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A Car’s Computer Can ‘Fingerprint’ You in Minutes Based on How You Drive

wired.com

21–30 of 71 posts

Re: A Car’s Computer Can ‘Fingerprint’ You in Minutes Based on How You Drive

#21

Talk about doing things the hard way. With 15 people, I'd bet you could determine the driver simply by the weight sensor in the driver's seat. No need to do any actual driving. You could probably make some progress with radio station settings (volume/channel etc) or even how they adjust the seats/mirrors.

Not all sensors are available all the time. I was creating a prototype dash cam that recorded drivers driving habits and AR of obstacles on the path in addition to GPS routing.

The best way to "log on" a driver was analyze driving pattern and assign records to that person

Re: A Car’s Computer Can ‘Fingerprint’ You in Minutes Based on How You Drive

#26
I suppose it would depend on the driver. I know a few people I could fingerprint with the lousy IMU built into my ears with no computer analysis - some go constantly from the white line to the yellow line and back, some don't realize that the accelerator works at input levels below 10%, some second-guess the automatic transmission at every shift...but many drive, well, normally. Regarding the mouse or keyboard inputs discussed in this thread, there are a few hunt-and-peckers or over-correctors who would similarly be found. I don't think it's that impressive to get a few drivers out of a sample, they likely have detectable quirks.

Re: A Car’s Computer Can ‘Fingerprint’ You in Minutes Based on How You Drive

#27
The privacy concern is valid. It won't be long before all new cars are sending data from the sensors to third parties, and it would be unthinkable for the manufacturers to ask for your consent before collecting that data since they'll make money off of it.

The article mentions concerns with insurance companies. One I worked for tried to get customers to agree to having their rates adjusted based on data from their cars. It was mostly to do with how many miles the customer drove, but I think there was also an element that looked at speed coupled with GPS data to determine if they habitually exceeded the speed limit. There was a lot of pushback from customers and privacy advocates at the time and it didn't really go anywhere at the time (2007-08 iirc) but since that time I recall hearing of another company doing just that with some volunteers.

Now imagine the insurer has access to everything on the CAN bus. Your rates could go up based on taking curves too fast, braking too hard too often, or following too close.

The law enforcement angle is disturbing too.

Then there's the nightmare of the advertising people getting hold of it, complete with GPS data. God knows what they'd do with it exactly, but whatever it is, it will be sleazy and annoying by definition.

Time to include this on the list of things to oppose for privacy's sake.

Re: A Car’s Computer Can ‘Fingerprint’ You in Minutes Based on How You Drive

#28
post #8

With 90 minutes of data, they could pick out one driver out of a sample size of 15 . How meaningful is that, really?

Agreed. A 10% false positive rate is huge. Expand the dataset to millions and I doubt you can identify individuals quite so certainly.

Re: A Car’s Computer Can ‘Fingerprint’ You in Minutes Based on How You Drive

#29
post #27

The privacy concern is valid. It won't be long before all new cars are sending data from the sensors to third parties, and it would be unthinkable for the manufacturers to ask for your consent before collecting that data since they'll make money off of it. The article mentions concerns with insurance companies. One I worked for tried to get customers to agree to having their rates adjusted based on data from their ca…

>taking curves too fast, braking too hard too often

I was thinking about this the other day, people driving in San Francisco or Seattle hills would then have higher rates than people driving on flat Texas roads? People stuck in rush hours (where no matter how smoothly you try to drive, there will be more hard brakes) would have higher rates than people who can avoid it? regardless of the number of car accidents in the area?

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