Did your car witness a crime? Bay Area police may be coming for your Tesla

Regarding bugs and remote takeover, the one thing that does feel like a mitigating factor is I expect for many car models it might be tough to find an exploit that enables the rear camera, but doesn't let the driver know that it's active. Usually when the rear camera is active, the infotainment display automatically switches to the rear view, and I wouldn't be surprised that there's no mode for "turn on rear camera but don't display the video feed to the driver" on most cars. Not as a security/privacy feature, but just because it's easier to write the code that links the two all the time rather than having it be conditional on something.

But yeah, as autonomous driving becomes more pervasive, there will be more cars with cameras recording everything around them at all times. I expect the manufacturers/operators of these cars to store that video for some time after capturing it, even just for quality control, bug tracking, and dispute resolution if there's a crash. And certainly law enforcement already has legal tools to compel the release of this kind of video.

I suppose this is just the next step of what's already the status quo, though. Many public places already have (stationary) cameras, either operated by the police or by private individuals, and police generally have the ability to access the latter, even. Cameras on autonomous vehicles just mean many more cameras over time, cameras that move around.

I don't really love this situation; I would like to see legislation that makes all of this data protected, and requires companies that store it to delete it after a relatively short amount of time (unless subject to a legal hold). But like most things, legal protections tend to lag behind technological progress.

> if an officer isn’t willing to be in the field to issue the ticket and show up in court to defend it then there shouldn’t be a ticket in the first place

I'm torn on this in general. The idealist in me really really really wants to agree with your statement, but the sheer number of cars on the roads means that cops see a teeny tiny fraction of things that happen. Driving-related injuries and deaths are disgustingly high, and I expect most of them are related to speeding, and running red lights and stop signs. That is, stuff cops are supposed to be policing.

No human-powered enforcement mechanism can watch for all of those. Yes, the usual deterrent factor applies: even if you are a butthole who doesn't care about safety, you might follow the rules because of the (relatively small) possibility that there just might be a cop nearby that sees you doing something bad. But clearly it's not really working all that well; car-related injury and death statistics are still (IMO) unacceptably bad.

I feel like this is sort of unique. Like, for other illegal behaviors, you can usually reduce them through other things. Like, have a healthy economy, low unemployment, under-control inflation, and housing that's affordable enough for everyone who wants to live in a place, and you have an environment where it's rare that people feel the need to commit property crimes. But drivers who speed are gonna speed. Drivers who run red lights and stop signs are gonna run red lights and stop signs.

Maybe -- like for many things -- better enforcement isn't the answer. Better road/traffic engineering, stiffer penalties for when people do get caught doing unsafe things... I dunno, maybe that will get us there. Perhaps we'll have some sort of a transit renaissance, and so many fewer people will opt to drive, and that will naturally make things better. Or maybe self-driving will get good enough (and be used pervasively enough, or perhaps even mandated) that riding in a car will become a lot safer, on par with train or even air travel. Who knows.

Regardless, though, I think my personal level of comfort is somewhere in the middle. I certainly don't want dystopian 100% panopicon-style enforcement of every single thing, where everyone is recorded everywhere they go to make sure they aren't breaking the law. But I think a light sprinkling of automated enforcement here and there is probably not harmful privacy/freedom-wise, but can indeed be a societal good. But I don't exactly trust law enforcement to stay within the lines of their mandate when it comes to these sorts of things. And I don't trust elected officials and judges to actually do something when law enforcement gets out of control.

Because people don't. That's just a fact of life, and we even have silly names (like "California stop") for the all-too-common behavior of barely or not completely stopping at a stop sign before continuing on.

I'm not excusing this behavior (even though I do it myself), but it's a widespread fact of life. The world is squishy, and I don't think it's reasonable to punish everyone for not coming to a full stop every single time, even if it's 0.01% safer to do so.

It's also kinda hard to define a "full stop". Well, obviously there are some states that are very obviously a car at rest. But if you were to, say, graph my car's speed at an intersection with a stop sign, you might see a curve that flattens out to where the slope is zero. Maybe that zero-slope point is a teeny tiny fraction of a second, though. Did I come to a full stop? Yes! Can a cop actually realize I did come to a full stop? Often not. Ok, so I did stop, but did I give enough time while at a full stop in order to assess that it was safe to continue moving? Do I even need to do that after I've come to a full stop, or can I start that assessment when my speed is 3mph, and know by the time I've fully stopped that it's immediately safe to continue? I think so, yes.

It's just fuzzy. Humans are fuzzy. The law is fuzzy. Safety is not a yes/no binary, it's fuzzy. Many many people don't always come to a full stop. That's just a fact; asking why is probably pointless.

I just don't believe violating the law is always wrong, always bad, or always unsafe. While I would agree that most people are bad at risk assessment, and most people are not good drivers, the law should be flexible enough to deal with cases where breaking it is absolutely fine to do.

As a perhaps weird and imperfect analogy, killing another person is illegal... except when it isn't. The law recognizes that sometimes, even if in rare cases, killing another person is justified. This is why we have different words: "homicide" is sometimes not "murder" or even "manslaughter"; sometimes it's "self-defense".