Ethical issues of CCTV monitoring and surveillance in road transport ITS applications

In this paper a number of ethical implications of ITS monitoring and surveillance will be considered. Many people consider closed-circuit television (CCTV) monitoring and surveillance in public places, especially on the road or in the street, to be practically unavoidable, but also an infringement of important privacy-based rights of persons, e.g. drivers and passengers. It can raise a few privacy issues which, if left unsolved, could jeopardize the wider deployment of CCTV-based ITS. It could happen that CCTV systems are not used mainly for monitoring the flow of vehicles but rather to supervise some people. At what point does the monitoring and surveillance of persons become unethical? My article has to identity a few ethical conditions under which CCTV monitoring and surveillance in road ITSs may be considered to be morally justified. The paper refers to the following issues: problems with ITS monitoring and surveillance of persons, philosophical and ethical concepts of privacy, legal regulation on personal data privacy in EU and Poland, ethical issues of privacy in a few road transport ITS applications, and the problem of ethical justification of ITS monitoring and surveillance.