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ACLU: Police must get warrants to obtain personal data from cars
You might not think of your car as a treasure trove of personal data, but it frequently is -- performance data, phone contacts and location info may be sitting under the hood. And the American Civil Liberties Union wants to be sure police can't just take it. The organization is appearing as a friend of the court in Georgia's Supreme Court on June 19th to argue that personal data on cars is protected by the US Constitution's Fourth Amendment and thus requires a warrant. The appearance is tied to a case, Mobley vs. State, where police used a car's "black box" to level more serious charges.
After a deadly car crash, Georgia police downloaded data from the Event Data Recorder on Mobley's car to determine his speed before the crash, using that to level more severe accusations against him. Georgia has contended that this was legal under the Fourth Amendment's "vehicle exception" allowing searches for physical items, but the ACLU believes this doesn't count for digital data. It likened this to requiring a warrant for phone data -- just because the device holding the data is obtainable without a warrant doesn't mean the data is also up for grabs.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by AthanasiusKircher on Wednesday June 19 2019, @02:16AM
I'm not sure you are actually disagreeing with the parent post you replied to. You don't want police to go on "fishing expeditions" in most cases but believe police should have access to data in the case of an accident.
That's NOT a "public record." That's a record you get under circumstances where you believe an illegal offense may have been committed. An accident where the car is question is clearly at-fault or where fault is uncertain would seem to constitute probable cause for a warrant to determine whether additional offenses or crimes were committed during the accident.
That's the ACLU's point here -- the police shouldn't just be able to get the data, which might contain evidence of speeding an hour before the accident or other random stuff that could be incriminating. Instead, the police should obtain a warrant for very specific data relating to the accident -- IF there is cause. (Again, what about another driver who is clearly not at fault in the accident from an examination of basic physical evidence, but ends up being ensnared with random data that showed a connection to another unrelated crime or offense based on the data. No, the data shouldn't be public, but it should be made available to police only when circumstances warrant -- no pun intended.)