn't even have to ask.
Frankly that is an insane take. With the amount of information being (secretly) kept about us by our own devices we risk putting the entire population under constant surveillance if we don't improve protections against law enforcement hacking devices.
Like, I understand that privacy is important. I agree that it is. But if you choose to drive a deadly machine, then you agree to give up a degree of that privacy.
All cars have license plates, identifying who it belongs to. Car drivers are subject to document checks by road security personnel. Car drivers are subject to alcohol tests if they're suspected of being drunk.
What makes phone usage more sacred than any of those things?
I'm not saying all your phone data becomes public if you're in a crash, the same way that an alcohol test doesn't tell the cops where, what, and with who you were drinking with.
How is society in any way worse, if phones recorded usage in the past 24 hours, and drivers had to provide that data if implicated in a crash?
1) phones that allow installation of a custom free OS;
2) phones that are already in use now.
Most of Asia has very strict laws against drug use, even weed. If you look at rate of usage, it's a lot lower than more liberal places.
But I'm not even saying put people in jail. Just take away their license. They've clearly proven they're not responsible enough to handle driving.
I don't think this discussion is gonna go anywhere.
The requirement to record anything in a way useful for law enforcement would be pretty close to a ban of phones that can run a custom OS, which is in turn pretty close to a ban of phones that not spy on the user all the time, whether or not the user drives at all.
P.S. And I write it as a happy iPhone user. I want to hope I have options if I later decide that I value privacy or customizability over features!
Yes, if it's alleged you killed someone. There's a whole legal system and body of precedent about that stuff going back centuries or millennia. It's not even controversial.
It also seems like Apple and Google should have a roll as trusted third parties. The phone could save a short activity log (basically the same things screen time apps record: was the device unlocked, active, last touch event, etc.) any time car play is active or the accelerometer records hard deceleration with a secure way to share that with the police so you can be confident all you’re giving them is evidence that you weren’t looking at Tik Tok 20s before the collision.
2. ...and should they? If a crash happens, and someone was on their phone, it would be pretty obvious that they were at fault. I just have a really hard time thinking that more device-related tracking would be better for society. Also, the mention of cameras at the end of the article is another concern for me. I really don't think this country is better off with more internet connected cameras that are actively being used to surveil the populous. There have to be better ways to win the hearts and minds of people and convince them to not use their phones. Turning into a surveillance state doesn't seem to be the best way to do that IMO.
Accidents are so circumstantial that it's not always going to be "pretty obvious" someone involved was on their phone. Nor does being on your phone when involved in an accident necessarily mean that you caused it.
So, not only were they on their phone and reportedly didn't cause the collision, nobody even asked if they were on their phone and therefore nobody found out, presumably because they didn't cause the collision.
Police come along, ask her a bare minimum of questions. "Did you have a green light?" "Yes, I did." "Okay."
Walk over to the other driver, and talk to him, come back less than three minutes later. "The other driver said he definitely had a green light. I am issuing you a citation for failure to obey a traffic control signal."
That fell apart very quickly when we appealed it to court. "Definitely" in a statement adds nothing to the reasonable doubt equation.
A good analogy would be DUI: Americans really loved their booze and there were many people who felt it was a core freedom to be able to drive after drinking, but eventually the death toll mounted high enough that our social norms changed to include things like designated drivers and doing roadside tests rather than trusting drivers’ claims. Phones will probably follow a similar arc because they are involved in many serious accidents and most people agree that driving safely is not an unreasonable request or a civil liberties violation.
I have seen cases where they went back and look at phone use history after accidents.... not sure how often they do it though.
> The police can access cellphone records but the process is cumbersome and privacy laws require a subpoena.
I wish it was just a default step in figuring out fault nowadays. An not handing over that data should put that driver at a disadvantage.
Just last fall I responded to a late-night crash where a drunk driver lost control and pinballed across the highway hitting both barriers and coming to a rest on the shoulder when a second vehicle whose driver was looking at their phone failed to notice the gigantic fire engine with flashing lights blocking the right lane of the three-lane road and braked just late enough to crash into our engine.
We found the phone, still playing a video, in the driver's side footwell.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/12/11/upshot/nightt...
