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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."
Since insurance money is involved, I wonder how long it will be before someone tries to hack the data. There are already a couple of sites that are at least documenting some things and doing some tricks. Since the owner of the car generally has or can gain posession of it between when the accident happens and the data is subpeonaed (sp?), there is opportunity. It doesn't seem that the data is encrypted or hidden in any way, probably to make it easy on mechanics (simple and portable software).
US Democracy:The best person for the job (among These pre-selected choices...)
I would suspect that the police would have to go through the normal means of obtaining a warrant before they could grab the data from the GPS system in the car. This would be no different that the police getting a warrant to rifle through a guy's home looking for evidence to convict him. It's just that a GPS system gives much more accurate data than a few hairs or a spot of blood could, in terms of location and time.
If the government is able to have access to this data without a warrant, that would be unconstitutional, and might be a "Get Out of Jail Free" card. Even the patriot act doesn't allow that.
The radical sect of Islam would either see you dead or "reverted" to Islam.
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.
This is utter bullshit. Dealers should have to inform their customers that the car they're buying has a device that could incriminate them with ease in court. And who's paying for these devices? The consumer? Maybe they should be an optional extra. Yeah right.
Car ECU's do seem to hold a lot more information than perhaps most people think they do... and I personally think its for the better.
I am certain that on a number of higher priced cars (such as Porsches or BMW's) they record lots of little details.. like the number of standing 'sprint' starts you have made as a pose to just regular pulling away from lights etc.
A friend recently had to visit the dealership to have his ECU reprogrammed on his brand new Peugeot 206 - they were able to determine from that what, amongst other things, his top speed had been since owning it.
I feel its a good idea for car manufacturers to do it though.. it helps them when it comes down to court cases and complaints about the 'quality' of their car, if they can see how their cars are been driven. They can then gauge if the wear on parts relates to the style of driving and can absolve themselves from any responsibility.
"Hey! Unless this is a nude love-in, get the hell off my property!!"
Save yourselves! Rip these things out right now! Write your senator! E-Mail your representative! Hack the thing so it continueously records you going 25mph with your seatbelt on! Just don't sit there and let anything your car says be used against you in court.
Karma: SELECT `karma` FROM `users` WHERE `userid`=138474;
From the ref. article:
"the data from black boxes, which are on about 40 million cars in the USA"
6 of the 8 posts so far show that they aren't even awware that such a thing exists on cars. Is this an informed society? Or a purposely misinformed, under-informed or engineered society?
Maybe 10 billion of our clothes already contain RFID tags? A few billion of our wrist watches already contain bugs? Seems like paranoia is the only sensible option to remain sane.
If you keep throwing chairs, one day you'll break windows....
My '97 Starun SC2 had an electrical problem a little while ago, something called the RKE module fried. OK not a big deal I thought to myself, it's a machine and things fail. What caught my attention was the fact that I always ask for the old parts back. I think there is a california state law about it or something, and just to make sure I am not getting ripped off. The funny thing is the dealership refused to let me have it. Some BS about security and the car alarm ( At the time I thought the mechanic I was talking to just made this up for whatever reason) so I didn't argue as the car worked.
But now I read this and am wondering... is the standard GM "black box" contained in the RKE module? Does anyone know what exactly goes on in the RKE besides car alarm functions. Seems like a rather big box for just an alarm, even factoring in GM's bloated-lo-tech way of doing things.
Or am I just paranoid?
The previous post was paid for by CRAP, Citizens Rallying Against Privacy, a non-profit organization dedicated to disabusing the plebes of the strange notion that they have rights.
Muslim community leaders warn of backlash from tomorrow morning's terrorist attack.
>Why on earth haven't they told people about these devices?
:-) "I couldn't have possibly caused that accident, sir, I was in reverse the entire time!"
Simple. Because now my next hack plans are to see what I can do to either disable that box, or to fix the data going to it. I expect I'm just one in a soon to be large pool of people hacking their cars.
Wouldn't it be neat to go -20 km/h all the time!
>So at the moment, I see them as nothing but good.
And they sure are. But that doesn't mean I won't do what it takes to avoid getting in trouble. It's human nature.
If you could be told what you can see or read, then it follows that you could be told what to say or think - BoC
For crying out loud, if someone is speeding and causes an accident, they deserve to get stiffed by the law because they are a dangerous, arrogant, son-of-a-bitch. These people kill. Having a box that records five seconds worth of data is not a problem. You think you should have a right to endanger other people's lives and break the law? If you think the law on speeding is wrong, campaign against the law. If you think the speed limit is too low, campaign to raise the speed limit. But if you think it's right, then why on earth should you have the right to break it and not get caught?
Not all your points are garbage - the police should not be capable of recording onto such devices, and Insurance companies shouldn't have access to the things, but people who drive well already tend to get lower premiums than people who drive badly - don't you have 'no claims bonuses' in your part of the world? Age-related insurance levels?
In the airplane industry, the hundreds of little black boxes that belong to a typical jetliner can only be read and interpreted by the specific airplane manufacturer that made them. The resulting simulation may appear to be an unbiased account of what truly happened, but we really don't know that -- the system used to decode them is a closely guarded trade secret.
In the automobile industry, those same black boxes will serve the interest of whoever develops them and puts them in your car. If your car manufacturer puts them in, they will be biased in favor of your car manufacturer. If your rental company puts them in, they will be biased in favor of your rental company. And if your car insurance company makes you put them in, they will biased in favor of your insurance company.
