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

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

#101
post #38

Imagine a world with less centralizing force, where owners of devices are encouraged to decentralize data storage. In such a world, autonomous vehicles would ask you to specify where to store the data they collect. The owner could select to choose on-vehicle storage, vendor-provided central storage, or a data server they personally own and operate. And in all cases, given an option to encrypt using a key selected by…

I'd love that, but there are three problems with it, even if you put aside the commercial benefits: 1. Means people have to build and test two systems 2. It's confusing to the normal user 3. It's better for the product if it's shared as they can iterate and improve based on the data. This actually applies to loads of products, like voice recognition (Google has recorded and stored everything you've ever said to 'ok G…

In my ideal world, data should go to the vendor by default. As you said, it helps the product improve by feeding it more data, and it's simpler for most users.

With that being said, privacy concious people should have the ability to opt out, and either not have their data stored permanently at all, or allow them to store it on a personal server. If you chose to do that, it's on you to make sure your server is setup in a way to ingest the data, so no additional work for the vendor.

I suspect in reality most vendors would not provide that option, because data is so valuable, which is why it's important to have laws that allow us to protect it.

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

#102
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…

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…

Its incredibly naive to think that any and data being recorded or transmitted won't be harvested (both legally and illegally) by authorities.

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

#103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

MobilEye is doing just that to create their HD maps and train their models so, yes.

Tens of millions of vehicles all at once?

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

#104

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 accide…

Is that any different or worse than the insurance company using street cameras to determine blame?

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

#105
post #22
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.

I'd rather think of roads(and national parks, and beaches, and mountains) as "ours" not as "government property". I have the right to be there because I'm the citizen of the country.

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

#106
post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess I can understand the argument but I don't see what kind of world view thinks that you can go out into the world r have privacy. Roads are what connect the vast majority of all land. It's not like you can just trespass into other people's land and expect privacy either

The world view is that what happens in public space is not private; you can't expect privacy for things you do in public. If you go to a public concert, people can look at you, note that you were here and tell that to others. That doesn't violate privacy because you had no privacy there to begin with. And in a similar manner, if you drove last thursday on a particular road, whoever bothered to look at you and your ca…

In a public space a random person might 'see' you there - but they would not know who you were and may not even remember you correctly. A machine on the other hand remembers perfectly and records constantly. As far as your car-the random observer may be hard pressed to note the fact of your license plate number while trying to remember what kind and color your car was.

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

#107
post #65
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.

As a fellow dutchman, I'm not sure what organization would track ships. Would you mind sharing? It sounds interesting.

Well, basically any nautical organization tracks them to some extent (i.e. ports, tugs, pilots, whatever).

We specifically use AIS [1], tracking ships is quite easy because of it. Other methods are radar.

Because it so relatively easy, there are a lot of commercial companies doing it too. The most well-known is probably MarineTraffic [2]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_identification_syste...

[2] https://www.marinetraffic.com/

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

#108
post #107
post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a fellow dutchman, I'm not sure what organization would track ships. Would you mind sharing? It sounds interesting.

Well, basically any nautical organization tracks them to some extent (i.e. ports, tugs, pilots, whatever). We specifically use AIS [1], tracking ships is quite easy because of it. Other methods are radar. Because it so relatively easy, there are a lot of commercial companies doing it too. The most well-known is probably MarineTraffic [2] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_identification_syste... [2] https://…

I recently heard about people being fined for sailing in a prohibited zone (I believe an exclusion zone around a drilling platform). How does that jive with the rules against keeping tracking information of personal vessels?

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

#109
post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why wouldn't un-disable-able OTA updates be vulnerable to large-scale remote hacking? Sounds like Teslas can already be hacked. By far the simplest way to prevent this vulnerability is to prevent automatic connections to the outside world.

You may want to read this admittedly long take on it: https://www.zachaysan.com/cars

Thanks! Glad to know I'm not the only one…

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

#110
post #64
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Would you take an 'off' button, but with the caveat that put the burden of proof on you if you were in an accident while telemetry is off?

No, I'm not willing to compromise my privacy in any way. I haven't had a ticket since l996 and refuse to install the insurance company monitoring tool.
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