Is Your Car Spying on You? Is Your Car Spying on Me?
Another nail in the coffin of Doctorow’s “metacrap” arguments. I never want to see anyone citing that inanity again. Doctorow said that metadata would fail because “people are lazy”, and “people lie”. The fact is, privacy is dead, because people are too lazy to STOP their metadata from leaking, and too lazy to lie/cover their tracks. And powerless to stop other people from collecting metadata about them anyway.
For the past 5 years, I’ve been writing things like, “I want my car to gossip with your car”.
Now Nissan is testing a system where cars can gossip with one another, so you know (for example) when you are in the vicinity of a dangerous driver. I pinged my friend Craig, who works on systems like this, and he assures me that all of the manufacturers are exploring different variations of the theme. It’s just a matter of time.
One example scenario I’ve often used is the “Amber Alert” in the U.S. The authorities send out an alert with an automobile description, and it gets displayed on freeways in the area of search. The alert is something like “Blue jeep cherokee with plates 555XY”. Good citizens on the road are expected to peer about and call 911 immediately if they see the wanted vehicle.
Now, imagine if your car had sensors to read the license plate of any car that it passes. That’s cheap technology. Now imagine receiving the amber alert automatically. Perhaps from the current freeway sign, using talking signs technology. Or over cellular network. Your car could beep and alert you “you passed the wanted car 20 minutes ago”.
The privacy implications are profound. If it’s completely legal for a neighbor to watch you going into a strip club and tell everyone at your church, and it’s legal for citizens to spy on one another for purposes of law enforcement, why would it be illegal to automate that process? If my car remembers every car that I’ve passed, that seems like a feature; especially if I have to opt-in to share that data with others. Do we tolerate citizen spying only because citizens have limited memories? Should we outlaw people with photgraphic memories?
In fact, your license plate number is a public identifier. We now have case law saying that anyone can key off of that identifier without “probable cause” or permission. I could outfit my car to automatically take the GPS position, timestamp, and license plate of every car I pass; and upload it to Google base. When enough people do that, it’s going to be pretty difficult to claim that we were somewhere we weren’t.
September 18th, 2006 at 11:32 am
The objections to all this that have raised my eyebrows over the last 40+ years are based on one’s notion of privacy: can there be some psychic version of the bathroom stall door?
Let’s just for the sake of argument propose that some unnamed citizen chose to smoke marijuana and that staying out of jail for doing so almost demanded some level of secrecy. Sort of like a “don’t ask - don’t tell” method.
Even though everybody knows that all those musicians smoke dope, they just don’t regularly get raided, although each time they do it’s once too often. On the other hand when a guy escapes a serial killer and the police don’t check out his story, that’s a little different. I think.
Love.
September 18th, 2006 at 2:44 pm
But you can smell weed outside the stall door, so everyone knows anyway
In this case, I think transparency only helps. Having access to the data in aggregate would probably reveal some interesting patterns about how selectively enforcement is handled. Would the public outcry be to “equalize things by persecuting more white musicians”, or would it be to admit that maybe there is something wrong with the big picture?
I think that’s the answer; if you took any random sampling of 2,000 (or so) people and put them in a tribe; which things would they presume have a reasonable level of privacy and personal discretion (e.g. bathroom stalls); and which would they presume have no presumption of privacy (e.g. rape, etc.)? Shockingly, Niniane’s post seemed to be flooded with guys who think rapists should have a presumption of privacy, but again aggregate information would go a long way toward helping people make a decision.