from the just-because-you-paid-for-it-does-not-mean-you-are-not-the-product dept.
Somebody's Watching You: The Surveillance of Self-Driving Cars:
Picture the future, where driving is a thing of the past. You can hop in your car or one from a ride-share, buckle up and tell the car where you want to go. During your ride, you can check your email and look up a few things online through your dashboard. Meanwhile, your whereabouts and other details are being tracked remotely by companies. As self-driving cars develop further, autonomous vehicles will play a much larger role in the digital economy as car companies and others harness personalized customer information through geospatial and navigation technologies, combining it with existing financial consumer profiles, according to a study in Surveillance and Society.
"Self-driving cars will represent a new mode for surveillance. Through a self-driving car's global positioning, system, navigational tools, and other data collection mechanisms, companies will be able to gain access to highly contextual data about passengers' habits, routines, movements, and preferences," explained Luis F. Alvarez León, an assistant professor of geography at Dartmouth. "This trove of personal, locational, and financial data can be leveraged and monetized by companies, by providing a data-stream for companies to target customers through personalized advertising and marketing," he added.
[...] As self-driving car technologies develop, privacy and security concerns loom as to how companies will use personal data, an area for which the limits and specific governance mechanisms have yet to be defined by federal regulations.
Journal Reference:
Luis F Alvarez Leon. Eyes on the Road: Surveillance Logics in the Autonomous Vehicle Economy. Surveillance & Society, 2019; 17 (1/2): 198 DOI: 10.24908/ss.v17i1/2.12932
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 08 2019, @03:52PM (11 children)
like this isn't happening ALREADY?
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 08 2019, @04:02PM (5 children)
Also to what end? What is the point of this monster? To sell us the perfect scent of soap? These companies are storing exabytes of data on everyone. Sometimes you can get a peek and it is usually wildly wrong sometimes spot on. But really to what end is this goop? What does it DO other than be creepy?
(Score: 2) by Arik on Saturday June 08 2019, @06:02PM
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 5, Informative) by fyngyrz on Saturday June 08 2019, @07:06PM (1 child)
That's essentially correct with regard to a company that only wants to sell you something. They are not much of a risk, as long as you are a reasonably astute consumer. If you don't want scented soap, then just... don't buy it.
However, for companies who want to lock you out of purchasing something — insurance, for instance — it creates clearly identified sub-pools that they can use to triage their risk beyond general statistics. It can also be used (and is in fact currently being used) to create "can't-have" classes of job applicants, wanna-be borrowers, homeowners, college applicants, even prospective dates.
Information in these databases can be extremely resilient to being purged, particularly once it has spread beyond the original collector. One example of this we're all familiar with is the email database; once a specific spam vendor gets ahold of an email address by purchasing a database, it won't matter if that email address is purged from the original database — it now exists in a new container that will not be affected by such a purge... and there's nothing at all saying it won't move on from where it now resides, either. An email address should be thought of as a proxy for any and all information about you. All of it is subject to this kind of effortless living on in the domain of data that can be used against you.
Also, keep in mind that one of the things the relatively harmless company in the first example can do is sell or give the data they have collected to a less harmless commercial interest.
Next, this information is (hopefully, at least) only one subpoena away from being used by the government, which is a much more powerful actor capable of causing you a significantly higher threshold of trouble. That's bad enough in and of itself, but with government(s) acting to impose retroactive law and punishment (for instance, the US federal and state governments) it can mean behavior you knew previously to be okay can get you into some very deep water later when there are persistent records of same.
Then there are the cases where government actors just skip the whole subpoena process, use the information to focus in on you, and then step on you for something else that otherwise would not have been notable. One example of this is parallel construction. [wikipedia.org]
So, no... in the end, this kind of data collection isn't harmless. Systems that proactively forget your actions once they have been addressed are far more benign.
We're not heading in that direction though, at least here in the US. And we won't be without considerably more counteraction from powerful actors such as legislators, either.
--
Every glass of beer is a tragic story of grains
that could have become pizza crust, but didn't.
(Score: 2) by Arik on Saturday June 08 2019, @07:39PM
On our side of the pond, few really want to be seen as pushing censorship, but few, in government or in business, see any great motivator to resist it strongly either. At least as long as it gets targeted at the people they don't particularly like, or in service of their pet causes.
I'm afraid the end result is simply going to be to normalize censorship worldwide. A gigantic step backwards for our species, and one we may not recover from.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Sunday June 09 2019, @04:05AM
if you're an American citizen you are entitled to:
a heated kidney shaped pool,
a microwave oven--don't watch the food cook,
a Dyna-Gym--I'll personally demonstrate it in the privacy of your own home,
a kingsize Titanic unsinkable Molly Brown waterbed with polybendum,
a foolproof plan and an airtight alibi,
real simulated Indian jewelry,
a Gucci shoetree,
a year's supply of antibiotics,
a personally autographed picture of Randy Mantooth
and Bob Dylan's new unlisted phone number,
a beautifully restored 3rd Reich swizzle stick,
Rosemary's baby,
a dream date in kneepads with Paul Williams,
a new Matador,
a new mastadon,
a Maverick,
a Mustang,
a Montego,
a Merc Montclair,
a Mark IV,
a meteor,
a Mercedes,
an MG,
or a Malibu,
a Mort Moriarty,
a Maserati,
a Mac truck,
a Mazda,
a new Monza,
or a moped,
a Winnebago--Hell, a herd of Winnebago's we're giving 'em away...
