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Comment by mLuby | Hacker News Reader

'I felt like I was in heaven,' the cop said. 'It's like instant replay in the NFL, I can tell what happened.' The engineers looked at each other like, 'Aw, crap.'

As engineers, we have an obligation to think through privacy concerns.

These (and nearly all) devices should either not retain data or should encrypt it. Also my self-driving car better not be phoning home or getting updates over the air. I've seen what happens in Fast and the Furious 8… https://fsmedia.imgix.net/19/8a/19/0d/3e81/44e8/ab9d/679cbb2...

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That quote is in the context of accident reconstruction. Putting aside the question of how many accidents there will be in our future autonomous world, accidents already leak personal information, especially if they lead to court cases, and it does not seem to me that improved crash investigation need necessarily leak any more. I think this is a qualitatively different situation than tracking people's location and who they communicate with, which is definitely a privacy issue, and not justified in the context of accident investigation.

Yeah it's about an accident, but if an ordinary police officer can view this, you know more powerful agencies are going to collect all of it (incidentally).

It is the people who want to expand general surveillance who would like to blur the distinction between that and accident investigation, in a bogus attempt to justify the former, and I don't think we should go along with it.

I eat popcorn watching the double-think these days. Laws simply weren't designed for perfect enforcement. We need a new legal framework that can handle omnipresence.

Many penalties have been scaled to compensate for the expected likelihood of getting caught (so as to keep the expected value of the crime negative.) Even without the radical overhaul it sounds like you're suggesting, we'll definitely have to update at least a few things.

Have they? My impression was that legislatures almost never reduced penalties outside of hotbutton political issues.

Are we even in the ballpark of being able to collect real time video (and other sensor data) from tens of millions of vehicles?

That's a completely different technical problem than having the vehicle store some period of data.

I guess authoritarians will push to have the ability to install monitoring programs locally.

You can use ML to summarize the video and you can store the most interesting bits in low quality - instead of actual video you can just store something like "red car crossed intersection going northbound, male with blue cap stopped at light, ..."

Youtube can record that amount of video just fine.

MobilEye is doing just that to create their HD maps and train their models so, yes.

Tens of millions of vehicles all at once?

The quote is in the context of accident reconstruction, but the point of the article is that we're going to be filling our streets with mobile surveillance platforms that record everything everyone does around them and police won't need warrants to access this data.

I was rear ended last week. First accident I've been in. I suddenly have a photo of a 17 year old's driver's license. Name. Date of birth. Photo. Home address. Jeez...

Its incredibly naive to think that any and data being recorded or transmitted won't be harvested (both legally and illegally) by authorities.

Aircraft, even private aircraft, are tracked and recorded. Why should automobiles be any different? Far more people are killed and injured by vehicles than are killed by aircraft. In general I'm pretty pro-privacy but I've had way too many close calls and accidents with bad drivers who were found to be at fault. Maybe there's a better way to get to vision zero, and if so I'd love to hear it.

> Aircraft, even private aircraft, are tracked and recorded. Why should automobiles be any different?

FAA and NTSB agencies aren't known for abuses of power. Local law enforcement, on the other hand, routinely abuse power (civil forfeiture, unwarranted traffic stops, racial profiling, police brutality, falsifying evidence, lying under oath, illegal search and seizure...).

Self driving cars should reduce accidents, because computers > monkey brains, so granting the police unrestricted access to data shouldn't impact safety improvements.

> Local law enforcement, on the other hand, routinely abuse power

I guess here is the real problem. I think it's better to go after the real problem instead of trying to work around it.

Couldn’t you make the same argument about total surveillance?

Or, say, forced labor for the entire population. If people experience negative feelings while imprisoned, then maybe we should work on the real problem of those feelings, not challenge the nice neutral forced labor concept.

My point is that power over ordinary people generally corrupts, and the only real solution is to reduce and distribute that power so that individuals have more autonomy. Mass surveillance from AVs is a direct threat to your human autonomy.

I'd agree with you, except that the surveillors are themselves immune to surveillance, so it's very difficult for us to ensure they do not abuse power.

Either let us watch the watchers, or don't let them watch.

> FAA and NTSB agencies aren't known for abuses of power.

That suggests one possibility would be to separate law enforcement agencies responsible for the management of automotive violations from law enforcement agencies for everything else.

Highway patrol + DMV enforcement arm for registration, safety, and moving violations. Normal police only have jurisdiction for vehicle stops for things like stolen vehicles or reckless endangerment.

Might solve a bunch of other civil liberty issues.

Cars, especially in the US, is very closely linked to the location of a person. For private aircraft that is generally not the case I assume.

I work for a semi-governmental organization in the Netherlands and we track ships. Tracking company-owned commercial ships is no problem, but we are heavily restricted by law in what we can do with the location data of privately owned ships because people live on them.

A weirdly relevant case from Switzerland [0]. The Swiss court ruled that it's totally legal to put GPS trackers on other peoples cars to track them.

The court argued that a car is so public and visible that the GPS tracker is only collecting "public knowledge" anyway.

