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Ask Slashdot: Will Cars Eventually Need a Do-Not-Track Option?
Nerval's Lobster writes "Earlier this month, a very public argument erupted between Tesla Motors CEO Elon Musk and New York Times reporter John Broder, who claimed in a Feb. 8 column that his electric-powered Model S sedan had ground to a halt on a lonely stretch of Connecticut highway, starved for power. Musk retaliated by publishing the data from Broder's test drive, which suggested the reporter had driven the vehicle at faster speeds than he had claimed in the article (which would have drained the battery at a quicker rate) and failed to fully charge the car at available stations. Musk seems to have let the whole thing drop, but the whole brouhaha raises a point that perhaps deserves further exploration: the rising use of sensors in cars, and whether an automobile company—or any other entity, for that matter—has the right to take data from those sensors and use it for their own ends without the owner's permission. (For his part, Musk has claimed that Tesla only turns on data logging with 'explicit written permission from customers.') What do you think, Slashdot? Do we need the equivalent of a 'Do-Not-Track' option for cars?"
Do not track applies because you're visiting someone else's territory. There should already be a default inability to track your car based on the same logic that I'm not allowed to place a bug on your car and track you now. Companies should have to be given explicit permission to be able to do so. Opt-in rather than opt-out.
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Given that the "Do-not-track" option is a sad joke that will never protect anyone's privacy, I am going to go with "no." What we need instead is to restore the concept of "privacy" to something normal, routine, and backed by the force of law.
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You have a DO NOT TRACK option, called DO NOT BUY.
If you buy into the car with sensors, recording, logging, and reporting - then you've really put the gun to your own head and pulled the trigger, eh?
However, in the United States, driving is a privileged, not a right. Your car's position on public roadways is not private information. When your car wrecks in a suspected criminal manner - even if it is a 1957 Chevy, law enforcement gets to look at it, and record the speedometer reading if it was broken and held in place.
The more sensors, the more information.
Get informed, and make an informed decision.
It's a great topic but a poor example. The car was on loan for testing and a reviewer should not assume they have privacy rights for the obvious reason this story points out that the reviewer lied in the reviewer and was caught by the black box and it wasn't their car. Now if the reviewer had purchased the car things might have been different. Personally I dislike black boxes and we should always assume they are turned on since it can be done without our permission. An example being the police.
Highly unlikely given the likelihood of GPS-for-road-tax coming not too far down the line.
For any question asked in the subject line, the correct answer is no. For the specific example cited, it _was_ the owner of the car (Tesla) that was using the collected data as they saw fit. The only reason that this is being raised as an issue is because the reporter got caught trying to fudge the results, and now trying to cry foul (Reminds me of the scene from "Liar, Liar": "FR: Your honor, I object!" "Judge: Why?" "FR: Because it's devastating to my case!"). I bet there would be absolutely no issue if Tesla had come out and said that the data corroborated the reporter's story. Actually, I'm willing to bet that there would have been a big ruckus made if the data did show that and Tesla refused to release it.
No.
This was a test drive in a specially prepared loaner car from the manufacturer, which the reporter got to drive for free. The reporter knew the deal he (or his employer) would have signed a stack of releases in order to drive it.
Even with an eye to the future where such logging is widespread, we don't need any kind of "do-not-track"; we do need courts to recognize that information stored on our devices is equivalent to the "papers and effects" in our homes, and thus cannot be searched or seized without due process.
If the new sensors and tracking spawn any kind of legislation, I'd rather that the legislation be geared toward ensuing open access -- make the manufacturers publish API's and data formats for the data that the car tracks so I can use the data as I want. Let me read the "black box" if I want to, don't tell me "Oh, you need this $20,000 diagnostic computer to read it, then you have to send the data to us for analysis".
My Nissan LEAF also tracks all your driving. Nissan's solution to the question of privacy is to pop a dialog on the in-dash touchscreen every time the car is started, asking you if you want to send your data to them. Unless you press "Yes", that drive is not tracked.
People actually exploit this to game the driving efficiency rankings. Hop in, hit "No", drive to the top of a hill, then turn the car off and on, hit "Yes" and coast to the bottom of the hill. Do that a little and you can look like you regularly achieve 20+ miles per kWh.
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And as long as we continue to distort the market for freight transport by heavily subsidizing the trucking industry, those trucks will continue to tear up our roads (literally) and contribute to traffic congestion when much of their cargo should instead go by rail which causes much less of a problem.
I should also add that trains are three times as fuel-efficient as trucks, which means they create one-third as much air pollution. Air pollution costs us up to $1,600 per person annually.
We would all save a lot of money if the trucking industry pulled its own weight, so to speak.
Any sufficiently unpopular but cohesive argument is indistinguishable from trolling.