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Car Owners to be Notified of Blackboxes in Vehicle
smooth wombat writes "As a follow-up to this long ago posting, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has passed a resolution requiring car manufacturers to inform buyers if their cars are equipped with Event Data Recorders (EDRs). The new regulation also standardizes what information is to be collected. Car manufacturers must comply with the new regulation beginning in the 2011 model year."
One thing I've always feared: some huge speed bump because after some driving incident/accident I'm embroiled in an "I said/you said" recount of the event. I try to be as safe a driver as possible and have managed 30+ accident-free years. But almost every trip is an adventure with crazies on the road every day. This black box technology could hedge my (and others) bets on accurately describing what "went down".
I don't like the thought someone would be watching me all the time like Big Brother, but on the other hand if I get t-boned, and the other party claims I ran a red light or some other nonsense I like the thought there could be an electronic record showing the other party was traveling way over the speed limit, weaving, slamming brakes, etc. right up to the event.
It could be a great equalizer for insurance rates. It could even spur better driving in on whole by the general populace (some drivers of course and their negligence is intractable).
And, as for the breach in privacy, I don't see much demand and/or interest in the type of data described in the article in contexts other than accidents. If you're accident free, why would the data be interesting?
(Aside: I actually installed a "Car Chip" in my car for personal monitoring. Most notably I was surprised at the frequency of "hard accelerations" -- far more than I'd have guessed. The data was charted against distance, and I was able to "see" where I was "hard accelerating". Interestingly after knowing this, and paying more attention to accelerating I self-modified my habits and the mileage for my car (Civic) increased almost 6%.)
(NOTE: this doesn't address and/or discuss the notion of tracking movement and travel via mechanisms such as GPS... a whole other ball of wax in privacy discussions.)
What also needs to happen, in addition to informing the buyer of the existence of such a recording device in a car, is to have the buyer decide whether or not such a device should be disabled/removed before purchase at no extra cost or liability to the buyer.
Modern copyright is theft of culture from everyone and it retards the progress of the useful arts and sciences.
Do we ALSO need a law to indicate that it's illegal to remove my own property from the car and then destroy that property if I'm in an accident? Imagining that it's my fault, that is. It's not evidence of a crime, unless I intentionally caused the accident.
Are police just entitled to come along and remove it from my car without my permission now? Do they have to ask?
--Jim (me)
I was telling an attorney friend about EDR's and his response was "really? I suppose that means I can subpoena that information and admit it for evidence. Unless it's ruled self-incrimination..." We spent about an hour discussing and it brought up a whole bunch of interesting questions: Is the information on this machine considered part of a persons "papers or effects" or is all information now property of the government court to be surrendered on demand? Is destroying this device considered tampering with evidence... do I have a right to smash up my own car (computer, books, diary, etc.)? If not, I think this intrudes on my property rights. Where does the court's right to information about me end and my rights to my own property and information begin? Is it safe to say "none of your damned business" any more?
""5 years of collecting any kind of data we want, without telling anyone!""
"If the data is a loop of recent events and data is not leaving your car how are they watching you?"
Because in the event of an accident the police can easily download the events off the black box and use it against you in court. It's happened several times already.
That's not the collecting 5 years of data. the statement that I questioned. Secondly, I bet you are being told if the police are touching your vehicle. Alternatively your insurance company may have right to the data and they may turn it over, but you had agreed to that, so you were told. My question stands.
I'm not a big fan of this level of privacy invasion but their is too much precident for privacy crushing actions that this will likley be mandatory in the near future(7-21 years out), as the added price will be negligible.
Storm
The data is my intellectual property. Their copying it violates my copyright. Even the insurance companies are scared of the DMCA.
Notification laws aren't that useful. California has one that requires businesses to post warnings of "hazardous substances". Problem is, damned near everything is a hazardous substance under this law. Consequently, every business has one of these placards and nobody pays any attention because if we did, we'd never be able to buy anything. This notification will just end up as another piece of paper in the mound that nobody ever reads and that we sign whenever we buy a car. I suppose it will have the benefit of letting the seller say, "We told you about this" when some dope comes back a few years later, upset that his black box recording ratted him out as going 100 mph just before the crash.
Not until I agree to the insurance payoff and sign it over, it's mine until then.
Been there and done that one.
while totally irrelevant, it lead to an interesting thought... the data in the recorder is a unique pattern generated by the drivers purposeful actions- eg the data was explicitly designed by the driver and therefore is automatically copyrighted on their behalf..
now perhaps that wouldn't fly in court, but it's an interesting thought.
What needs to be required here is that the black box data cannot be released without the owner's signed approval. And that retaliation cannot be taken against a car owner who refuses to release this data. Anything less is not enough.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
I would argue that any unpublished recording or document should be considered equivilent to the memory of the person who made it; just as one cannot be forced to testify against oneself (divulge one's memories as evidence against oneself), one should not be forced to divulge private (audio, video, data) recordings that one has made. Such will undoubtably become even more important as we begin to develop ever more effective electronic (and possibly cybernetic) aids to memory, and as our technology for decoding the neural patterns in the human mind improves.
Perhaps one day we might discover a way to read a person's memory directly; will this technology be used to circumvent our laws against self-incrimination? What if the memories are encoded, not in human neural tissue, but rather in an electronic implant? Why should there be any difference? And if reading an electronic implant is considered self-recrimination, then why would an external memory device be any different? On the other hand, if one can subpoena the blackbox in the defendent's car, or the contents of the defendent's PDA or laptop, then what makes the defendent's biological memories special? Had we the technology, would it be right to submit the defendent's own memories as evidence? That would make a mockery of our laws against self-recrimination -- and yet we do the same today by seizing and entering into evidence the private documents and recordings of the defendant.
No offence is truly committed when the defendant is demonstrated guilty, provided that the infringement of the defendant's rights does not exceed the crime itself. However, should the defendant not be demonstrated guilty, then the infringement is entirely unjustified, and those responsible should be open to countersuit by the (presumably innocent) former defendant. This would go a long way toward curbing abuse of power in carrying out justice -- as would the addition of a requirement that the prosecutor be the victim of the crime (or the victim's appointed representative, but not the government), with clear (though not necessarily precisely measurable) damage as the basis for restitution (and possibly retribution; this is rather more controversial).
"The state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else." - Bastiat