The headline really got my attention.
Matt Richtel reports for the New York Times:
Cellphones can track what we say and write, where we go, what we buy and what we search on the internet. But they still aren’t being used to track one of the biggest public health threats: crashes caused by drivers distracted by the phones.
More than a decade after federal and state governments seized on the dangers that cellphone use while driving posed and began enacting laws to stop it, there remains no definitive database of the number of crashes or fatalities caused by cellphone distraction. Safety experts say that current estimates most likely understate a worsening problem.
The absence of clear data comes as collisions are rising. Car crashes recorded by the police rose 16% from 2020 to 2021, to 16,700 a day from 14,400 a day, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, or NHTSA. In 2021, nearly 43,000 Americans died in crashes, a 16-year high.
[…]
Technologically, phones are capable of connecting the time of a car crash and the way the driver was using the phone at the time, Strayer said. That is because phones are equipped with sensors and other tracking and surveillance technology that is typically used for marketing, measuring steps and other functions.
“Your phone leaves lots of breadcrumbs, but nobody is looking at them,” he said.
Read more at Yahoo!