Boston's Safest Driver Public Privacy Policy

The City values participants’ privacy and has partnered with Cambridge Mobile Telematics (CMT) to ensure that data collected in this competition is anonymized within sixty (60) days after the competition ends and cannot be used for anything else. Driver scores and the data listed in the table above will be collected at the individual level by CMT but provided to the City in summarized reports at the zip code level. The email you supply will be used in conjunction with your score to identify weekly winners. The City receives email addresses for purposes of communication about this competition.  For the purpose of contacting selected winners for prize distribution, those emails will be shared with our partner Promosis for the sole purpose of this project. CMT has its own privacy policy that governs the individual level data it collects during the competition.  View the CMT privacy policy.

The City of Boston will receive aggregated reports from our technology partner, Cambridge Mobile Telematics (CMT), as noted in the table above. CMT has a limited license to use that data for the purposes of providing reports to the City and to improve its program, but cannot share that data with anyone else. The raw data is not provided to the City; only aggregated statistics from the reports will be available to the City.  Data in the custody of the City is subject to the Massachusetts Public Records law, M.G.L. c. 66, s. 10, and other applicable laws and regulations, and may be made available to members of the public under that law. Other partners, like the National Safety Council, the Vision Zero Task Force, Liberty Mutual Insurance, and Promosis, will only see aggregated reports from the project that will be publicly available and will never be supplied any personally identifiable information or raw data.

First off, the best use of this data is for self-reflection. If you drive in and around Boston, we want you to do so safely and this app provides a tool for you to reflect upon your own habits. To be clear, the City does not want individual driver data for the purposes of enforcement. However, there are a few pieces of data the City is interested in learning more from with your collaboration as a researcher:

• Self Reflection: Largely, this is about you being able to reflect on your own driving habits. Massachusetts has a reputation for having a high number of crashes and regularly ranks last in lists of cities by major insurance companies in good driving. We aren’t sure that we live up to that reputation, and want to give residents a chance to reflect upon that stereotype. Aggregated and anonymized data will provide insight of an average driving score for each zip code.
• Transportation Challenges: The City of Boston and surrounding areas could be improved with better data. Maybe the traffic signals need to be timed better to prevent rapid braking or acceleration on a stretch of road. Or perhaps better signage or roadway design to improve turning movements. Data aggregated over the duration of the competition showing some of these hotspots could be useful to City of Boston urban planners and engineers.
• Future Public Safety Campaigns: It’s possible that anonymous and aggregated over the course of the competition could show us a specific problem with driving behavior (e.g., harsh braking) that would lead to a bigger public safety campaign in the future.

CMT will strip all data of personally identifiable information (i.e., email address) within 60 days after the competition ends. Data aggregated and anonymized at the zip code level and described above may be released on the City of Boston’s open data portal for analysis.

We welcome you to be our partner as a public researcher of road conditions through this competition. Alerts triggered in the app (e.g., hard braking) that occur on the same street segment repeatedly will be aggregated and may be shared publicly through the City of Boston’s open data portal for the purpose of exploration. Aggregated and anonymous data at the zip code level on average driver score may also be shared publicly.

Should you decide to delete your account, simply uninstall the App. If you would like CMT’s servers to remove your driving data, please contact support@cmtelematics.atlassian.net with your information, and we will remove your data. Even after you remove the app, your information may remain viewable elsewhere, to the extent it has been shared with others, or was copied or stored by other users. If you change smartphones, you’ll be able to reinstall and continue using the app by signing in with the previously registered email address.

The Services are not intended for children under 18 years of age. No one under age 18 may provide any personal information to or on the Services, and we do not knowingly collect personal information from children under 18. If you are under 18, do not use or provide any information on the Services, register on the Services, make any purchases through the Services, obtain any quotes through the Services, file any claims through the Services, use any of the interactive features of the Services or provide any information about yourself to us, including your name, address, telephone number, email address or any screen name or username. If we learn we have collected or received personal information from a child under the age of 13 without verification of parental consent, we will delete that information. If you believe we might have any information from or about a child under 13, please contact us at safestdriver@boston.gov.