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Networked Cars: Good For Safety, Bad For Privacy
jfruh writes "Networked cars — cars that can identify each other's location and prevent collisions — are coming soon, and will be a boon for safety, with one estimate having them cut accidents by 70 percent. But what happens to all the data the car will collect — about your location and driving behavior? It's worrisome that nobody seems to be thinking seriously about the privacy side of the equation."
They don't have to be, if you just generate a guid for each trip rather than for a single car for its life time the problem is solved.
Um, considering that more than likely, every person in the car is already being tracked at a personal level via their cell phone (and other devices, such as tablets, etc), I don't see this as being all that much worse than the de facto privacy of the modern digital world.
Better known as 318230.
There's a giant plate identifying me or the driver on the back of the car(and in most states, front too).
Given the chance of damage I don't know if privacy is something I want in a car.
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
I know our entire world is built against it, at the moment. But I hope that, sometime in my life, robotic systems replace humans in the driver's seat. Driving is one task we humans seem inept at safely executing. It makes sense, most of the time in a car is uneventful. It's the 5% of the time where something really bizarre happens that we have to be prepared for the rest of the time. But human attention span doesn't work that way and so people get lazy, start slurping sodas (or worse), and people wind up dead. So, I hope to see the human driver become a thing of the past in my lifetime. It may not happen, but it is worthy of working toward.
PS: I don't reply to ACs.
Yeah and all those other idiots are speeding because everyone else is too.
While there are instances where privacy concerns are legitimate, in cases like this it is my opinion (yes I'm entitled to it, no you dont have to like it or agree with it, and so what if you dont) that the only people concerned with the what if's and maybe's are those who do not abide the law.
Privacy isn't always about hiding wrong-doing; it's about hiding things that some people are too narrow minded or ignorant to understand and accept.
So I believe it would be more accurate would be to say that those who are concerned with the what if's and the maybe's are those who understand that not everyone does - or even should - conform to societies idea of normal. These are the sort of people who understand that in any system there are edge cases, things which are not quite as they seem on the surface and actively try to design around such flaws. These are the programmers, the designers, the engineers of our society.
These are the people who try to make sure that you can pick up your drunken college buddy from a gay bar at 0-dark-30, and not have it bite you in the ass should you later try to run for public office. These are the people who try to prevent you from being labelled a terrorist simply because your club happens to share a community building with an unpopular religion. These are the people who try to to prevent pediatricians from being lynched because some idiots can't tell the difference between a Doctor specializing in children and a pedophile.
So, in future when you are about to call someone paranoid over issues such as this, please consider: it may be that they have realized that what may seem to be a simple system, when applied on a national or international scale, becomes a system in which even relatively small errors can destroy lives.
Remember when they told us that traffic light cameras wouldn't be used for anything but managing traffic jams at that intersection?
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade