New York Wants To Know: Have You Been Texting And Driving?

This guy is just clueless. There are so many things wrong with his idea:

* You can't get records of texting without cooperation by the phone's operating system. This includes both keeping the necessary records, and supporting whatever signals this hypothetical device sends, then actually telling the truth. Additionally, the phone would have to actually be able to connect to this hypothetical device. So unless you ban all phones which don't support and cooperate with this device, which would mean that many people would suddenly be breaking the law by not buying new phones they might not even be able to afford, it would be subverted easily. Hell, some phone manufacturers might use such subversion as a selling point.

* Even if you manage to get this information, you still have to match it up to precise information about when the collision occurred, and that's not usually possible. There aren't video cameras in the sky recording everything that happens on the roads. Does he propose to change that? Even if you're fine with living in Orwell's nightmare, it would be a massive financial burden to put enough cameras on all of the streets to catch all collisions.

* Got enough surveillance cameras all over the place to see where every single car is all the time, and always catch collisions? Well, you still have to manually inspect the footage to find the time of the collision, then input that time into this hypothetical device. It's not as simple as this guy makes it out to be.

* Fixed all the technical problems? OK with living in Orwell's nightmare? Somehow managed to ban all phones that don't comply with this device? It's not going to work, anyway. The idea is to use fear to make people stop texting and driving. But this fear just isn't going to be present until an accident actually happens, because no one thinks they're going to be one of those people who get into an accident. At that point, this hypothetical device will either do nothing but bum the driver out a little bit if the penalty is low, or if the penalty is extremely high (like jail time), it will just be providing an incentive for drivers to find a way to destroy their phones rather than attending to matters that are actually important like making sure everyone is OK and possibly calling an ambulance. It's not even a difficult task; just find some water and pour it on the phone. Or even better, toss it out the window into a river or lake nearby.

Ars Technica has an article on this.

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/04/first-came-the-breathalyzer-now-meet-the-roadside-police-textalyzer/

It's another excuse to search your belongings. Failure to comply could cost you your license.

I want to spare Jodiendo the trouble: OP, this goes in the troll hole.