I'm not sure that things have really changed all that much, big picture.
Things have changed a lot. The biggest thing that changed is how common this kind of driving is.
> Bowls of soup also don't send you unprompted notifications.
Oh, if you carry a full bowl of soup in a moving car, I bet it does! If the soup is hot, the notifications can be even harder to ignore than a ringing phone.
I think you either care about driving safely or you don't. The phones are just the latest distraction.
But the phone can easily tell when it's in a moving car. It could be programmed to not be useable during those times, or maybe allow passively displaying a navigation map but no interactive use.
(I obviously don't do that when driving… I even avoid podcasts because that uses too much attention.)
I haven't been driving as much in recent years wasn't aware of this trend. (Except for Tesla drivers: 5 years ago, I remember looking over to see a Tesla on autopilot next to me, doing 60 on Seattle's 520 bridge with the driver totally checked out and watching a video.)
I am guilty. It’s easier for me to fast for a day, but a digital fast feels very very unconfortable.
I tried not using my phone or a screen for an entire day. By evening I got proper anxiety.
Android let you enable Android auto on phone, but iirc the feature went away.
This can't be true. Zooming the screen from the accessibility settings probably gets you half way there already. Every navigation app is enticing you to use it while driving. Touchscreens are enticing/forcing users to take the eyes off the road. The mere existence of the phone is enticing a driver to use it.
CarPlay "mode" would just be a slightly different GUI for what you can already do with the phone whether legally (by the passenger, or while stationary) or illegally (while driving). Every app in the phone is also accessible from the home screen.
At most Apple would have to issue a warning every time to use it correctly, like many cars already do.
It gets you there all the way. If some cop wants to screw you over, that's more than he needs. Taking your eyes of the road to look at some small smartphone is not just illegal, it's dangerous. People die because of it every day. Most cops just don't give a fuck because almost everyone does it. Doesn't make it legal though. That's also why all navigation apps tell you not to use them while driving. But while these apps have other legit uses, CarPlay literally only exists to be used while driving. So it makes no sense to offer it without integration into a car's systems that allow you (in theory) to use it without looking down. If someone screws this up it's the car maker's fault.
You are not making more sense than the first time and I already mentioned some reasons why.
"Phone icons too big" is not a thing a cop can "screw you over". Google had this feature for years. Whether this is "enticing" users to operate the phone while driving has to be legislated or judged before it can be policed. And Apple can get around it the same way everyone else: with a legal disclaimer.
In general it's absolutely legal to have a phone operating in the car as long as the driver isn't actively interacting with it while driving, and it isn't displaying videos to the driver. The size or shape of the icons is irrelevant. Anything that can be legally displayed on a car's display is also legal on a phone screen. Tl;dr: don't play with either or watch videos while driving.
It doesn't take much thought to realize that if cars come plastered with giant screens and apps like Netflix, then a 5" screen with slightly larger icons is a non-issue.
Given that other large companies offer equivalent functionality, I really doubt that fear of lawsuits has determined when CarPlay is available.
Amusingly apropos the main complaint that people seem to have with Driving Mode is that it isn’t designed to be screen-based, which would be quite dangerous, but rather voice-based which is comparatively safer.
Edit: I think their strategy here confused people because most people seem to think that the goal is a zoomed touchscreen, whereas the actual goal was voice only with a nav screen if you’re navigating.
Totally agree with the point that, as usual, the branding is awful. They need to have these names reviewed by people who don’t live and breathe the product, the small nuances here are lost on GenPop.
Buttons on a screen are a bad idea and should be highly discouraged for drivers. Big buttons almost make that worse because of licensing, i.e. people see a thing labeled car mode and assume that means it’s safe to use in a car.
Voice interfaces are generally safer, partly because of eye line but also because they significantly constrain the space of things your phone can do and thus use less attention.
* It reads out texts to me, and asks me if I want to reply by voice. * car mode UIs means it takes less attention to skip songs or whatever. * It turns off some distracting notifications etc.
They let you have these features when navigating, why not when you don't need navigation?