[0] https://www.tagesanzeiger.ch/panorama/vermischtes/wenn-am-au...

In the US, the SCOTUS has ruled differently: that attaching a GPS tracking device to a car constitutes a search under the Fourth Amendment and requires a warrant. See US v. Jones (2012) and Grady v. North Carolina (2015).

As a fellow dutchman, I'm not sure what organization would track ships. Would you mind sharing? It sounds interesting.

Well, basically any nautical organization tracks them to some extent (i.e. ports, tugs, pilots, whatever).

We specifically use AIS [1], tracking ships is quite easy because of it. Other methods are radar.

Because it so relatively easy, there are a lot of commercial companies doing it too. The most well-known is probably MarineTraffic [2]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_identification_syste...

[2] https://www.marinetraffic.com/

I recently heard about people being fined for sailing in a prohibited zone (I believe an exclusion zone around a drilling platform). How does that jive with the rules against keeping tracking information of personal vessels?

The tracking you can do for personal vessels is limited, not forbidden.

Enforcing an prohibited zone, which exists for safety, probably is well within parameters. If you only track and save the vessel that are very close to your drilling platform because you can't track a persons movements from just that data.

If you want privacy maybe don’t drive around on what is literally government property.

I'd rather think of roads(and national parks, and beaches, and mountains) as "ours" not as "government property". I have the right to be there because I'm the citizen of the country.

Privately owned boats and autonomous cars are government property?

That post probably means public roads.

I guess I can understand the argument but I don't see what kind of world view thinks that you can go out into the world r have privacy. Roads are what connect the vast majority of all land. It's not like you can just trespass into other people's land and expect privacy either

The world view is that what happens in public space is not private; you can't expect privacy for things you do in public.

If you go to a public concert, people can look at you, note that you were here and tell that to others. That doesn't violate privacy because you had no privacy there to begin with. And in a similar manner, if you drove last thursday on a particular road, whoever bothered to look at you and your car is allowed to do so, note that you were there, write it down and tell that to others.

Privacy is about your private stuff - what you do in your private space, what you have in your private items. If you go out in the public, the things that you do (and where, and when, and with whom) are not private anymore.

In a public space a random person might 'see' you there - but they would not know who you were and may not even remember you correctly. A machine on the other hand remembers perfectly and records constantly. As far as your car-the random observer may be hard pressed to note the fact of your license plate number while trying to remember what kind and color your car was.

I highly doubt you are pro privacy even a little bit, and it is foolish endeavour to trade liberty for promised safety..

You start off on the assumption that everyone agrees that aircraft should be tracked, and that data should be open to law enforcement review with no warrant. To the extent the data can be justified for safety it should be limited to that purpose only and barred by law from being used in any other manner. That is not how the law is today, as these records are used in all kinds of legal cases (both civil and criminal) outside of need for safety.

People that are actually pro privacy understand how these records are used and do not desire to see it expand to the tracking of every car on the road as a car is much more personally identifiable than a plane, and is in much more common usage.

in short, Maybe automobiles should not be treated differently and maybe it is time to look at how aircraft are tracked and what that tracking is used for changing the law to be more privacy focused

I donate hundreds of dollars annually to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, so I have a vested interest in privacy protection. That said I ride public transit routinely. There are cameras in the buses and trains. There are smart cards that store a record of every station and bus line I tag in and out of. There are cops with bomb and drug sniffing dogs. The point is there is a strong and historic precedent that transportation systems are monitored. There are even creepy announcements urging riders to report odd acitivty to throw authorities, of which I've been on the wrong end of more than once.

> The point is there is a strong and historic precedent that transportation systems are monitored.

You do realize there is a difference between public and private transportation, right?

I have yet to see a precedent that supports the government getting as much data as TFA talks about while using my private transportation system. Or the Supreme Court deciding that making a person wait until "cops with bomb and drug sniffing dogs" show up to a traffic stop without probable cause is an "unreasonable search". I could go on and on...

>>I donate hundreds of dollars annually to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, so I have a vested interest in privacy protection.

Do you want a gold star? that in no way proves you have a "vested interest" in privacy, that just proves you have give some money to charity.

> The point is there is a strong and historic precedent that transportation systems are monitored

Yes and people that have a "vested interest" in privacy are concerned about and have problems with the current levels of surveillance on these systems,

Far more people commit crimes than vehicles. So why not forcibly track all people?

Apparently there's a correlation between thinking of committing a crime and committing it. We should probably find out a way to track that too!

Yes, I heard there are three creatures that can predict that too!

You mean, like, track people's phone location?

You may be sarcastic, but I'm sure you know that the mobile phone companies already do this, as does Google if you have Location Services on. Not sure what Apple does.

I believe that was the point.

You can't be pro-privacy and place it last priority behind the unattainable "vision zero".

No one is asking for historical location data, but merely what the car recorded as your input and other driving parameters before, during, after a crash. Where exactly is the privacy interest in that?

