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

arstechnica.com

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

#51

Post by user5994461 »

maxerickson wrote: post #43
mLuby wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

Are we even in the ballpark of being able to collect real time video (and other sensor data) from tens of millions of vehicles? That's a completely different technical problem than having the vehicle store some period of data. I guess authoritarians will push to have the ability to install monitoring programs locally.

Youtube can record that amount of video just fine.

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

#52

Post by mozumder »

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 public roads aren't private spaces.

We allow you to drive on the public roads, in exchange for you giving up your driving privacy. This is why cops can stop you and give you a breathalyzer at will, because that's the trade-off you agreed to when you got your driver's license.

If you want to encrypt your driving data, you should only drive on private roads.

I never assume that driving is a right, instead of a privilege, and the best way to maintain privacy is to just not participate in public activities in the first place..

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

#53

Post by justgottasay3 »

I think there is an aspect of privacy that folks may be ignoring. Privacy from commercial entities.

Consider the following scenario:

Driver A and driver B are involved in an accident. Driver C is in an autonomous vehicle that "witnesses" the accident, by being in close proximity to the event.

If driver A or B have the same insurance company as C, that company could get the data from C to determine fault in the accident that C's vehicle witnessed... or better yet, show that both drivers were at fault and they will not pay anyone anything.

As the number of autonomous vehicles rise, the amount of data available to companies will grow, too.

I would be surprised if there isn't language in the policies being underwritten today that would make such a thing possible... possibly even mandatory.

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

#54

Post by confounded »

konschubert wrote: post #45
balls187 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Aircraft, even private aircraft, are tracked and recorded. Why should automobiles be any different? FAA and NTSB agencies aren't known for abuses of power. Local law enforcement, on the other hand, routinely abuse power (civil forfeiture, unwarranted traffic stops, racial profiling, police brutality, falsifying evidence, lying under oath, illegal search and seizure...). Self driving cars should reduce accidents, be…

> Local law enforcement, on the other hand, routinely abuse power I guess here is the real problem. I think it's better to go after the real problem instead of trying to work around it.

Couldn’t you make the same argument about total surveillance?

Or, say, forced labor for the entire population. If people experience negative feelings while imprisoned, then maybe we should work on the real problem of those feelings, not challenge the nice neutral forced labor concept.

My point is that power over ordinary people generally corrupts, and the only real solution is to reduce and distribute that power so that individuals have more autonomy. Mass surveillance from AVs is a direct threat to your human autonomy.

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

#55

Post by [deleted] »

konschubert wrote: post #45
balls187 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Aircraft, even private aircraft, are tracked and recorded. Why should automobiles be any different? FAA and NTSB agencies aren't known for abuses of power. Local law enforcement, on the other hand, routinely abuse power (civil forfeiture, unwarranted traffic stops, racial profiling, police brutality, falsifying evidence, lying under oath, illegal search and seizure...). Self driving cars should reduce accidents, be…

> Local law enforcement, on the other hand, routinely abuse power I guess here is the real problem. I think it's better to go after the real problem instead of trying to work around it.

[deleted]

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

#56

Post by confounded »

revelation wrote: post #23
jeffdavis wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Great. To provide that, all the car will have to do is record all telemetry and upload it to a server farm. After all, it could be months before the cops realize they need a new angle on a crash you drove past.

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

#57

Post by whatshisface »

harlanji wrote: post #32
mannykannot wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I eat popcorn watching the double-think these days. Laws simply weren't designed for perfect enforcement. We need a new legal framework that can handle omnipresence.

Many penalties have been scaled to compensate for the expected likelihood of getting caught (so as to keep the expected value of the crime negative.) Even without the radical overhaul it sounds like you're suggesting, we'll definitely have to update at least a few things.

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

#58

Post by mnm1 »

Yeah, but we already knew this. Of course they will collect all the data they can all the time and store is as long as they can. What I'm more interested in is how they plan to treat the vehicles themselves. In an autonomous vehicle world, there should be no more moving violations and being pulled over a thing of the past, especially if the vehicles are not owned by humans. Or not, who knows? That's the kind of information that would be much more useful and would potentially save many more lives from ruin than the accident avoidance technology.

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

#59

Post by confounded »

revelation wrote: post #26
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 wo…

Storage is cheap, this data will have a value. Precedent that gets set now is very important.

Also don’t forget Google’s substantial investments in both AVs and ad-surveillance. They have a strong incentive to make cars phone home the whole time, with as much as possible. And so will their lobbyists.

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

#60

Post by white-flame »

mozumder wrote: post #52
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 public roads aren't private spaces. We allow you to drive on the public roads, in exchange for you giving up your driving privacy. This is why cops can stop you and give you a breathalyzer at will, because that's the trade-off you agreed to when you got your driver's license. If you want to encrypt your driving data, you should only drive on private roads. I never assume that driving is a right, instead of a priv…

In a practical sense, people DO have their own expectation of privacy in being "lost in the crowd" when in public places, regardless of what the legal systems project & rationalize.

Regarding public roads, we need licensing and insurance because we can severely damage other people sharing the same space, but that's not necessarily linked to consent to eliminate privacy there. We expect as reasonable for license plates to be recorded when something bad or suspicious happens, and that things like comprehensive license plate tracking is an invasion of privacy.

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