Eyeline is slightly correlated with safety when compared with a device you need to locate, however with a constant position device the effect disappears. The actual problem is cognitive load.
Having your phone visible increases cognitive load even if you don’t use it. Composing text message by voice is equivalently distracting to typing one. Yes really, this has been rigorously studied. Texting by voice is only better than holding a phone and talking on it if you’re careful about using it in safer situations. And even then, the gains are pretty small.
Using a touchscreen with large buttons has higher cognitive load than an equivalent voice interface, even accounting for misunderstandings. The key intuition here is that you have to decrease amount you think about or interact with your device. Stop looking at your phone, it’ll be there when you get there.
Reducing cognitive load is why I want car mode to activate!
> Pulling off the highway every buzz isn't a solution either
I don’t know if you’re American, but you’d make a good one. Putting small conveniences over others safety is kind of a national pastime here.
https://www.bestbuy.com/site/sku/6283607.p?skuId=6283607
Labor and parts for installation could easily bring the total cost of adding a CarPlay/Android Auto compatible head unit to $1,000. At least it did for me, and that was 3 years ago.
Mind you - it's a little janky after 5 years, but an awesome value for what it cost. I know what you're thinking: Yes it has Netflix and Retroarch. No, I don't ever use those.
https://9to5mac.com/2022/11/08/ios-16-2-custom-accessibility...
0: https://support.apple.com/en-hk/guide/assistive-access-iphon...
1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tCB-qzXoJpQ&t=252s
Until people decide that reality is better than the unreality of phones, this kind of willful ignorance will continue.
But willing to be wrong on the latter, so might as well watch as it plays out.
The adoption rate of other entertainment tech like television and video games makes me think that the trend you identify might just be human nature to some extent (with the help of consumerism). I’m not sure people will in fact choose “reality” over entertainment in large enough numbers to reverse that trend.
Calling phones/games/tv/social media/etc addictions just tells me that you have an authoritarian paternalist ideology.
Although I have never done meth, I had an addition to a type of amphetamine in my teens. It was not a physical addition, in the sense that there were no physical withdraw symptoms, but I can tell you from experience that it was a very "real" addition in the sense that it a) ruined my life b) I felt like I had no control over it and c) I needed professional help to overcome it.
A big part of the cycle was that the "down" felt like an overwhelming depression while the "high" felt like pure happiness coupled with the ability to hyper-focus on anything, which really fed into my personality type. It was that cycle that created a psychological dependency that was very hard to break. Every use created an incentive to use again as soon as the high started to wear off. I've never experienced that with anything else ... not even other types of drugs.
Basically after staying awake for an entire week because I was high on a stimulant 24/7, when I "crashed" I slept for days and that's when my mother realized that I had a serious problem and got me professional help because she was worried I was in a coma or something.
I've never experienced anything similar with video games, gambling, television, social media etc. So I have no idea if it's the same for people who develop "addictions" to those things. All I know is that you don't need physical withdraw symptoms to experience a very real addiction that you can't break on your own.
The word is used for deleterious behaviors that have become compulsive or the person has otherwise lost the ability to control.
"Deleterious" may depend on the person and their life circumstances. And inasmuch as "lost ability to control" relates to "willpower" -- or shall we say various executive functions -- it may be difficult for someone without those problems or limitations to understand. That doesn't mean it isn't real.
The modern world has become much more complex and the traps for our primate brains have increased. Our understanding of psychology also continues to deepen and better understand the problems.
In short: words change meaning. Addition as a term includes a history of positive definition in the 17th century of "devoting oneself to another person, cause or pursuit", to being "associated with excessive alcohol use" in the early 1900s, to "linked almost exclusively to excessive patterns of substance use" in the 1980s, to the modern medical definition—not made until 2013!—of "the most severe degree of the addictive disorders, due to pervasive/excessive substance-use or behavioural compulsions/impulses".
Indeed, for most of the late 20th century, no one could agree what it referred to! "The word addiction was deliberately omitted from four consecutive editions of the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders [...] because it was considered a layman’s rather than a scientific term, pejorative, stigmatizing, and too difficult to define. There were simply ‘too many meanings’ (Alexander & Schweighofer 1988); the term lacked any ‘universally agreed upon definition’ (Buchman et al. 2011); the result of using it was ‘conceptual chaos’ (Shaffer 1986, 1997)."
So it hasn't been redefined to mean anything because it was never fully defined to begin with. Only in the last decade has it truly been formalized, and yes includes both chemical and behavioral dependency.
[1] https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/16066359.2018.1... [2] https://www.tn.gov/content/dam/tn/mentalhealth/documents/FIN...
Addiction does not exclusively refer to chemical dependency.
> Now it is being redefined to mean “people doing anything I don’t like and don’t think they should do”.
I don't know where you got that impression, if that were the case then I would expect there to be widespread disagreement about what is addictive. Why is it not possible that both dependency and addictive substances are often harmful?
> Whatever you call it there is a tremendous difference in type between alcoholism or opioid dependency and social media use.
What does difference in type mean? Are we distinguishing between alcoholism and opioid dependency or between material conditions and it's presentation in social media?
> Calling them the same word is grossly misleading if not outright lying.
They do share quite a few characteristics.
It's one of the few areas where society basically demands we take on massive liabilities in order to live our basic lives. Then we also like to pretend it's a "privilege", and not necessary. My employer almost called the cops on me, because I didn't drive in one day and used uber.
Starting to get some real second thoughts about this culture. It seems we have taken an insane shift in perspective. In 1970 all car crashes were accidents, but in the 2020s, none are; and someone has to be obliterated.
Tackling "drunk drunk" driving eg. 10 beers, 0.10+ bac, etc. is one thing. All these calls to lock up more people for longer seem to be taking us down a crazy road... and they continue to use the same rules for other substances, even though the chemical testing doesn't work, and the number of cases are low (ie. not a lot of crashes happening).
What was their reasoning behind this? Unknown car at a secure facility?
Do you want to make everyone that has a severely limiting disability have to constantly explain themselves? Or maybe their fucking car is in the shop.
It's honestly not something that's the most meaningful, but among other things it's made me distinctly aware how weird the culture is if you want to make driving not necessary to be a first class citizen. So while it doesn't prove my point, even prior I felt like "people are just gonna start calling the cops on me for not driving", and it basically was like that.
See how I'm now still kinda having to explain myself? I can't help but think this is a little proving my point. Now the notion of not-driving is such an inexplicable concept that it must be explained?
It's not like proof of my point, but in the times I've not-driven, I've noticed it draws strange, weird attention. This was just the most outlandish.
It was just an honest misunderstanding. She should have been able to catch me on video and card swipe.
Btw, I know this isn't the slam dunk proof of my point. Just imagine you were thinking this stuff was weird, then someone finally threatens to call the freaking cops on you! (not really, she was nice we just cleared it up).
Obvious exceptions being to look at a message while stopped at a traffic light or other safe location, or having the navigation app open with the phone fixed to the dashboard and otherwise not interacting with it.
So it's just you I'm afraid.
My guess is: yes. I'm almost too "I look at the car, not the driver" to understand but I have actually seen this as a passenger in America. I drive myself places.
This exception is "obvious" until you've sat through an entire cycle because the car in front of you didn't notice the light turning green.
I realize this anecdotal story is not a 1:1 example. It's definitely more general into distracted driving in general, and just how teenage decision making isn't very mature at all.
It's not quite a lethal problem when their peripheral can notice a car in front of them (which is probably moving with traffic), but it could be lethal for me. Car drivers are used to looking for cars, they're not looking for me on a bike - even with a florescent yellow backpack, flame orange helmet, and obscenely bright red blinky rear light.
I've given up hope on people not talking on their phone or occasionally dialing a call with their fingers or updating navigation apps or starting a voice-to-text or using their phones at stoplights. But could we at least get a few of the most-used OSes and non-driving apps to not work when they're being used by a driver? If there are no other phone Bluetooth beacons continuously in range (you're known to be not a passenger), there is a car stereo Bluetooth beacon, and GPS says you're in motion on a road at road speeds, don't play video. Don't allow new social notifications. Don't allow Tiktok or Facebook or Reddit to run. At least make an effort at it, stop the easiest 80%.