May be I'm just paranoid, but I would really like to see somekind of black box kit we could develop ourselves and install ourselves.
Here's a response to a lot of questions people will have:
Which cars have it?
How long have cars had it?
Here's a lengthy explanation:
All cars released in the United States are OBDII compatible. This has been a federal mandate since 1998, although some carmakers decided to support OBDII in 1997 and some(including Toyota) had limited compliance in 1996. OBDII is an extension of OBDI, an earlier version of the standard. Carmakers were well aware that this law was coming, many thought ahead.
What is OBDII
It stands for Onboard Diagnostics, version two. It is a requirement for all cars mass produced(exemptions are issued, but it is for specialty manufacturers). It is a standard describing the diagnostics, logging, and interface to the Engine and Powertrain Controller Unit present in all fuel injected cars. Some of the parameters are always monitored, such as vehicle speed, air/fuel ratio, injector pulse lengths, rpm, gear(for automatics mostly), air flow meter/absolute manifold pressure meter, throttle/accelerator pedal position, and measured oxygen sensor output. There were minimums set for what a car had to monitor, but it is an extensible protocol and carmakers were free to extend it as much as they liked. Once the framework was there, extending it to include things like steering wheel position and brake pedal position/brake system pressure were easy. One of the minimums though, was that all cars had to maintain a 30 second rolling-log of all sensors and that as a minimum, the required sensor inputs had to be saved at the moment a sensor fault is detected. Hell, with the price of Flash memory these days, 30 minutes of logging was feasible. Many cars maintain a very detailed log of your driving activity.
So, in response, all new cars sold today have some form of limited logging, and many have very detailed logging. The only differences being what is logged, and for how long.
If you have any questions, just ask. Believe me, I know. It is my job to know.
You can't legislate goodness. Let each to his own destiny, by will of his freely made choices.
PROVE IT to your insurance, employer, and goverment:
bring your car to us and we'll switch your BLACK box
with our WHITE box, always driven under 25 MPH,
always seat-belted, by our team of grandmothers!
Cheers, Joel
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...
A year spent in artificial intelligence is enough to make one believe in God.
Because, if you cause an accident and don't have one, then it's that much harder for me to prove what really happened.
I'm glad they're in there. I can't see that it's a privacy issue; if there's an accident, everyone already knows where I was anyway! I think what people are worried about is that they'll actually be blamed for their irresponsible driving. Well, frankly, airline pilots have had to live with that for years, because they have the responsibility for others' lives. Anyone driving a car is in the same boat--you have a responsibility for your life and the lives of other motorists.
The other side of it is that they can provide useful diagnostic information when your engine is malfunctioning. I've been wanting to buy one of those things that hooks up to the OBD and records the information in my laptop.
--RJ
It was recently revealed that the NTSB has been working with some automanufacturers to deploy black boxes in passenger vehicles. Of special interest was drivers last words immediately before impact. In 49 of the 50 states, it was typically "Oh, shit", but in here in Montana, most drivers last words were "Hold my beer and watch this!!"
OK, if everyone'e car had one of these devices it would make reconstruction of an accident a bit easier. However what happens if you're in an accident with someone who drives an older car?
Would the other driver be able to introduce your black box into evidence even though he had no such box? So he could say "I swear that I was driving within the speed limits, the black box shows that the other guy was going 5 MPH over the limit, therefore the accident was clearly his fault." You could only prove the speed of the car with the black box, not the other car.
That frightens me because it would only give a biased view of the accident. Maybe I sped up to avoid his speeding car. Maybe I was blindsided so I didn't hit the breaks. But only my black box would be revealed, so I'd be the only one with direct proof against him.
The article posted shows a very clear-cut example of how this technology could be good, and does not give any example of how it could be misused. Heck, by reading the article, you'd agree that a non-consenting blood alcohol test would be a good idea, but that clearly was not permissible in this case. Why would a non-consenting black-box reading be permissible? Why are the two things different?
People living in the United States seem to have come to a very wrong belief about the concepts of "self-incrimination" and privacy -- to the extent that I think many of us do not really understand what these concepts mean anymore.
Take the constitutional amendment against self-incrimination. Do you really think that this protection was put into place to prevent evidence from your car being used "against you"? For godsake, this amendment was created to prevent people from being tortured or coerced into false confessions by the government, a basic human right. It's kind of embarassing to have this human right turned into "my car's data recorder cannot be used to incriminate me", don't you think? Since when did your car become an extension of your body, subject to the protections of the constitutional restriction on self-incrimination??
And then, the issue of privacy. People here have come to the belief that "privacy" means that nothing you do should ever be aired for anyone else to see. Again, a perversion of what was fought long and hard for. Privacy is the right of common citizens to be let alone in their daily affairs, to be secure in their peoples and posessions from unwarranted intrusion by others. It is *not* the right to conceal information in a car crash. Sorry.
This is a problem in a prosperous society, where many people have forgotten the reasons why urgent protections were needed from different kinds of intrusions by government or others. Basic rights have been manipulated to become more and more, rights of luxury and desire -- so that we claim violation of basic rights for the most trivial (or undeserving) things. The "right" to smoke in bars? The "right" to have an unobstructed view of the beach? etc etc. We need to get a grip and not squander the real rights that were wisely given to us.