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Black Boxes In Cars Raise Privacy Concerns
hessian writes "In the next few days, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration is expected to propose long-delayed regulations requiring auto manufacturers to include event data recorders — better known as 'black boxes' — in all new cars and light trucks. But the agency is behind the curve. Automakers have been quietly tucking the devices, which automatically record the actions of drivers and the responses of their vehicles in a continuous information loop, into most new cars for years. Data collected by the recorders is increasingly showing up in lawsuits, criminal cases and high-profile accidents. Massachusetts Lt. Gov. Timothy Murray initially said that he wasn't speeding and that he was wearing his seat belt when he crashed a government-owned car last year. But the Ford Crown Victoria's data recorder told a different story: It showed the car was traveling more than 100 mph and Murray wasn't belted in."
The guy broke the law, tried to lie about it and now that's called privacy concern? Oh the hypocrisy.
He's a politician. It's not hypocrisy; it's simply his preferred form of reality.
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
- Last time I checked it wasn't slashdot.us either
- Yes, even americans do wander in some "foreign" websites (as if it meant anything on internet) and voice their opinions. What's wrong with it either way ?
Those rules will change. For safety. Always for safety. First it will be unavailable. Then it will be logged for "simplicity and ease of access" but only by a court order. Then a court order will become easier to get. Then it will be rubber stamped. Then any police department will be able to access the data.
And don't say "slippery slope fallacy". It's only a fallacy when there's no clear way for it to progress that way. Just like security cameras, traffic cameras, and phone records are sliding that way black boxes will.
If video games influenced behavior the Pac Man generation would be eating pills and running away from their problems.
Not so much this guy. He drove a government-owned vehicle and has a public function so his duties include giving a good example, and so he has less expectation of privacy. And yes, I'd be inclined to allow law enforcement access to such data in the case of a deadly incident. Though "breaking the law" is debatable as road rules generally aren't "law", merely rules. Yes, there's usually a difference, though I haven't the faintest about the details of the road code(s) relevant to this.
But there is a privacy concern, and if you ignore the guy and his incident in TFA, it's pretty clear later on what the problem is. It's about adding recording devices to cars without the owners knowledge or consent. That was a problem before the law requiring this came into force, and it's still a problem now. There is also the problem of reliability of the things that may or may not be quite the same as the perception (electronic thus infallible, just like "biometrics" is generally taken to be infallible but is anything but). Aeronautical black boxes are tightly regulated. These things, not so much.
What if the storage fails in a way that shows incorrect data and you do end up in an accident when only driving 50 but the device showing you've been zigzagging and doing 90 (which you were just before it burned out, but on a privately owned racecourse a couple weeks prior)? Or what if someone manipulated the recorder to frame you? It's unlikely, but not impossible, and if this sort of thing is going to be used as evidence against the owner of the vehicle it had better have safeguards and tamper evidence mechanisms built-in.
And then there's the question of who owns the data and who may access it when, at what cost, how, that sort of thing. On top of that there's the problem of various promises made ("only use for law enforcement, honest!") when such promises are routinely broken in similar situations elsewhere.
So yeah, plenty of problems with this practice. The example isn't a particularly good one, but laws turning your car into evidence against you is a bit much, innit? Then just gimme a robotic car and have someone else be liable for its mistakes, thanks.
I live in the United States, where people enjoy the right to not testify against themselves. That means nothing if a person is forced to pay for and travel with a device that will record possibly incriminating testimony which must then be surrendered to the courts. Sorry, but the right to be free from self-incrimination is the historically progressive innovation here. What you're talking about belongs to the days of the Inquisition. From the way you tell it, it seems like it's the Old World that's a little behind on the times.
In this case the vehicle was not owned by him, it is owned by the employer i.e. the government who has every right to sue and claim damages of their property and also have the right to instal any sort of device on their car without requiring the consent but the after disclosing the fact to the user.
The so-called choice to buy another car is moot in this regard once all car manufacturers have them.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Just look at what you wrote, think about the meaning you were apparently trying to convey, then about what meaning was actually conveyed.
America's a big place with lots of different people. Some of them are interested in the wider world, some aren't. I've met some of the most ignorant (racist) and provincial people in Europe, but I don't extrapolate that to EVERY EUROPEAN.
That is so much bullshit.
You have a right to privacy, and it is the government's remit to protect that right against all who would trample it, just as you can't sell yourself into slavery, enter a contract that obliges your vote, or dictate that an employee or renter go to church. And with your examples, you don't get to put an asterisk and say "except where denied by law" when you say stupid shit like that, it's an absurdity. It's saying "this categorical statement is true, except where it isn't".
And the government didn't give us that right, it exists simply because we demand it of them. It's funny to see the libertarian herp-a-derps get that backward, treating the Constitution like it was a magic freedom fountain from which the rights flow.
So you're willing to give up your freedom for security? Ben Franklin had a saying for you.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
Ben Franklin was NOT proposing anarchy.
Neither was anyone else. Nice try, though.
Filthy, filthy copyrapists!