I'm convinced it's going to take a horrific accident going viral - someone plowing through a class of elementary students on a field trip while live-streaming or something like that - to cause change.
There's not going to be a rational answer for 'why', it's just addiction.
* slide to power off * Medical ID * SOS Emergency Call * Recent Phone Use
Report would be high-level -- has phone been unlocked in last 30 minutes, if so, timestamps showing when it was unlocked, for how long, how many finger taps occurred, etc.
That would give law enforcement a quick indication of whether phone was in use. Of course if there are passengers it could be contested. For more detail, they'd have to subpoena as they do now.
Now, it would be possible to use the same mechanism they use for digital drivers licenses to further restrict it but the nice thing about that idea is that not using sensitive information means there isn’t much concern of a leak.
Have you actually seen what amazing technologies are worthy of the name "privacy-preserving" these days? You can look up items in a database without the database operator knowing what you queried. You can let a server add two numbers without the server operator knowing what these two numbers are. These are worthy of the phrase "privacy-preserving" in this age.
The feature described would be a nice way to support those questions in a manner which does not reveal private information, require you to unlock the phone, or otherwise risk giving them access beyond what’s needed to answer the questions during an official investigation. You could of course choose not to use it but why you’d want to give them additional access to your device is beyond me.
Even the breathalyzer requirement seems irrelevant, considering that it only requires you to submit to a breathalyzer performed by a police officer, rather than mandating that your BAC be available to anybody with physical access to your property.
You can’t answer their question with anything but hearsay. This is why I brought up the DUI checks because we know some people are going to lie, and hard evidence can easily be acquired to sidestep that issue. The suggestion above would be similar in terms of having minimal privacy concern and because it’s cheap and easy it’d actually be done in non-egregious cases.
I also reject the comparison to DUI checks on the basis that those must be performed ASAP in order not to lose the evidence, thus necessitating urgency; the same doesn't apply to phones. As we've seen in, for example, the case of the Uber self-driving car operator who was using her phone when she killed a pedestrian, they were easily able to determine this after the fact, without such intrusive features.
If your phone is mounted and easy to reach, that's perhaps true. If you're holding it in your hand and looking down, it's less comparable.
If you want a dedicated gps or music player you can buy one.
In my area you can not use a phone at all while driving a motorcycle even for navigation.
You are allowed to buy a dedicated gps though.
It appears that new drivers are also forbidden from even looking at dash-mounted devices while driving. I get that they might be more easily distracted, and unable to give voice prompts while driving, but they presumably also need more help navigating, with advance lane change warnings, etc. Basically, these laws have not been especially well-calibrated, which is not surprising given that this is true for pretty much all laws regarding new technologies.
1: https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/does-california-law-...
Touch device with cellular radio physically attached to car: A-ok
Touch device with a radio not connected to the car? VERBOTEN.
People have phobias about all sorts of things eg flying. Flying on a commercial airplane is demonstrably safer than driving. So why isn't there a more prevalent fear of driving? Some will point to the illusion of control. I can buy that to some degree.
Phone use by driving should make people more fearful of driving. Even if you personally don't use your phone while driving, other people do. And that increases your own risk. Yet that doesn't seem to be the case.
What makes this worse is that everything from marketing to public relations to politics is built around stoking irrational fears that aren't based in fact. A classic example is child abduction even though in reality in the United States ~8 children are actually abducted every year. Figures like "800,000 per year" are heavily inflated with custody disputes.
Can you give me some stats on this? I was under the impression that it's maybe a little bit safer in terms of distance traveled.
But the people who think their driving is 50% safer than the average person's don't care about this. And this is probably near 100% of people who drive.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transportation_safety_in_the_U...
Well they’re not laughing when their children are involved. /gruesome
[0] https://www.netflix.com/title/70302184
[1] https://vimeo.com/369894528
The fix for this is easy: pull people over. When I was a teenager, cops met their quotas by watching for people with a phone (back then folks were talking, not typing). This is a big part of what drove people to get bluetooth earpieces: you wouldn't get pulled over for having one and talking on the phone (and cars didn't have microphones yet, so there wasn't another option).
