Filed under: Government/Legal, Safety, Technology
Fears over domestic spying operations and privacy concerns have been splattered across the headlines with alarming frequency, and now it appears that even the auto industry isn’t immune. According to a report from The Huffington Post, the chairwoman of the National Transportation Safety Board, Deborah Hersman, has argued that black boxes should be mandatory in self-driving cars, like those that Google and Nissan have been working on.
“Data capture is going to help you understand if there is a vehicle problem, or if it’s a human factors issue,” Hersman told the Post. The fear behind black boxing cars, though, has always been one of individual privacy being compromised. That isn’t likely to change regardless of whether a car is controlled by man or machine, as evidenced by an Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers survey, which claimed that nearly three-quarters of participants were worried about driverless cars recording personal information. Adding to that, 70 percent of respondents feared their info being accessed by the government, according to the HuffPo report.
Those arguments aren’t enough for Hersman, though. “When you have a driverless car, you have to demonstrate on the front end that you have the data that shows it’s safe. But we would also say, you need to make sure you have good data recording capabilities, so when there is an event, you can understand what happened.”
Google self-driving cars should have data recorders, says US official originally appeared on Autoblog on Wed, 28 Aug 2013 13:31:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Toyota has been granted the ability to gather financial data on 81 plaintiffs filing lawsuits against the automaker over losses associated with claims of unintended acceleration. According to The Salt Lake Tribune, two private judges ruled that the automaker could, in fact, secure information from banks, lending and insurance institutions. Lawyers working for Toyota have argued that since the cases deal directly with the value of the plaintiffs’ vehicles, the company is entitled to know just how much the cars were worth to begin with. In fact, most of the information has already been accumulated by Toyota, and the plaintiff’s privacy is protected by a special court order.
