On the contrary, the how you do it includes where and when you do it, which is a major privacy concern. Sure, a black box to get telemetry after the fact might make sense, with specificity and my explicit knowledge when access happens. I'd have a hard time turning that into free data for any particular company or government to have though, vehicular deaths aren't the only issue in our world.

Very good point. Although, in the case of an accident, isn't your location already a matter of public record?

Not really/depends. Florida has the Public Records Act (which is why we have "Florida man" and "Florida woman" headlines) so there the police's crash report is public, but if your car hits another car on a backroad in any other state, more often than not only the two drivers, their insurance, and the police know about the event.

The last accident I got in (a fender-bender) was about 10 years ago -- and only myself and the other driver knew about it. No insurance companies or police were ever told.

Probably, but not universally.

Generally, information recorded (or maintained by, and often if contracted through a third party) by a government agency is made public if that state's public records law does not consider it to be private. "Private" is usually defined on a state-by-state basis. Every state has a public records law.

Some states consider license plates to be private, while others don't. Foe example, Illinois considers license plates private only if it's associated with other personally associatable information.

Aggregate or redacted information on accidents might be accessible in the case of privacy exemptions. Unless it's all on paper, which dramatically complicates things because of the efforts required to review/redact where needed.

In other words - if an agency has access to records on traffic incidents, it's probably accessible.

Wouldn't think so, although I live in Germany so YMMV on that question.

Around here there would be a public record of an accidents location if it was big enough to bother waiting for the police, although the public portion of that would not be tied to my name or license plate. Announcements (by authorities) on larger accidents mostly contain maybe an age, gender, and generic vehicle information. Other than that only the two insurances involved would get more data.

The only thing I could think of that made more information public might be lawsuits that could occasionally result from an accident but I'm not sure on how public those currently are. Our news around here usually refrain from naming people in reporting anyway if it's not too relevant or it's a public person anyway.

If it's reported, it'll be a record somewhere, if only in your insurance company. They seem to get sold on a lot to third party claims companies.

If there's a police report, then of course it's a public record.

In the EU, the "e-Call" system is being rolled out which mandates that the car automatically phones home in the event of a crash: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECall

The location of the crash is public. Who was involved is not. AFAIK You can download the locations of fatality crashes here. ftp://ftp.nhtsa.dot.gov/fars/

>I'm all for retaining ownership of your Spotify playlists, Bluetooth synced contact list and location data.

>But given the number of vehicular deaths...

Ah the good 'ol "my principals go out the window when $emotionally_loaded_topic is involved."

Nobody, not the insurance company, the DMV, nor the people debugging the software in prod deserves access to ones data without express and informed (i.e. not a million word eula nobody reads) consent. It's no different than data generated by a cell phone or smart blender

Anyone worried about safety can find an external way to monitor that.

Death is just an "emotionally loaded topic"? I think it's perfectly reasonable to have principles, but value those principles less than human life. In fact, I wish more people did that.

There are plenty of cases where we can and do make exceptions to personal privacy for public benefit, under certain guidelines. E.g. medical data is one of the few things that's actually private by law in the US, but we still find way to make aggregate data available for epidemiological studies. Location data is absolutely sensitive data, but there are valid reasons to make subsets of it available for the public benefit.

> If you are operating a 100 kW machine in public, how you do it isn't a privacy concern.

I'd be more likely to agree if traffic laws weren't already such an arbitrary garbage fire of selective enforcement.

Though assuming this data was not networked and belonged to the individual (can still be used as evidence is court), a black-box is probably a good idea.

> But given the number of vehicular deaths

Or we could spend a small fraction of the war on drugs on more traffic cops and save many more lives than the war on drugs has. Driving is extremely dangerous, and there is a significant number of people out there making it even more so by tailgating, suicide lane switches, and excessive speeding for the road conditions.

With an average of one death per 100,000,000 miles traveled, I don't know if I'd rate driving as extremely dangerous.

Otherwise, I kinda agree. Eliminate drunk driving and make it so everyone is wearing a seatbelt, and the fatality rate would drop by half.

It's not just deaths, but injuries and property damage.

Yes, driving has gotten much, much safer over the past few decades, but it's still the most dangerous thing we do on a daily basis.

Authorities already have legal methods for accessing data that you otherwise own. That seems sufficient.

Corporations, on the other hand, have no such need.

Yes it is, or did you go ahead and install that blackbox geico has been trying to sell you?

Agree. Any activity that is so hostile to other people should be monitored aggressively, and privileges revoked for the slightest reason. By the same token, you should need to file an individual route permit anytime you want to exceed 20 mph in a multi-ton vehicle. The externalized social costs of designating ~25% of our cities' surface area to violent human exclusion zones is hard to overstate. For one example, it's become rare for children to walk (to school or anywhere.) How much is that worth?

My children walk all the time, including to/from school every day. And there are plenty of their friends on the sidewalk with them.

It's also difficult to overstate how much value universal transportation has brought to the human race. Maybe more than enough to justify the surface area dedicated to it.