Auto Black-Box Data Being Used In Court

DrEnter writes "Yahoo! is running this USAToday article about automobile electronic data recorder (EDR or "black-box") data being used in civil and criminal court cases. Most owners of cars so equipped don't know they have them, or that they can be used against them. The NHTSA has been investigating EDRs and is collecting public comments to determine if and how these devices should be regulated."

Comments

A good tech safety feature, not a privacy problem

[Hittite Creosote]

Why on earth haven't they told people about these devices? It's an obvious dangerous driving deterrent - if you speed and have an accident, your car will tell us.

This isn't some nasty privacy thing - cars are dangerous things. If someone is driving like an idiot and causes an accident, they need to be banned from driving, and if these black boxes - which only record the last five seconds of data before the airbag inflates anyway - are the only way to get the evidence to do so, then so be it. Conversely of course, if the other driver claims you were speeding and your black box records that you were doing 30mph in the last five seconds, it'll let you off the hook.
These things aren't recording your speed over large periods of time, they aren't downloading info to any police car that asks for it, they aren't transmitting your position to some control centre. So the engineer can look at it, so what, he/she gets to see how slowly you drove the car across their service station forecourt. So at the moment, I see them as nothing but good.

A couple views

[CrudPuppy]

I guess I am torn on this issue.

On one hand, if black box data is used against you, you could claim discrimination since not all cars have the boxes and therefore you are being punished to a greater extent as a direct result of the car you chose to purchase.

On the other hand, I think it would be a good idea (Big Brother paranoia aside) for the industry to create a standard for what kind of dasta is collected and mandate the use of these devices on all new cars. Unbiased witnesses in courtrooms is badly needed these days due to blatant disregard for truth and justice.

Now how do you stop Big Brother from tapping this info? You KNOW they're gonna wanna give this thing an IP address that maps to your Social Security Number and is able to broadcast on wireless networks...