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Lawmakers Try To Block Black Box Technology In Cars, DVR Tracking
Lucas123 writes "Lawmakers this week filed bipartisan legislation that would give car owners control over data collected in black box-style recorders that may be required in all models as soon as next year. The move follows a separate proposal made earlier this month that would limit telecommunications companies in tracking viewer activity with new digital video recorders (DVR) technology. The 'Black Box Privacy Protection Act' would give vehicle owners more control over the information collected through a car or motorcycle event data recorders, which the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has proposed be required in all new cars as of 2014. 'For me, this is a basic issue of privacy,' said Rep. Mike Capuano (D-MA). 'Many consumers aren't even aware that this technology is already in most vehicles.' The second, more colorfully titled piece of legislation, is the 'We Are Watching You Act'. The bill was filed in response to reports that national telecommunications companies are exploring technology for DVRs that would record the personal activities of people as they watch television at home in order to target them for marketing and advertising. If implemented, among other things, when the recording device is in use, the words 'WE ARE WATCHING YOU' would appear on the television screen. 'This may sound preposterous, but it is neither a joke nor an exaggeration,' Capuano said. 'These DVRs would essentially observe consumers as they watch television as a way to super-target ads. It is an incredible invasion of privacy.'"
Actually I wouldn't mind having a black box in the car recording everything... IF I have access to the data. I've contemplated wiring up cameras and building a small server to continuously record front and rear views, so if there's an accident or something and there's questions about what happened I can pull up the video and say "Here, watch what happened.". Having had friends who've been dinged for rear-ending someone because they got rear-ended and shoved forward, I think it'd be wonderful to be able to pull up the black box record and prove that I was stationary with the engine at idle and the brake fully applied when the collision occurred and could not have been the cause.
What I object to isn't the black box itself. It's having that black box there and not having any access to it or control over or even knowledge of who's pulling the data from it and when.
Yeah, I got a primitive one in my own car. I just opened it up and wired the nvram reset to the ignition. Whenever the car turns off, it fires the reset. It's an amnesiac vehicle now. Of course, not everyone knows how to do this, but hey.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
Programming/reprogramming these things.
Judge: Officer Friday, could you please repeat that, I'm not sure I heard it right.
Friday: Yes, your honor. It appears on Tuesday, June 4th, 2013, the suspect's car was orbiting Europa, in clear violation of the directive to leave this one moon alone.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
when will americans well... complain about something? When they pass a law saying that your first born daughter must lose her virginity at age 7 to the president?
I don't know... I haven't been in the US for over 15 years now, but this bullshit I read... It makes you people look like meekest lot out there. And then I read comments about americans laughing at the chaos in brazil. You people should be doing that 24/7, instead of clapping, laughing, stuffing your faces and then changing the channel for more wrasslin
"In America, you watch Television.
"In Soviet Russia, television watches YOU!!"''
This time you've got it backwards.
im certain blocking black box technology in cars has nothing to do with, say, the potential to correct a politicians statements after the fact
Good people go to bed earlier.
Instead of making little piss-ant changes that affect only specific and limited circumstances, let's make a strong amendment to property law as a pile driver through all the non-ownership bullshit that's been plaguing us for the past 15-20 years.
If I am making a purchase as a private person (ie: not a business), whatever I've bought is mine. I own it 100%, it's my goddamn property and I will do whatever I fucking want with it (within written law of course)
No amount of shrinkwrap, ckickwrap, stick-on contracts, implied or non-negotiated "agreements" can change that. Contracts, usage policies and EULAs in which you had no bargaining or direct input are automatically null and void.
Any attempt by a manufacturer or producer to actively restrict, limit or deny my access to my own property, whether it be a needlessly fortified mechanism or an encrypted system to which I'm not provided the key, is met with swift punishment. The process for customers to address their grievances should be streamlined and available to the general public with minimal expense to the individual.
Hey, I can dream of a time when corporations won't be the government's puppet master, can't I?
""TomTom Australia says it is planning to sell GPS data collected about its customers' journeys to road authorities and private companies even after it was forced to apologise when that same data was used by Dutch authorities to set speed traps. The revelations, revealed in The Australian Financial Review today, have caused outrage among privacy campaigners and lobby groups who believe it is now necessary for electronic devices to come with special stickers saying whether they are going to track your location and be sold to marketers. I'm starting to think that we're going to need to label every electronic item with a special sticker saying whether it's going to track your location and sell it to marketers or not. But TomTom Australia's vice-president of marketing, Chris Kearney, in a phone interview, rejected the privacy concerns and claims that TomTom was "tracking" users. He conceded TomTom was collecting real-time "timestamped GPS data" of users' journeys but said there were no privacy risks because the data was decoupled from the individual users."" http://www.smh.com.au/digital-life/cartech/outrage-over-tomtom-speed-traps-for-motorists-20110506-1ebc2.html
Radical counterproposal: Why not remove the income-based restrictions instead?
Even better, why not just guarantee everyone a minimum income that's sufficient to cover the basics?
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
It really makes me angry that we as a society have tolerated the creep of this surveillance society for so long like frogs in a pot while the temperature rises to boiling. You can argue that technology made it inevitable, and you're right, it's probably too late now to get the genie back in the bottle. No one knows history. Few people have actually read "1984". There should've been laws against this passed two decades ago, but noooo, it was sold to us as security, and people will fall over themselves to trade freedom for that.
Post-industrial society? When's that coming?
Do an inventory of the goods sitting around your house. Clothing, hand-stitched by child labor in buildings prone to deadly fires and collapse. Produce, picked by migrant workers, stooped over in fields for 12 hours a day, and frequently deported instead of being paid. Power from coal, via mountaintop removal in the Appalachian coal and lead belt, where cancer rates are 80% above national average, and ubiquitous heavy metal poisoning stunts the physical and mental growth of children. Post-industrial, my ass. You go to the store and see everything neatly packaged in pristine plastic --- just propaganda covering the massive amount of blood, sweat, and tears providing your comforts. A little neocolonialism and a lot of ignorance: we haven't moved past industrial society; just shuffled it out of sight, where working conditions can regress ever further back towards the horrors we once ran from.
Constant remote reporting of vehicle location via OnStar, etc. - bad.
Record of speed, braking, etc. for the last few seconds before airbag deployment, readable only if someone plugs a reader into the wreckage - probably OK.
It will not be very long now until all insurance companies require you to plug their black box into your OBD II port or they won't cover you at all. And given that insurance companies are about the lowest form of life, they won't blink before handing over data from your car (in their box remember) to any official that asks. So as usual, this legislative Kabuki dance won't solve anything.