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Carsales Staff25 Jun 2014
NEWS

German car companies confront surveillance question

Pushing aside privacy concerns will be the next step towards a future for autonomous cars
Black box data recorders are key to overcoming the legislative and legal hurdles facing autonomous cars, according to a report by authoritative industry journal, Automotive News Europe (ANE). 
But legislating fitment may place car companies and legislators in conflict with privacy advocates in Germany – where the idea is currently under consideration by a "roundtable on autonomous driving."
The group, composed of government officials, car company execs, legal eagles, privacy advocates and insurance executives, is currently debating aviation-style on-board data recorders for autonomous cars. As a reliable 'eye witness' in the event of a crash leading to property damage, personal injury or death, the black boxes would verify the circumstances of the crash, assisting courts to assign liability. 
Some cars, capable of semi-autonomous operation, are already registered for the road and are taking the pain of parking out of the hands of the driver (although feet still have a part to play in practically all instances). However, anything more sophisticated than parking or keeping a safe distance in a conga line of freeway cruisers is not yet attainable in practice. 
An additional wrinkle in the debate so far comes from the German car companies – accepting of black box technology provided it doesn't allow software firms like Google to feather their own nest by dipping into automotive industry data. The car companies reportedly want to limit the amount of data collected by the black boxes. 
"We accept that personal data belongs to the customer, and that we are not entitled to do with it whatever we want," said Thomas Weber, head of development at Mercedes-Benz, as quoted in the report. "The fact that we take these issues more seriously than some other companies is an opportunity for German industry."
German citizens, according to ANE, have long-held suspicions of surveillance methods and technology, especially those residents of the former German Democratic Republic (East Germany). And in recent times, the report notes, the US government had been spying on German chancellor, Angela Merkel, prompting renewed calls for tighter privacy safeguards.
While the vehicle's black boxes are unlikely to dob you in for armed robbery, watering down beer or upskirting, the data they capture could be a useful market research tool, providing data that can be compiled in a dataset to build up a profile of your lifestyle preferences – making you even more a target for focused advertising than you already are. That's the danger the car companies foresee in Google becoming a major player in the automotive industry with its own autonomous vehicles.
"Our view of autonomous driving is not to gather personal data and use this for business. Our vision is to make driving safer," the report quoted Peter Mertens, Volvo's Senior Vice President, Research and Development, during a conference earlier in the month. 
But the real fun will occur after a prang. In a court of law, counsel for the third party may well ask why you were being driven by your autonomous car along the Reeperbahn (in Hamburg's red light district) when it collided with the third party at 2am on a Sunday morning during Oktoberfest. The final video footage from the car shows the third party – wearing fishnet stockings, lederhosen and a halter-neck top – just prior to bouncing off the bonnet. That may take some explaining to the spouse.
A statistic cited in the ANE report is the 90 per cent of crashes attributable to human error. In the short term autonomous cars will have miniscule effect in reducing that percentage. Even in the longer term, human error will remain a significant factor in road trauma, with drunk pedestrians stepping out in front of autonomous cars, and thus dying through their own misadventure. 
In the main, however, autonomous driving will offer quantifiable gains in reducing fatalities. But as a society, we need to place blame when something goes wrong. The black box technology is apparently the best way to achieve that, assuming privacy objections can be addressed.
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Written byCarsales Staff
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