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Comment by joosters | Hacker News Reader

I wonder if everything you say & do is recorded in these? The car has all those cameras covering the outside of the vehicle, it would be little effort to add another inside, and I doubt Uber will be able to resist.

Uber could claim they need to record passengers in order to spot damage or dirtying of the cab. (Otherwise passengers could blame any damage on the previous occupant.)

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This is already occurring in almost every Taxi I've ever been in. They use it to protect the driver and passenger. This would be the first time all of that data is aggregated to one company for potential abuse but compared to what we see from gvt agencies, this is not my biggest concern.

What planet have you been living on? Of course they will do that if not regulated. Officially they can claim blurb like "improving customer experience and safety", "compliance with law enforcement", "protection of our property", "automatic detection of medical emergencies" while their main economic interest will be the further dismantling (not much left to dismantle anymore in 2016 anyway) of privacy for marketing purposes and buyer manipulation.

Most taxis already have cameras inside them, plus there's a driver there watching you. I'm a staunch privacy advocate but a taxi is not a private space and never has been.

> The car has all those cameras covering the outside of the vehicle

This raises a good point i never thought about. If in some day all of our cars have self driving or self aware features, then that means nearly all locations in the city are within reach of cameras and possibly microphones. I'm not "a paranoid" about privacy stuff, but that is quite impressive nonetheless.

The future is going to be quite interesting. I always thought we'd end up with cameras on every street corner monitoring everything. I never thought our own cars could become every present monitoring devices.

Your phone is more omnipresent and knows about as much as your car would.

Yes but i'm not trying to evade detection. If i was, i would obviously not bring a phone with me. I can't however, avoid all cars, everywhere.

The UK already has millions of CCTV cameras set up like this.

You might find this article interesting: http://www.wired.co.uk/article/one-nation-under-cctv

I didn't thought of it that way round! I was concerned with cameras & microphones inside the car, but as you say, it's likely that there will be microphones on the outside too.

Yes, they said that in the email they sent about self driving service:

> I heard there is a camera in the car. That’s correct. To learn more about how we can improve the self-driving experience for our riders, your trip may be recorded.

When picking up a ride they notify it's a self-driving Uber and let you cancel for free.

Given Uber's track record, more likely to mis-use the footage for shits, giggles, and helping stalkers.

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