Comment by ovi256 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ovi256 | Hacker News Reader

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This is an aspect of autonomous vehicles that I had never considered before.

Given each AV has complete 360 degrees camera coverage (for detection of other vehicles, if Tesla, for debugging, if others which rely primarily on Lidar) and this camera data is very valuable for debugging and as a liability reducer, this data is very probably to be kept, then transferred to a datacenter. So each AV is also a bunch of mobile security cameras.

LE officers can access those recordings with the same ease they access fixed security cameras, once an investigation starts. Very easily, even without a warrant.

One increased difficulty is the need to ask AV makers which vehicles were near the incident at the time, so as to know which AVs camera recordings to ask for. That location data is protected, at least in some US states.

I don't think that data is likely to be kept, raw or otherwise, on anything other than a very small rolling window, if even that. What the author of this article missed is the boot full of server racks that have the storage and processing abilities to even consider storing the raw data from a multitude of cameras, LIDAR and associated sensor systems.

For development, sure, in test fleets, sure, but production cars won't bother with that.

In all the vehicle recording systems I've worked with (for a local municipality's police video recording) the only video data that would be stored is video data that is pertinent.

So you wouldn't record and store an officer's complete shift. When the officer turned on his lights or siren, the device would rewind 30-45 seconds and start recording. It would then record until the lights/siren were disengaged. That is the video that would be uploaded.

So I think a more likely scenario is that the autonomous cars would in fact permanently store and share all GPS data, but data from the sensors would only store what was recorded with a reasonable buffer around a fault event such as a collision.

Ubiquitous 5g could allow for constant data egress.

Storage is cheap, this data will have a value. Precedent that gets set now is very important.

Also don’t forget Google’s substantial investments in both AVs and ad-surveillance. They have a strong incentive to make cars phone home the whole time, with as much as possible. And so will their lobbyists.

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