Section 1 Short title
This Act may be cited as the “Don’t Track Me Act”.
Don’t Track Me Act
A BILL
To prohibit the replacement of the gasoline excise tax with a GPS, location or distance-based tax and for other purposes.
Sec. 2 Findings and purpose
Findings— Congress finds as follows:
Tracking the location of vehicles and the identities of owners for the purpose of taxation, fines or fees has the potential to be misused, and such collected data could be hacked or used for privacy-invading purposes.
Government and corporate websites are frequently hacked, and driver-tracking databases may be no more invulnerable to hacking; to the advantage of criminals, stalkers, and identity thieves.
GPS tracking enables the technology for automatic speeding, parking and other traffic tickets, charging variable tax rates due to the time of day or other factors, including characterizing driving behavior from acceleration and braking speed, evasive maneuvers such as swerving to avoid a child or deer in the road, or driving in what the Government may believe is a “fuel-wasting” manner.
GPS tracking schemes may require vehicle owners to maintain bank accounts for the debiting of resultant fees. This may be a hardship for many low-income vehicle owners, as well as opening new hacking vulnerabilities for bank accounts of vehicle owners.
The existing gas tax is a rare example of a user fee, whereby vehicle owners pay for the roads they use when purchasing fuel. The tax has successfully provided necessary funding for many decades.
There are far less intrusive ways than location-based tracking to get electric vehicle and hybrid owners to pay for their road usage.
Vehicle owners must not be required to surrender their Fourth Amendment rights and be tracked everywhere as a condition of driving on public roads.
Amendment IV of the United States Constitution states “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.”.
Purpose— It is the purpose of this Act to prohibit the replacement or supplementation of the Federal gasoline excise tax with any tax or fee based upon vehicle location or distance traveled, whether determined by global positioning satellite (GPS), license plate reading cameras or any other method of determining owner registration or identity information, and vehicle location or distance traveled.
Sec. 3 Prohibition of a GPS, location or mileage based tax
In general— It is contrary to the public policy of the United States to require the placement or use of any GPS, location, distance tracking system, or any other system to collect identities of vehicle owners by any remote means such as license plate reading cameras, radio frequency identification (RFID) devices or by any other means.
The Federal gasoline excise tax may not be replaced or supplemented with any tax, fee or fine based upon vehicle location or distance traveled, whether determined by global positioning satellite (GPS), cameras that read license plates or any other method of determining vehicle location, distance traveled or registration and identity data.
No motor vehicle may be required to have any device on board the vehicle or to transmit data to any off board device which tracks or records, collects, stores, transmits and location, distance, or registration or driver identity information.
Sec. 4 Limitations on vehicle-to-vehicle and vehicle-to-infrastructure communications
No public funds may be used to study or implement or require the use of any method of tracking or reporting vehicle movement or location for the purpose of taxes, user fees, traffic fines, accident investigation, or to communicate with other vehicles or infrastructure.
Vehicle-to-vehicle or vehicle-to-infrastructure communication systems for the purposes of recording or transmitting or storing for later retrieval location, registration, identity, or speed data are prohibited, except for those vehicles owned or leased by Federal Government agencies in question.
Any such transmissions may only be used for momentary accident avoidance or completely anonymized traffic reporting.
Sec. 5 “Black box” data recorders
No motor vehicle shall be required by any Federal agency to have installed and operational any “black box” accident data recorder that records any vehicle data for a period longer than the last five minutes of vehicle operation, and such devices may never be capable of recording audio, images, or video from inside the vehicle. Any such device may not broadcast or transmit any data in any way, except by a direct cable connection to a computer.
Sec. 6 Vehicle owners exempted
No provisions of this Act shall prohibit the use by vehicle owners of GPS or other technologies for tracking the location of their own vehicle.
Sec. 7 Reporting requirement
The Secretary of the Department of Transportation shall submit to Congress, not later than 90 days after the date of the enactment of this Act, a report describing the actions taken to ensure permanent compliance with this Act.