Big Brother will be watching while you drive

Submitted by acohill on Fri, 11/12/2004 - 12:12

In a deeply disturbing ruling, the National Transportation Safety Board has ruled that car manufacturers must put black box data recorders in new cars and trucks. The boxes will record speed, acceleration, braking, direction, and other data that could be used to reconstruct accidents, among other things.

The problem with this is that the data does not belong to the vehicle owner--it can be accessed by third parties without your consent. Traffic safety experts like to talk at length about how the data is valuable in analyzing accidents and improving vehicle safety. Fair enough, but forcing private property owners to both buy the system and to give law enforcement officials, officers of the court, and other third parties access to the data without the permission of the property owner is not acceptable.

Expect a big fight over this one, and there should be a big fight. This is abusive technology--the fact that we now have the technology to monitor and collect this kind of data does not mean we should automatically force everyone to use, at great loss to our privacy.