Stepping into your car, not behind the wheel, but in the backseat of your vehicle. As you close the door the car says in a humanoid voice: “Good morning, where do you want to travel to today?”, after you replied your journey begins while you open your morning paper. On the way, the car tells you are passing a brand-new restaurant that serves food within your interest since the car heard your conversation with a friend a few days ago, picked up on several keywords, and knew to suggest this restaurant. Upon your agreement, a reservation has been made for upcoming Friday, since the car saw a free spot left in your agenda.
Self-driving cars are the future of the automotive industry (Urmson, C. 2008), I assume that will not be a discussion point. These driverless vehicles are going to make roads safer according to Howard, D., & Dai, D. (2014). Besides safer roads these scholars also assume self-driving cars to create a more sustainable automotive environment (lafrance, A. 2016). But on the other side these cars are building a ‘gold mine’ of personal data. “These vehicles will know where you like to come frequently, which businesses, and may very well build a profile of you” (McGowan, M. 2017). Since the future cars will make use of high-tech cameras and ultra-precise GPS data these cars will collects lots of data of the people they drive around (Lafrance, A. (2016). About this information, related to e.g. your movements, destinations, shopping behavior and social life behavior, is currently little investigation done in terms of who is going to own this data and to what extent this data can be used/bought by third parties. Furthermore, it is completely unclear how this data will be stored (McGowan, M. 2017). Questions arise such as: Is it customer’s data? Is it the car manufacturer’s data? Or is it government data?
In my opinion, it is frightening that self-driving cars are about to enter the market but there are hardly no decisions made with respect to personal data usage and storage.
McGowan, M. (2017) ‘Driverless cars: safer perhaps, but professor warns of privacy risks’ Retrieved from: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/sep/22/driverless-cars-safer-perhaps-but-professor-warns-of-privacy-risks
Urmson, C. (2008). Self-driving cars and the urban challenge. IEEE Intelligent Systems, 23(2).
Howard, D., & Dai, D. (2014). Public perceptions of self-driving cars: The case of Berkeley, California. In Transportation Research Board 93rd Annual Meeting (Vol. 14, No. 4502).
Lafrance, A. (2016) ‘How Self-Driving Cars Will Threaten Privacy’. Retrieved from: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/03/self-driving-cars-and-the-looming-privacy-apocalypse/474600/
Hi Brend,
Interesting article!
I do believe self driving cars will be available and transform our lives in the coming decades; however, I think before the full implementation there will be many regulations put forth regarding privacy concerns and changes in people’s lifestyles. Automotive cars will most likely create a social phenomena of ride sharing over self driving. Therefore, with less people owning cars the vehicle may not be as personalized. Although the self driving car can offer a pick up service with the shortest route, I believe the machine learning built in the car should not act as a robot that records or detect the words from a phone call, unless you enable the ability for the AI to record such personalized information. There should be regulations built around protecting the privacy of users, and only enable the sharing of customer data that people are willing to share. However, it is difficult to estimate the future growth in this field and it would most likely take many more years!