People will be pissed that they're getting pulled over for using their phone while driving. But if there's no expectation of punishment for breaking the law, people will continue breaking the law. And texting and driving is breaking the law. And if I can spot half a dozen people texting and driving on my way to the gym, cops can definitely spot folks texting. Hell, if I could apply for the special cop job of "pull people over for texting" and nothing else, I'd do it purely out of resentment for distracted driving.
I feel that the media is partially to blame too. They like to victimise drivers who are caught using their phones, or driving over the speed limit for that matter. Or maybe it’s just my point of view.
I get so sick of hearing people say "It's okay: my car lets me talk hands free!" It isn't just the hands that are a problem ... it's your brain being disengaged that's the problem. No hands-free phone fixes that.
The bottom line is, no one should be using their phone and driving. If you have to use the phone, pull over.
Usually holding the phone up in their hand, but sometimes with the phone in a holder on the windshield.
Or, as is currently being tested in many European countries, cameras above the road that automatically detect drivers on their phones.
But I am not optimistic about that taking off in the US, where even speed cameras are a rarity (although I do not really know why).
See the links on https://yro.slashdot.org/story/09/03/24/145247/mississippi-p...
I looked into the legality of receiving a ticket from someone who is not a cop and I was under no legal obligation to pay it. However, they can ruin your credit if you refuse to pay, so I just went ahead and paid it. I did not seek legal advice and maybe I should have, but the fee was less than a lawyer would have cost.
I think the biggest issue here is simply that the United States has created a transportation system that is inherently unsafe and ungovernable. By universalizing the automobile as the only de facto mode of transportation, we have made revoking a bad driver's license a hardship.
The only way to fix the problem is fixing the infrastructure which is extremely expensive, and politically would be wildly unpopular. We are currently doing the exact opposite -- increasing vehicle size and weight in a myopic arms race -- which means we will likely live with the scourge of traffic deaths (100+ dead per day) for the rest of our lives...
This would inconvenience passengers of all sorts but it would immediately eliminate all phone related accidents without getting people with bad impulse control license suspensions. Most people with license suspensions continue driving anyway.
It’s hard for me to see any other solution that really changes anything. Millions of people have a phone addiction and punishing them for using their phone while driving may be just but it won’t be effective. To me this is more than worth the very minor inconvenience of not being able to use my phone while riding in a bus, car, or train.
The comparison with drug use can only go so far. And even in that domain, despite what harm reduction purists will tell you, supply reduction DOES work to an extent, in that it dissuades casual users. Looking back at phone use, a casual distracted driver really only differs from an addict in how often they’re doing it. If you hear about your friend being raked over the coals by the cops because of distracted driving, I honestly do believe that you’d be less likely do to it yourself.
Where I live, cops routinely drive through lakes of traffic on motorbikes and will tap on your window and signal for you to take the next exit if they see you on your phone. It works.
Even with all the imperfections present, it’s still worlds better than less-than-half-baked ideas like disabling phones travelling beyond a certain speed. Christ. Guess I’ll just never catch a train again.
What I propose reduces the problem by 100%.l and is very easy and cheap to implement.
Is it really that burdensome to not use your phone on the train? I don’t now and it wasn’t that long ago nobody had phones.
You might want to think a little harder there. Phone conversations themself are a distraction and, per your own arguments in this subthread, would not be eliminated under this proposal.
Idiots who interfere with the normal operation of someone else's devices need to be locked up.
At least there’s things you can do to control or ameliorate situations like that. You can learn where the local hospitals are. You can use android auto or CarPlay. You can call 911. You can’t control the guy running a red because he’s on his phone and he’s much much more common. This is a minimally intrusive intervention on devices that already do all sorts of things to “interfere with normal operation” that would save thousands of lives for in the 99.99999% of other cases a minor inconvenience to everyone else. A return to the year 2005.
Those in power have obvious incentives to implement limitation to harm their opponents. Flagging political emails as spam is a well know example.
Once some limits are tolerated, tyranny becomes inevitable.
