Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Cops won’t need a warrant to pull the data off an autonomous car

arstechnica.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 111 posts

Re: Cops won’t need a warrant to pull the data off an autonomous car

#21

Post by jeffdavis »

jdavis703 wrote: post #8
mLuby wrote: post #2

'I felt like I was in heaven,' the cop said. 'It's like instant replay in the NFL, I can tell what happened.' The engineers looked at each other like, 'Aw, crap.' As engineers, we have an obligation to think through privacy concerns. These (and nearly all) devices should either not retain data or should encrypt it. Also my self-driving car better not be phoning home or getting updates over the air. I've seen what hap…

Aircraft, even private aircraft, are tracked and recorded. Why should automobiles be any different? Far more people are killed and injured by vehicles than are killed by aircraft. In general I'm pretty pro-privacy but I've had way too many close calls and accidents with bad drivers who were found to be at fault. Maybe there's a better way to get to vision zero, and if so I'd love to hear it.

You can't be pro-privacy and place it last priority behind the unattainable "vision zero".

Re: Cops won’t need a warrant to pull the data off an autonomous car

#22

Post by rayiner »

dtech wrote: post #12
jdavis703 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aircraft, even private aircraft, are tracked and recorded. Why should automobiles be any different? Far more people are killed and injured by vehicles than are killed by aircraft. In general I'm pretty pro-privacy but I've had way too many close calls and accidents with bad drivers who were found to be at fault. Maybe there's a better way to get to vision zero, and if so I'd love to hear it.

Cars, especially in the US, is very closely linked to the location of a person. For private aircraft that is generally not the case I assume. I work for a semi-governmental organization in the Netherlands and we track ships. Tracking company-owned commercial ships is no problem, but we are heavily restricted by law in what we can do with the location data of privately owned ships because people live on them.

If you want privacy maybe don’t drive around on what is literally government property.

Re: Cops won’t need a warrant to pull the data off an autonomous car

#23

Post by revelation »

jeffdavis wrote: post #21
jdavis703 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aircraft, even private aircraft, are tracked and recorded. Why should automobiles be any different? Far more people are killed and injured by vehicles than are killed by aircraft. In general I'm pretty pro-privacy but I've had way too many close calls and accidents with bad drivers who were found to be at fault. Maybe there's a better way to get to vision zero, and if so I'd love to hear it.

You can't be pro-privacy and place it last priority behind the unattainable "vision zero".

No one is asking for historical location data, but merely what the car recorded as your input and other driving parameters before, during, after a crash. Where exactly is the privacy interest in that?

Re: Cops won’t need a warrant to pull the data off an autonomous car

#24

Post by namelost »

Sargos wrote: post #11

Laws take a while to catch up with new technology. This will be fixed in 8-14 years after enough people are affected by this and congress finally gets lobbied enough. Early adopters will get hit the hardest though.

It's not the early adopters that will be hit the hardest, it's the people around the early adopters. So, anybody who lives in an urban area.

Re: Cops won’t need a warrant to pull the data off an autonomous car

#25

Post by lovich »

rayiner wrote: post #22
dtech wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cars, especially in the US, is very closely linked to the location of a person. For private aircraft that is generally not the case I assume. I work for a semi-governmental organization in the Netherlands and we track ships. Tracking company-owned commercial ships is no problem, but we are heavily restricted by law in what we can do with the location data of privately owned ships because people live on them.

If you want privacy maybe don’t drive around on what is literally government property.

Privately owned boats and autonomous cars are government property?

Re: Cops won’t need a warrant to pull the data off an autonomous car

#26

Post by revelation »

ovi256 wrote: post #4

This is an aspect of autonomous vehicles that I had never considered before. Given each AV has complete 360 degrees camera coverage (for detection of other vehicles, if Tesla, for debugging, if others which rely primarily on Lidar) and this camera data is very valuable for debugging and as a liability reducer, this data is very probably to be kept, then transferred to a datacenter. So each AV is also a bunch of mobil…

I don't think that data is likely to be kept, raw or otherwise, on anything other than a very small rolling window, if even that. What the author of this article missed is the boot full of server racks that have the storage and processing abilities to even consider storing the raw data from a multitude of cameras, LIDAR and associated sensor systems.

For development, sure, in test fleets, sure, but production cars won't bother with that.

Re: Cops won’t need a warrant to pull the data off an autonomous car

#27

Post by mannykannot »

mLuby wrote: post #19
mannykannot wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That quote is in the context of accident reconstruction. Putting aside the question of how many accidents there will be in our future autonomous world, accidents already leak personal information, especially if they lead to court cases, and it does not seem to me that improved crash investigation need necessarily leak any more. I think this is a qualitatively different situation than tracking people's location and wh…

Yeah it's about an accident, but if an ordinary police officer can view this, you know more powerful agencies are going to collect all of it (incidentally).

It is the people who want to expand general surveillance who would like to blur the distinction between that and accident investigation, in a bogus attempt to justify the former, and I don't think we should go along with it.

Re: Cops won’t need a warrant to pull the data off an autonomous car

#29

Post by praneshp »

ben-schaaf wrote: post #17
Consultant32452 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Far more people commit crimes than vehicles. So why not forcibly track all people?

Apparently there's a correlation between thinking of committing a crime and committing it. We should probably find out a way to track that too!

Yes, I heard there are three creatures that can predict that too!

Re: Cops won’t need a warrant to pull the data off an autonomous car

#30

Post by Clubber »

pimmen wrote: post #7
mLuby wrote: post #2

'I felt like I was in heaven,' the cop said. 'It's like instant replay in the NFL, I can tell what happened.' The engineers looked at each other like, 'Aw, crap.' As engineers, we have an obligation to think through privacy concerns. These (and nearly all) devices should either not retain data or should encrypt it. Also my self-driving car better not be phoning home or getting updates over the air. I've seen what hap…

The problem is that I do want the data to be stored because it could act as training data to make the vehicles better. But I also recognize the potential for abuse. This one's tricky...

It's only tricky because there isn't an "off" button. That's the problem, it's forced on your rather than optional.
Post reply on HN