Autonomous Vehicles and the End of Privacy
By: Ernest Oppetit
Tags: Privacy, AI, Self Driving Cars, Autonomous Cars, Augmented Reality

So, what are the implications of these advances?

Commercial Implications

Advertisers, insurers, retailers, banks, will feast on this new data like they have done with all other internet data so far. The aim remains to build a detailed profile of you to sell you more stuff and quantify the risk/liability you represent.

Ubiquitous video combined with ever improving AI systems provide:

Your socioeconomic status: where you live, where you work and how much, whether you go drop off kids at school, who you hang out with, where, how frequently

where you live, where you work and how much, whether you go drop off kids at school, who you hang out with, where, how frequently Your shopping habits: where you shop, what you wear, what your friends wear, what you have to wear at work

where you shop, what you wear, what your friends wear, what you have to wear at work Your health: how active you are, whether you smoke/drink, which kinds of restaurants you visit or order from, how many doctor visits you have been to

truly 121 advertising with a side of leather jackets and guns (Minority report)

It also brings up some interesting forecasting opportunities at a more macro level:

What happens to the fashion industry when half a dozen static $100 cameras can tell you everything that anyone in Shoreditch wore this year — when you can trace a trend through social and street photography from start to the mass-market, and then look for the next emerging patterns?

— Benedict Evans, Cameras, ecommerce and machine learning

It seems inevitable that these video-sourced insights will be resold by the AV companies, in the same way that Google and Facebook sell targeting based on browsing history and likes. The commercial opportunity is huge.

Whether this happens officially will depend on the nature of the regulation surrounding the use of this video data. Unofficially, given febrility of security on the internet, this data will get used for commercial means.

Privacy Implications

“The Right To Privacy” ~ December 15, 1890, Harvard Law Review

As Gregory Ferenstein brilliantly lays out in The Birth And Death Of Privacy, full transparency is humanity’s natural state. Privacy as a concept is only about 150 years old.

For a long time, it was not materially possible to have any form of privacy as we’d think about it today. Tribal communities all lived together in caves, Romans all lived in one room houses, medieval families and servants all slept in the same bed — there was no practical concept of private space or individual intimacy.

As private life became possible — physically with separate houses, rooms, beds, and through communication with new technologies like writing and the telephone — the desire for privacy emerged. The first privacy-orientated law in the US was the 1710 Post Office Act, which banned sorting through the mail by postal employees.

Nonetheless, privacy has always remained a secondary concern to convenience and cost. This explains the consistent, broad adoption of new technologies which encroach on our privacy but are deemed worth it.

Today, Autonomous Vehicles is one of these new technologies to evaluate. Isn’t it crazy that today we let people drive a ton of steel at 100s of miles per hour, just with a few signs telling them not to press on a pedal too much? It is — and it causes 30 000 deaths per year in the US (that’s one every 17 minutes). With autonomous vehicles, this number will significantly decrease, which by itself makes this technology very attractive. But what are the privacy implications?

This time, you can’t opt out

The smartphone & internet revolution has also been a profound change, but you could choose not to have a smartphone or not to use Facebook, Google, or any other services that make a living collecting and selling your data.

In the Video Everywhere world, tracking moves fully offline. The moment you step outside, all your movements are streamed to a database, timestamped, geolocated and added to your digital profile. You can’t opt out.

(To delay this day as much as possible, you could (1) make sure your face is not on the internet, (2) live in a place that will have AVs last, e.g North Korea, (3) live in a cloudy place such that drones and satellites struggle to see you from far. On the plus side, I bet your rent will be cheaper there)

100% Enforceability

As we all know, the USA-pioneered surveillance-without-warrant state is in vogue at the moment, for example with the recent UK ‘Snooper’s charter’ bill becoming law, or the emergency state being preserved in France.

Video Everywhere means potentially one more source data from which to find anomalous citizen behaviour. This will be used by intelligence agencies for defence purposes, but it directly affect you and me in the hands of your average prosecutor.

Law becomes 100% enforceable. If the prosecutor can codify all infractions in a video processing algorithm — say jaywalking (to take a particularly ridiculous law) — and run it on all video ever taken of public life in the US, it could then immediately charge all jaywalkers.

I think the most important idea is to remember that there have been times throughout American history where what is right is not the same as what is legal — Edward Snowden

Another factor to consider is the increased breadth and effectiveness of cybercrime that results from more data collection, particularly video data. As tracking moves to the offline, physical world, so does the targeting — you could for instance imagine a drone being hijacked to go and hurt someone who was identified by hacking into an AV’s video feed.

😬. What now?

Today, the public debate about Autonomous Vehicles and AI focuses on the most pressing issue: the economic and societal impact of automating millions of jobs (such as truck driver which is the most popular job in America.) This is what the electorate is most worried about.

However the privacy implications of Autonomous Vehicles also need a place in this public debate.

Autonomous Vehicles should be a deliberate societal choice made after the pros and cons have been carefully weighed, including the privacy impact.

The output of this debate should be clear regulation that addresses: