By Kat Boushee

I don’t drive drunk. In fact, after my younger brother fell asleep driving last May, I don’t even drive tired. I do, however, often find myself out driving during the peak times for sobriety checkpoints due to my job as a waitress.

In those moments while I’m waiting to have the officer shine his flashlight in my eyes and ask me his litany of questions, all I can do is wish for my bed, or dream that one day my GPS will be able to warn me about things like this.

It turns out that the day I was hoping for was already here and no one had bothered to tell me about it. I learned from an article in the New York Times that there are applications for smartphones that tell the user where the checkpoint is and how to get around it. Genius!

However, the point of the article was not to spread the good word, no, alas, it was to celebrate Research In Motion’s (the maker of the Blackberry smartphones) decision to ban these apps from their devices. Apple and Google have not followed suit, much to the dismay of the author of the article, Randall Stross, and various U.S. senators.

Sobriety checkpoints are always announced ahead of time and you can even go on the CT.gov website to access them. I could, theoretically, go on the website from my iPhone before driving home from work, no application needed. So it doesn’t really make sense to me to ban these apps.

Honestly, when I get drunk, my texts look like someone sat on my keypad. There is no way that I could open an app and correctly interpret the data and map within. I wouldn’t even think to do it.

If the information is already available in another form, how much harm is the app really causing, and how much of the fuss is just people in government wanting what they suppose is an easy cause to garner themselves support and votes from their constituents?

Of the 17 smartphone-owning CCSU students I polled, only two had heard of the apps and neither had downloaded one. I don’t think this is quite the crisis that it is being made out to be.

In a letter written to RIM by four senators, they quote an unnamed police captain as having said, “If people are going to use those, what other purpose are they going to use them for except to drink and drive?”

Perhaps, good sirs, I just don’t wish to waste my time and that of the police officers when I’m driving home from a long shift at work, or perhaps I simply value my privacy and my rights.

That being said, I’m all for catching drunk drivers. I just don’t think limiting the types of applications I can use on my cell phone is the way to do it.