There’s absolutely nothing in the specifications about contacting police or keeping black-box recordings. The only outside contact functionality was EMS contact when the vehicle had to pull over to the side of the road due to unconsciousness and detected other signs of a health emergency. Even that had loud audible warnings and a countdown timer before dialing.
If shitty governments take something that would save tens of thousands of lives globally every year and turn it into a surveillance system that’s the fault of those governments. The manufacturers entire focus has been on reducing fatalities and injuries among road users.
Can we trust that these systems will legitimately be used to improve public safety and not as a backdoor by the government to exert greater control? The skepticism is not unfounded.
As is often the case, the EU has placed appropriate guardrails on driver monitoring systems, which the US and others would do well to follow;
Driver drowsiness and attention warning and advanced driver distraction warning systems shall be designed in such a way that those systems do not continuously record nor retain any data other than what is necessary in relation to the purposes for which they were collected or otherwise processed within the closed-loop system. Furthermore, those data shall not be accessible or made available to third parties at any time and shall be immediately deleted after processing. Those systems shall also be designed to avoid overlap and shall not prompt the driver separately and concurrently or in a confusing manner where one action triggers both systems.
There’s absolutely nothing in the specifications about contacting police or keeping black-box recordings. The only outside contact functionality was EMS contact when the vehicle had to pull over to the side of the road due to unconsciousness and detected other signs of a health emergency. Even that had loud audible warnings and a countdown timer before dialing.
If shitty governments take something that would save tens of thousands of lives globally every year and turn it into a surveillance system that’s the fault of those governments. The manufacturers entire focus has been on reducing fatalities and injuries among road users.
What much of it comes down to is trust.
Can we trust that these systems will legitimately be used to improve public safety and not as a backdoor by the government to exert greater control? The skepticism is not unfounded.
As is often the case, the EU has placed appropriate guardrails on driver monitoring systems, which the US and others would do well to follow;