Black Boxes In Your Car, Safety Issue Or Easier To Apply Blame?
Wired.com reports that the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, a government agency, wants to propose that all cars are required to have a Black Box event recorder. Similar to those in airliners, they would record statistics as you drive. Their claim is that the data would be used in the investigation of an accident. However, a far more privacy violating, unethical, and dangerous practice may come out of having your car recording how you drive.
When it comes to the data recorded automakers have already tried to say that the data recorded doesn't belong to and shouldn't be accessible by the car owners. That means that even though you bought and paid for your $35,000 SUV, you don't have any rights to use it 100%. Second, you have no idea what is being recorded. Speed, brakes, engine statistics would be the basic data points you would think are getting stored, but what about GPS position? With almost every car new having a GPS installed in them, why couldn't they store your coordinates as you drive as well? Record if you have your seat belt on or not? Look at the volume of your radio? Detect how many people are in the car? If your car has a camera system, who says they are not taking a picture every 30 seconds and storing it? Cars today have several computers all over the place to control fuel, brakes, electrical, etc... all it takes is a small change to record a data point. If the car makers want to block the owners from accessing it, then why record it in the first place
In the event of a horrible accident, it might be useful to have that data to determine what happened, see if it was a design defect, make sure all the equipment was functioning properly. This is more true when deaths are involved. However, what about the smaller fender benders. The T-Bone crunches at intersections, rear ends, the dent making type of accidents that happen every single day? How could that data be useful in an accident investigation? If you are the police, it's not useful, the drivers can tell you and it's pretty clear in the smaller crashes what happened. However, if you are the insurance company, that data can tell them if you were breaking the law, distracted, or any other excuse to not accept your claim.
Continued on the next page
Follow Technorati