E-ZPass Bypasses Your Privacy

If you're planning to cheat on your spouse or are about to commit a crime, you should think twice about the time you save paying tolls with the E-ZPass system. It could cost you much more time—in prison.

Criminal and civil court cases are being won and lost based on E-ZPass records that show where you've been and when you went there. Of the 12 Northeast and Midwest states that use the system, seven of them will supply toll information to lawyers and law enforcement officials. Four states will release records only in criminal cases, but even where divorce attorneys aren't allowed access, they can ask the aggrieved spouse to obtain them. Jacalyn Barnett, a New York divorce lawyer, says that "E-ZPass is an E-ZPass to go directly to divorce court, because it's an easy way to show you took the off-ramp to adultery." Electronic toll records helped convict a New Jersey nurse who was accused of murdering her husband and packing his remains in matching suitcases, which she threw into Chesapeake Bay. The E-ZPass records allowed the prosecutors to figure out where she had been, and when. Two billion electronic charges a year is a lot of records, and it's a sure thing that their use for court cases will only increase. Bob Barr is a privacy rights advocate who says that people who want to protect their privacy shouldn't pay their highway tolls electronically. "People are foolish to buy into these systems without thinking, just because they want to save 20 seconds of time going through a toll booth."