So yes, thousands of lives in exchange for millions of people not being able to doomscroll Facebook and Tiktok during their train commute seems OK. Driving while distracted is already a crime in lots of places, there's variable enforcement, but it's not making a big dent. Something else needs to be done.
It's bizarre to me how strong the reactions against this are. You're talking about suffering: I'm talking about returning to what was the status quo not that many years ago. This is addict behavior.
For what it's worth, I agree that distracted driving is a huge problem, which is a big part of why I would like to see a drastic reduction in the rate of car ownership, the number of cars in our cities, and extremely harsh punishments for drivers who kill people. We also should make it much, much easier to live far away from cars, but close to other people, in developments like https://www.bloommerwede.nl/ for instance.
This reminds me of how MADD looked at drunk driving and decided the problem was all alcohol and not, in fact, car dependency.
1. Two software companies making a software change.
2. Convincing (or forcing) hundreds of millions of people to stop driving, reorganizing cities, eliminating rural and suburban living to the greatest extent possible.
I too enjoy using my phone while traveling. But if I couldn't, it'd be no skin off my back most of the time. And, I mentioned only disabling the screen, not the whole phone.
Having phones disable themselves while moving fast is absolutely ridiculous, imaging if you're on a 4 hour bus ride and can't communicate with people you need to meet at your destination.
Not anyone can or is willing to carry a laptop or tablet with them everywhere, especially if you're taking a bus or are a passenger in a car
Also, there'd be nothing to stop you from saying "Hey Siri, call so and so." Only the screen would be disabled.
The amount of added background commute stress caused by almost everyone on the road ignoring their turn signal these days is infuriating. It makes everything take longer, and every delay gets magnified multiple times by multiple people in a causal chain not doing it.
This increases stress, road rage, increases commute times, gridlock, everything connected with driving decision that involves meshing with the moves of the cars around you, which now defaults to the worst case defensive scenario- i.e. that everyone who, say, could swerve into your lane when you try to merge, is likely to do so, so you wait multiple times longer to get on to a highway or turn onto a two or three lane thoroughfare, than you would have to if people would just perform what has to be the simplest yet most beneficial gesture of productive cooperation. Even navigating a 7-Eleven parking lot turns into a needlessly guessing game.
And yet if you try to raise the subject among casual friends, even in a joking manner, they look at you like you're some kind of anachronistic Barney Fife character.
More enforcement is what we tried with drugs, how’d that go?
If you want to race, that's fine, but don't do it on public roads. Go to a race track that's designed for that.
And also agree on drugs, we should just legalize everything IMO. Prohibition has never worked, anyone who wants to do drugs are going to do them, and we're better off helping than harming people by filling up the prisons.
Really? That's your argument?
Even when I just call someone on the phone (not that often these days) and find they're in the car I always ask, "Hey, should I just call you later?" and, perhaps surprisingly, people will usually say "yeah, we can talk XXX". This is common when they will get to their destination in not so long a time. I'm nore likely to get a "naah, I'll be on the road for a couple of hours so let's just talk now" than I am, "I'll be driving for another 10 minutes so let's just talk now"
I park myself in a meeting before driving and then use CarPlay mute/unmute as needed. It works ok. If I lose the call, it's impossible to get back in, as I need to use the phone.
Maybe the initial version of this camera that requires human intervention will barely abide by the already overreaching law, but face-reading cameras everywhere will soon be abused.
Despite talk about authoritarianism we rarely discuss its cultural roots.
Notice how the article puts the burden on authorities & companies to add more surveillance and penalties for people to improve their behavior.
Every ill in society can be fixed with enough surveillance, by this reasoning.
People often worry that we will become like the 20th century authoritarian states (e.g the 3rd Reich, GDR , USSR, etc) and I tell them that we've far surpassed their surveillance and control capacity.
So let's not keep adding to it, shall we?
I very much like that US treats me as an adult when driving. I am fine with cops pulling me over.
I just legit hate the idea cameras always watching me waiting for me to make the tiniest mistake and chew up a significant chunk of my monthly income.
Speed and red light cameras are a big business raking in millions per camera.
Transcription of messages is utterly broken when having conversations in different languages with different people. Why is it still bad with so many advances in LLMs and machine learning?