A Roadside Test for Texting and Driving?

Ben Lieberman, whose son was killed in a crash involving a distracted driver six years ago, wants to find a way to stop drivers from texting and driving before other teens are killed.

He has given talks at schools. He has attended law enforcement conferences. He has seen people throw up their hands over the lack of a reliable field test to determine for sure whether a driver in a crash had been texting around the time of impact.

“I kept hearing over and over again, there’s no such thing as a Breathalyzer for distracted driving,” Lieberman said. “So I asked why not?”

Now such a device seems close at hand. But Lieberman has also found that lawmakers and others, citing privacy concerns, are reluctant to embrace it. As New York State Assembly considers a bill that would allow law enforcement officials to use a handheld device that can detect whether a motorist was using his smartphone while driving, Lieberman is hoping attitudes will change. This is the second time the bill has been introduced.

“We don’t have to accept that this exists,” he said.

The device, known as a Textalyzer, is designed to analyze a smartphone to determine whether its user had been tapping the keyboard or swiping at its screen. The device would not be able to read the messages or other content. But some have raised privacy concerns.

“Every fender bender would become a pretense for gobbling up people’s private cellphone information, and we know that cellphones typically contain our entire lives,” Donna Lieberman (no relation), executive director of the New York Civil Liberties Union told the Associated Press.

Lieberman says the ACLU’s fears are misplaced. No one’s interested in giving police carte blanche to mine people’s phones for private information without a warrant, he said.

“A phone’s not a religious object,” Lieberman said. “The content’s what’s sacred. With all these technological breakthroughs, it didn’t seem like it was so far-fetched to separate privacy from use on a phone.”

Lieberman, 55, attended the University of Maryland to study journalism before going into finance and settling down in Chappaqua. He is like a lot of advocates for change. He didn’t think about becoming the embodiment of a public issue until a terrible event touched his life.

In the summer of 2011, his son, Evan, was home from freshman year at the University of Connecticut. He had lined up a construction job with some other guys his age, who piled into a car to get to work one morning. They were on a twisty stretch of road near Bear Mountain when their driver crossed the double yellow line, smashing head-on into a Jeep.

Evan, who was riding in the back seat, was critically injured. The Jeep’s driver had to be hospitalized, and two other occupants in Evan’s car were seriously injured, too. The driver of Evan’s car, who was also a teenager, told authorities he had fallen asleep at the wheel. He suffered a broken wrist in the crash.

Read more of the original article at The Washington Post.

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