Feds Requiring ‘Black Boxes’ in All Motor Vehicles

Feds Requiring ‘Black Boxes’ in All Motor Vehicles


Photo: neoporcupine/Flickr

Federal regulators are proposing that new automobiles sold in the
United States after September 2014 come equipped with black boxes,
so-called “event data recorders” that chronicle everything from how fast
a vehicle was traveling, the number of passengers and even a car’s
location.

While many automakers have voluntarily installed the devices already,
the National Transportation Safety Agency wants to hear your comments
by February 11 on its proposal mandating them in all vehicles. Congress
has empowered the agency to set motor-vehicle-safety rules.

Clearly, regulators’ intentions are about safety, as the devices
would trigger — for about 30 seconds — during so-called “events” such as
during sudden breaking, acceleration, swerving or other types of
driving that might lead to an accident. The data, which can either be
downloaded remotely or by a physical connection, depending upon a
vehicle’s model, is to be used by manufacturers and regulators
“primarily for the purpose of post-crash assessment of vehicle safety
system performance,” according to an announcement in the Federal Register. (.pdf)

But privacy advocates are raising the alarm bells, and want the
agency to require data safeguards, including demands that data be
anonymized, and to prohibit the marketing of it.

“You should not think of this as being an opportunity to sell data to
auto-insurance companies for risk evaluation. That’s a real
possibility. Data is valuable,” said Lillie Coney, associate director of
the Electronic Privacy Information Center.

Submit your comments to the National Transportation Safety Agency here. Your comments are a public record.

Australian researcher David Warren invented the black box in 1953
to record airline cockpit noise and instruments during flight to help
investigators solve crash mysteries. It was only a matter of time before
they would be required in motor vehicles.

The vehicle black boxes — which are either tiny standalone devices or
part of a vehicle’s computer system — are to record speed, engine
throttle, breaking, ignition, safety belt usage, the number of
passengers, airbag deployment, and among other things time of the
recording and sometimes a passenger’s location, depending on a vehicle’s
model.

According to NTSA, as the National Traffic Safety Agency is known,
the “event data recorders” will be ”used to improve crash and defect
investigation and crash data collection quality to assist
safety researchers, vehicle manufacturers, and the agency to understand
vehicle crashes better and more precisely. Additionally, vehicle
manufacturers are able to utilize EDR data in improving vehicle designs
and developing more effective vehicle safety countermeasures. EDR data
can also be used by Advanced Automatic Crash Notification (AACN) systems
to aid emergency response teams in assessing the severity of a crash
and estimating the probability of serious injury before they reach the
site of the crash.”

Still, questions remain about the black boxes and data. Among them,
how long should a black box retain event data, who owns the data, can a
motorist turn off the black box and can the authorities get the data
without a warrant.

For the moment, it’s the Wild West, with few guidelines.

“You have all of these entities that can collect and use this data without any bounds on how this data can be used,” Coney said.

Just 13 states have some regulations about the black boxes.
Many of them demand the manufacture disclose the existence of the black
box and some require a motorists’ consent for the black-box data to be
viewed by others.

Clearly, the black boxes tell a story.

Timothy Murray, the Massachusetts Lt. governor, claimed he was
traveling within the speed limit and wearing his seatbelt after he
crashed a state vehicle last year. The black box in the Crown Victoria captured data that Murray was going 100 mph without a seatbelt.

How the government finalizes rules about the black boxes might set
scary precedent for other technologies, according to Jay Stanley, an
American Civil Liberties Union policy analyst.

“Will devices serve the consumer/owner, or some other powerful
interest such as the government or big companies?” he asked. “We don’t
want to drift into a world in which our own possessions are riddled with
computer chips acting in the interests of others — watching us, controlling us, and possibly snitching on us.”


Source:-
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/12/black-boxes-privacy/