The French group Geopost is carrying out a large-scale digital project in eleven European countries, but not yet in Belgium. With Geopost Vision, all vehicles that use Geopost (for example in DPD colours) are equipped with video surveillance systems and collect data about the condition of the roads and streets where they drive.
On some DPD vehicles, people are invited to scan a QR code. This refers to an internet page where Geopost (DPD’s parent company) explains that the use of the images collected by the built-in cameras is in accordance with national privacy legislation. Broadly speaking (the conditions vary slightly from country to country, depending on national regulations), personal data that may appear in the raw video images, such as faces and license plates, are made unrecognizable before the images are shared outside the Geopost environment.
But what are these images used for? Geopost Vision supplies them to ‘customers’ who can be online map publishers, infrastructure managers (who can thus more quickly identify which areas need repairs), urban planning services and even insurance companies. This data can also be used to train artificial intelligence models.
The Geopost Vision project was launched today as part of the Geopost Innovation Day. “We are transforming our fleet in eleven countries simultaneously into a source of real-time urban intelligence. With Geopost Vision we are joining the data revolution by offering detailed real-time traffic data to improve mobility for everyone,” said Yves Delmas, CEO of Geopost.
