Black boxes, new cars, you don't own what yours record

[11B4V]

Bob Beckel went ape shit. 
http://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2013/01/06/black-boxes-cars-edr/1566098/

Editorial: 'Black boxes' are in 96% of new cars
6:37 p.m. EST January 6, 2013
And you don't necessarily own what yours record.
ourview010613

(Photo: 2010 AP photo)

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If you happen to read every word of your new car owner's manual, then you already know that your car may be monitoring your driving habits.

If you're like most people on the planet, though, it will come as a surprise that a box the size of a deck of cards — called an event data recorder — is on board, tracking your seat belt use, speed, steering, braking and at least a dozen other bits of data. When your air bag deploys, the EDR's memory records a few seconds before, during and after a crash, much like an airliner's "black box."

NHTSA: EDRs help keep roads safe

This a handy tool for analyzing the cause and effect of crashes. It can be used to improve safety technology. But its presence is not entirely benign. The data have many other potential uses — for insurance companies, lawyers and police, for instance — and it's up for grabs.

The EDR is the only part of your car that you don't necessarily own. Just 13 states have laws on the issue, and fewer — Oregon and North Dakota, for example — offer strong privacy protection. The devices, part of a car's electronic system, are almost impossible to remove.

Last month, the federal government proposed that all new passenger vehicles be equipped with the devices. But 96% of new cars already have them, as do at least 150 million older vehicles. American makers, led by GM and Ford, have been putting them in cars since the mid-1990s.

What the federal government ought to do is ensure that car buyers get prominent disclosure before they buy and that privacy protections are in place. But the trend is in the opposite direction.

In 2006, when the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration first proposed regulating black boxes, it rejected calls for pre-purchase disclosure and opted for requiring a few obscure paragraphs in the owner's manual. It gave car makers six years to comply.

The agency says it has no authority to regulate privacy. But it has not sought any, nor alerted Congress to the need for legislation.

The chaotic results are apparent in courts and in high-profile crashes. In a 2011 crash, Massachusetts Lt. Gov. Timothy Murray, who said he was belted in and driving the speed limit, was contradicted by an EDR. The government-owned Ford Crown Victoria's recorder found that the car was traveling more than 100 mph and that Murray wasn't belted in.

OK, so comeuppance for a politician doesn't sound so bad. But what about your own car? Should police be able to grab that data without a warrant? Should insurers access it so they can raise your rates?

Courts are all over the place. Two New York courts have ruled warrants are not needed. Many prosecutors, not surprisingly, argue that drivers have no expectation of privacy on public roads.

In California, an appeals court tossed out a drunken-driving manslaughter conviction because police failed to get a warrant for the box.

Proponents of black boxes argue that they aren't all that intrusive. Maybe so, today. But technology never stands still. GPS in cellphones was originally advanced as a safety feature so callers to 9-1-1 could be quickly located. But location identification is now used in all sorts of third-party apps. People's movements are easily tracked. It wouldn't take much to tweak EDRs for equally broad uses. They could record more. Some insurers are offering customers a cousin of the EDR, which tracks how a car is driven over a long period, so volunteer participants may qualify for lower rates.

Two things are certain. Black boxes are here to stay. And without strict rules of the road, they are less a boon to safety than an intrusive hitchhiker.

[DGuller]

Who's Bob Beckel?

[11B4V]

Who's Bob Beckel?

[DGuller]

How does he relate to this story? 

[Eddie Teach]

How does he relate to this story? 

Guess he doesn't like it.

[KRonn]

Bob Beckel is a liberal pundit on Fox news. I saw his rant on this, and he's usually on the side of protecting privacy which I usually agree with.

As for these black boxes, I'm not sure how I feel. They're be good to determine what a vehicle/driver was doing in a crash. Could absolve someone of wrong doing, or instead show they were driving too fast or whatever. Seems the courts will have some work to do to sort this all out, since auto black boxes are in most cars, soon to be all.

[Caliga]

All the people obsessed with privacy have gotten so irritating that I no longer care about the issue that much.  Besides, I've got nothing to hide.

[Valmy]

All the people obsessed with privacy have gotten so irritating that I no longer care about the issue that much.  Besides, I've got nothing to hide.

Hey don't take it out on the rest of us you married a libertarian.

[Berkut]

I am pretty libertarian.

But I don't think a black box that records data that is publicly available (like your speed on a public road) is any kind of invasion of privacy.

However, the idea that I don't own that object and the data it contains is absolutely ludicrous.

[OttoVonBismarck]

I don't see any support in the article for the frankly, leaping conclusion, that the car owner doesn't own the black box. Yes, it appears courts have a relatively emerging view on the issue of how data in the EDR should be handled/protected (in terms of requiring a warrant or not), but that doesn't mean the car owner doesn't have an ownership right in the EDR. I would also strongly suspect since it is part of a vehicle you own, and the only mandate is that manufacturers install them in all new cars, there is no legal prohibition on a vehicle owner disabling or removing the EDR.

Considering how quickly tech savvy people tear down and hijack or hack all manner of electronic devices I find it pretty unlikely they are nearly "impossible to remove." "Annoying" or "difficult" for sure, and it may be something your local dealership mechanic would never do for you, but I seriously doubt anyone willing to read up on it on the internet would have any problems removing their car's EDR or disabling it.

[derspiess]

Yeah, I'd imagine it would be pretty easy to cut the power to the black box.

[Berkut]

Yeah, I'd imagine it would be pretty easy to cut the power to the black box.

That would almost certainly not work. I suspect that the EDR is tied into the computers that run the car, and cutting power to it would likely cause the car not to work in general, or not work properly in any case.

I actually don't suspect it would be easy for anyone to disable the ERD if it is built into the cars electronics and control systems. If I were designing a car and I wanted it to be hard to remove, it would be easy to do so in a manner that would make disabling or removing it very troublesome. For example, simply route the system commands through it - you disable or remove it, system commands no longer make it where they need to be, car doesn't work anymore.

Not impossible to spoof of course, you could come up with some sort of dummy replacement for it, or hack it to pass the commands while not saving data or something. But not at all easy to remove or disable, and you can be 100% certain that doing so would void any warranty on the vehicle.

[CountDeMoney]

There is 3rd party software available for downloading information from the EDR, so it won't be too long before it's available for consumers, if it isn't already.

They don't want you messing around with the digital processes involved in your warning lights and manually resetting them either, but those readers have been available on the market for some time.

[DGuller]

As long as it's used in accident investigations only, I'm fine with that.  Accidents on public roads are an important enough matter that some privacy violations can be tolerated.  Traffic accidents do actually kill a lot of people, unlike terrorism.

Curiously enough, there was a time when even some cops didn't know about the black boxes.  There was a case about five years ago where a trooper t-boned a van and killed two teenage girls.  He claimed to have stopped at the stop sign and looked both ways before t-boning the van at the intersection, but the black box showed him speeding through it at 70 mph. 

[derspiess]

That would almost certainly not work. I suspect that the EDR is tied into the computers that run the car, and cutting power to it would likely cause the car not to work in general, or not work properly in any case.

Let me know when you find out for sure.  My guess was that the box pulls info from the computers but is very much a peripheral device.