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 2) by https on Sunday June 09 2019, @05:21PM
Normalizing surveillance has allowed advertising companies to sell a 4% improvement in results for 500% more money. So win, I suppose.
Offended and laughing about it.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Saturday June 08 2019, @04:21PM (4 children)
If you have a phone that doesn't lie its ass off like mine does, yes. All day, every day.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 08 2019, @04:38PM (3 children)
So now you are corrupting young phones? Tsk, tsk... (grin).
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Saturday June 08 2019, @06:36PM (2 children)
Between that and all the porn I use as wallpapers, I gotta plead guilty.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 08 2019, @09:35PM (1 child)
Somewhere else you mentioned fixing up a church to live in...is this where the porn wallpaper is going? If so I salute you, hard to think of a better place for it.
Have to ask--are you keeping the steeple?
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Saturday June 08 2019, @10:05PM
Nah, you have a use for it? I haven't checked with a tape measure but my aging memory says it's 10-15 feet tall, not counting the bit that is just a box with a wedge cut out so it'll sit on the roof. I'm sure there's something useful or fun I could do with it but none of the things I can come up with warrant the potential roof damage from it getting pulled on by the wind.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 08 2019, @04:20PM (2 children)
I thought everyone knew surveillance technologies already existed.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 08 2019, @04:27PM (1 child)
The first big story I remember hearing was Lindsey Lohan or one of those people having an Onstar person ask if it was really them... over a 'disabled' onstar system in late 90s or early 00s vehicle. I don't remember if they had accidentally pressed the service button or if the implication was that it always listened. Onstar itself has been available like this since the 1990s. Mercedes and BMW have similar systems almost as old. Lexus was slower to adopt, as were Acura and Infinity. Then Ford and Chrysler. Not sure about European/Japanese/Australian companies, or Chinese. And I imagine India and other such countries either haven't, or only have it on the highest end domestic models that cost western equivalent prices.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 08 2019, @06:51PM
I believe telemetry units are required in the EU market.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Saturday June 08 2019, @04:26PM (1 child)
Please remember the paper implies its an issue for car owners, although the cars being coated in a layer of what amounts to dashcams means we're all going to be tracked and sold.
Its pretty hard to sue Tesla for self driving into me and then driving away if every time a Tesla sees my license plate it saves a recording of every instant my car was in sight, and storage being cheap and legal being expensive, we can assume in 2030 that any time you're in public you're being continuously recorded and filed away by other people.
(Score: 4, Informative) by AthanasiusKircher on Saturday June 08 2019, @05:27PM
I think we can assume in 2019 that you're likely being "recorded and filed away by other people" a lot of the time -- often enough that while in public, I think you should safely assume this could be happening at almost any given time today. (And if you're in a private residence of anyone except the most dedicated paranoid security expert, you can safely assume most people have some devices that could be recording you at least by audio, and potentially by video too.)
I think it was over 20 years ago now that Law & Order started switching from plots like, "Well, a murder happened at a convenience store -- do they have security camera footage?" to plots like, "Well, a murder happened on the street, let look around -- there are at least a half-dozen businesses and other folks in the area who might have footage on THIS SPOT."
That reflected the general trend, which increased exponentially with the growth of smartphones and similar devices, as well as ever cheaper and smaller recording equipment.
And as for being recorded and "filed away" -- we've already seen the consequences of that, for example in the Google StreetView scandals of a decade ago, where Google's roaming cars captured many burglaries and other crimes in progress, some of which weren't noticed for months or even years until someone happened to be looking at the Google StreetView images. We've seen crimes solved by random people taking iPhone videos and accidentally capturing footage of something or someone amiss.
It may not be happening continuously in public now, but it's common enough that anyone NOT assuming you could be recorded while in public is probably being naive. Heck, regarding your thought about recording cars in front of you, etc., I've noticed the trend of smartphone mounts/holders for cars, which are often conveniently placed at the height around dashboard level. Yes, that's often easier to look at for someone trying to use their phone, but it also likely has the camera of the phone conveniently pointed out past the dashboard, effectively allowing your smartphone to act as a dashcam... were someone to coopt its camera.
I'm not saying that's happening (or at least not happening regularly). But we've seen how many apps are not policed by appstores, how many permissions are given by people to their phones for use of all sorts of features without question. Why does that Solitaire app need access to your camera? I don't know. I doubt it's recording videos continuously and sending them back, because that would be reflected in your data usage, but... do you really know how the devices you already own are locked down (or not) and/or how they could be compromised or coopted? (And that's just apps you explicitly gave permission to use things on your phone -- it doesn't take into account manufacturer or government backdoors that might already be present in the operating system on your device.)
The infrastructure is essentially present already for this stuff to be happening NOW. A lot of it already is. It will become worse, but we've so far down that road already, it's hard to see how to turn the trend around.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 08 2019, @05:35PM
Hidden in the dashboard
The unseen mechanized eye
Under surveillance
The road is full of cats eyes
It's sick function to pry
The spy in the cab
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 08 2019, @07:55PM (1 child)
oh how the lazy, ignorant, sycophantic masses will cheer their new mobile slave pens.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Saturday June 08 2019, @08:33PM
You have always been a slave, anon.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by corey on Sunday June 09 2019, @06:57AM
1. (Develop some sort of new technology which isn't profitable)
2. Suck up personal data
3. Profit!