>>No one is asking for historical location data,

I am not sure where you believe "no one" is asking for, or collecting historical data. In fact everyone from the Manufacturers, Potential Advertisers, Law Enforcement, everyone is in fact asking for and getting historical data

so where where are you getting this myth that no one is

Great. To provide that, all the car will have to do is record all telemetry and upload it to a server farm. After all, it could be months before the cops realize they need a new angle on a crash you drove past.

Why can't it keep it on a black box in the car?

This would actually be reasonable, and would match up with airplanes. However we're anticipating that companies will want access to this data en masse to keep training their ML.

I wonder what the police reaction will be to the same tracking on police cars. Using their lights to get though red lights and traffic jams when there is no emergency etc will be nicely logged.

Modern police dispatch systems already do this. The car automatically sends whenever the lights or siren are used, and it is flagged at the dispatch station if the car isn't on a call that authorizes that mode. I'm fairly sure Austin PD uses this.

> I wonder what the police reaction will be to the same tracking on police cars. Using their lights to get though red lights and traffic jams when there is no emergency etc will be nicely logged.

Body camera already demonstrate that (some) police will actively disable recording devices.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/baltimore-cops-turned-off-body...

Love the sentiment, but that suggests that the public has access to these tracking data. (We also need access to police emergency calls and locations, which we might already have, IDK.) I'd be quite surprised if the vehicle data would be made public.

Hell, even if specifically requested, you'd be "amazed" at how many times, if the information looks negative it will be "lost" or the camera will be "non-functional".

One department tried to claim that their cameras were "malfunctioning" in the majority of FOI / criminal cases where they were requested.

The problem is that I do want the data to be stored because it could act as training data to make the vehicles better. But I also recognize the potential for abuse.

This one's tricky...

Also there's the issue of liability. Inevitably, autonomous vehicles will be involved in accidents. If the manufacturer has telemetry, they can prove their car was not at fault if the accident was caused by something else. Without stored telemetry, the legal risks for manufacturers seem much greater.

It's only tricky because there isn't an "off" button. That's the problem, it's forced on your rather than optional.

Would you take an 'off' button, but with the caveat that put the burden of proof on you if you were in an accident while telemetry is off?

No, I'm not willing to compromise my privacy in any way. I haven't had a ticket since l996 and refuse to install the insurance company monitoring tool.

That's one major reason companies will want all this telemetry. (And will it be streaming video over cell networks, dumping once back on home wifi?) Perhaps homomorphic encryption can help achieve both aims, or sending back aggregated data only.

Retain all sensor data forever: absolutely not, and the storage requirements would be insane anyway, especially in a harsh automotive environment (think industrial SSD pricing)

Push back e.g. updated model data to help with updating routes, real-time construction developments, new driveways, ways humans make mistakes on the road, etc? I believe that every AV company will be doing this, and hopefully this data is useless to law enforcement.

OTA updates? Tesla already does. It won’t even be a choice, and that’s probably a good thing. Many people who don’t work with computers professionally don’t see the importance of updating things. In a situation where software updates could literally prevent deaths, I’m pretty sure that it will be mandatory to have vehicles receive OTA updates that can’t be disabled.

Why wouldn't un-disable-able OTA updates be vulnerable to large-scale remote hacking? Sounds like Teslas can already be hacked.

By far the simplest way to prevent this vulnerability is to prevent automatic connections to the outside world.

You may want to read this admittedly long take on it:

https://www.zachaysan.com/cars

Thanks! Glad to know I'm not the only one…

The public roads aren't private spaces.

We allow you to drive on the public roads, in exchange for you giving up your driving privacy. This is why cops can stop you and give you a breathalyzer at will, because that's the trade-off you agreed to when you got your driver's license.

If you want to encrypt your driving data, you should only drive on private roads.

I never assume that driving is a right, instead of a privilege, and the best way to maintain privacy is to just not participate in public activities in the first place..

In a practical sense, people DO have their own expectation of privacy in being "lost in the crowd" when in public places, regardless of what the legal systems project & rationalize.

Regarding public roads, we need licensing and insurance because we can severely damage other people sharing the same space, but that's not necessarily linked to consent to eliminate privacy there. We expect as reasonable for license plates to be recorded when something bad or suspicious happens, and that things like comprehensive license plate tracking is an invasion of privacy.

> I never assume that driving is a right, instead of a privilege, and the best way to maintain privacy is to just not participate in public activities in the first place..

You can extend that reasoning to public sidewalks. I mean, walking is indeed a "public activity" that takes place in a public space, so I assume that following your line of logic you'd be ok with any public authority following you or me (or anyone else for that matter) without any warrant, wouldn't you?

> We allow you to drive on the public roads, in exchange for you giving up your driving privacy. This is why cops can stop you and give you a breathalyzer at will, because that's the trade-off you agreed to when you got your driver's license.

Uh-huh...

It's been a long time so perhaps I missed the part where I signed away my constitutional protections in exchange for my privilege to operate a motorized vehicle.

Unless by "at will" you mean "under reasonable suspicion" and/or "with probable cause"?

Yet again you people make me sad...

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