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California Protects Black-Box Data Privacy
Snowgen writes "According to a story at SFGate.com, California has recently passed a law regulating the little black boxes found in many modern automobiles. The new law requires that manufacturers disclose the existence of such boxes in the vehicle's operators' manual. The law also prohibits the use of data from such boxes without a court order or the permission of the vehicle's owner, unless the data is used in such a way that it can not be traced back to the owner."
Easy. Ask yourself, "Did I do that at thair age?" If the answer's yes, then odds are they're doing it
- Apple Computer......proudly going out of business for over twenty years.
So what they mean is, unless you get sued... You crash a car into someone. You say you were going under the limit, the insurance company knows your car has one of these black boxes in it. Insurance company says to court "we don't think he was going the limit due to skid marks/someone saying he looked like he was going pretty fast/previous record", gets court order, information obtained, insurance claim denied. say the person you hit wants a piece of the actio, they say "his insurance company isn't paying out, I think he was going too fast, give me the black box data", gets a court order, sues your ass off.
So basically it's as useful as the constitutional amendments that begin "Congress shall make no law..." and end in "unless it makes a law that says it can"
The collection of vehicle control evidence is a crucial step in the investigation of traffic accidents. Sheltering that information from the authorities has only one purpose, to shield delinquent drivers from retribution for their unlawful acts.C T-style.
I think we've already been through the loop about "If you aren't ${someevilthing}, then you have nothing to worry about." Well, haven't you ever been late to a critical meeting and gone 10mph above the limit? Haven't you ever forgotten to buckle your seatbelt? And don't even get me started on video/audio data collection... My conversations within a car are indeed private, and should not be accesible by the police, the SS or DHS, or what ever. Especially not at-a-distance-we-don't-have-to-tell-you-PATRIOT-A
Shall we also say again that driving a car is a mere PRIVILEGE and far from being a right????
That very well may be, and probably is, but the possesion of that privilege does not nullify a more fundamental right to privacy.
#define DRM chmod 000
...if my insurance company in exchange would give me a sizable break on my $$$ premiums.
That's fine by me, but only so long as I'm allowed to remotely download the black box of any police car whenever I choose.
The "Black Box" system that everyone is crying about is part of the OBDII standard, or On Board Diagnostics that all cars produced since the early 90's are required to support. This is a set of standards that includes what data is to be accessible via diagnostics. There are several modes of retrieving data, and they are all intended for aiding in diagnosing the emissions welness of the vehicle as well as other faults your vehilce may encounter. The feature that has everyone up in arms is the "Freeze frame data" feature of OBD-II. What this does is, whenever there is a sensor fault (Ie: front of your car gets blown up in a collision, or something simple like your Oxygen sensor goes bad), the previous 5-30 seconds of data (varies depending on the car) is logged to *aid the technitian* in diagnosing the fault. Unfortunately, someone figured out that when you get in a wreck, there's usually some sort of sensor fault, and the car's computer conviently records a lot of variables relevent to the collision.
It is impossible to remove this "black box" because on any car that supports OBD, *EVERY* computer in the car logs some sort of data. The important stuff is logged in the same computer that controls how your engine runs. It IS possible to clear the data using a diagnostic tool designed to do so. See the SAE J1979 standard if you're interested learning how to do this.