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Comment by jdavis703 | Hacker News Reader

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.

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> 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.

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

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'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.

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.

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.

>>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,

> 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...

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

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.

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 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.

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