The European Electronic Toll Service (EETS) is a service which allows a user to conclude one contract with an EETS provider and have his vehicle equipped with one OBE in order to use this vehicle in all toll domains in Europe that require OBE.
In GNSS based toll systems an EETS provider sends the toll charger toll declarations, i.e. statements that a vehicle was circulating within a toll domain. Those declarations may be submitted directly by the OBE or by the central equipment of the EETS provider based on data obtained form the OBE.
In practice, such a scheme will only work if the toll charger can trust the declarations from an EETS provider without having to trust the EETS provider. One way to provide this trust is secure monitoring.
On the other hand privacy legislation requires that no more information be passed to a toll charger than necessary for his business. i.e. collecting a correct toll.
As shown, secure monitoring can provide both an adequate level of trust and of confidentiality. The major design trade-offs are not between trust and confidentiality, but between trust and confidentiality on one hand and the operational processing, storage and communications cost on the other hand.
The paper at hand reflects the current state of discourse in the Netherlands. It is a technical paper that does not deal with any Dutch policy preferences but provides a generic presentation of the subject.
This paper is a revised version of the paper that was first published on March 12 (PDF format, 110 kB), 2009 and revised on December 15, 2009 (PDF format, 260 kB).
This paper contains the personal view of the author. It does not present or imply any official position of his employer, the Dutch Ministry of Transport, Public Works and Water Management.