Comment by arthurofbabylon
15 hours ago
There's considerable cynicism in these comments and I have to suspect a puritan bent in most of them. No, no one is watching you. No, these cameras are not here to catch you doing bad things.
The purpose is very clear: reduce roadway mortality by reducing distracted driving. Frankly, I want OTHER PEOPLE to have this system in their car, while they are driving around me. Half of the cars I've driven over the past 3 or so years feature this system, and it is a good one: only occasionally invoked, and effective at observing driver attention. I'm very glad that my family members drive cars with this system.
Now to the privacy concern – yes, that is absolutely a concern. While generally my solution is to have no cameras at all, surely there are other solutions. Car makers have an incredible ability to spy on their customers, and rather than making that impossible by dumbing down the cars, I'd hope lawmakers and public advocates can devise solutions that allow both safe cars and secure data practices. This is not a case where safety in one domain needs to be traded for safety in another.
> I'd hope lawmakers and public advocates can devise solutions that allow both safe cars and secure data practices. This is not a case where safety in one domain needs to be traded for safety in another.
The reason for the cynicism is that this has never happened. Can you think of a time in tech when a new method that could be used for tracking and spying was devised and then everyone was sensible about it, developed reasonable regulations and it has never come back to bite us since?
It's always extremely easy to argue for anything that increases safety, because then the proponents can propose anything with the justification that their metric isn't zero yet, and then argue that anyone opposing them supports death or crime. But frankly, everything is safe enough. If the status quo was frozen in terms of tracking technology, no one would notice it and decry the lack of safety. Deaths in traffic accidents in the EU are down dramatically since the year 2000. So yes, I don't mind stopping for a bit if that prevents us from descending down a winding path to a place where every single object is always connected, permanently tracked and is mandated to collect, analyze and send out a thousand different data points to keep a tight grip on everything.
> “ Can you think of a time in tech when a new method…”
1. Apple/Google exposure notifications during the latest pandemic. 2. The Signal Protocol. 3. Differential Privacy (DWork et al) deployed by the US Census and Apple/Google. 4. Examine David Chaum’s body of work. 5. PIR motion sensors. 6. Elder care monitors. 7. Cities selecting lidar over cameras in traffic applications (motivated by privacy). 8. Retail foot-traffic counters. 9. Stickfigure/silhouette masking in Japanese elder care recordings. 10. Those traffic signs that read, “your speed is X.” 11. On-air or active-session indicators in recording studios.
Jeez it turns out that when you go looking for examples of designed-for-privacy monitors they are EVERYWHERE. Sounds to me like it is a completely reasonable expectation.