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Wednesday, August 30, 2006
Is your car going to tattletale on you?
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Note to readers: Jacqueline Bullard’s blog will return next week.
It doesn’t matter how many Saturdays you lovingly wash and wax your new car’s exterior. Nowadays, late-model vehicles have Event Data Recorders (EDRs), technological tattletales that can testify against you. Like the little black box buried in my 2006 black SUV’s interior.
Here’s how it works: The instant airbags deploy in a car accident, the EDR starts calculating and reporting. It records key safety components like how the seatbelts are functioning and if your brakes are working.
But an EDR also adds in personal anecdotes like if you mashed the gas pedal and/or the brakes in those crucial accident moments. Plus possible penalizing factors like exactly how fast or slow you were going. Oftentimes, this information ends up as testimony inside courtrooms, as Time magazine reported this month.
Were you over the speed limit when you accidentally slammed into a tree? Did you hit the brakes too hard causing your vehicle to flip over onto concrete? Doesn’t matter if the road was slippery or icy. If you’ve done something illegal, once the EDR information is downloaded onto a laptop it will spill all the beans.
This is why EDRs are so hotly debated. Police, insurance companies and automakers are speeding into the courtroom. During vehicular proceedings they want EDR information downloaded and reported.
On the upside, auto insurer Progressive is offering discounts if they can monitor your driving patterns using this type of system. This could mean lower rates at renewal time with their promise of no monitoring-related increases.
Still, there is an outcry from various civic groups that say this is a very ugly technological privacy violation. That, in particular, automakers knew it was there long before vehicle owners were told about it.
To be fair, last week the National Transportation Highway Safety Administration (NTHSA) ruled automakers are required to tell new car buyers if an EDR is present. The NTHSA are all for these little boxes. Just like the black boxes on airplanes, in an accident they want to be able to research your vehicle’s safety performance. Who needs a crash test dummy when real world accidents are regularly recorded?
Unlike on airplanes, EDR technology won’t record human conversations. No loud-talking children in morning carpools or road rage cursing. But that doesn’t mean an EDR won’t tattletale on you in a courtroom.
Beware the words of my 2006 vehicle owner’s manual stored in my glove compartment. On page four the automaker says, “We will only use this information for vehicle safety improvements.” While the next paragraph cites other possible uses like, “Or if we need to use it as a defense in a lawsuit.”
Do you think an EDR is a privacy violation? Or is the NTHSA’s plea for safety research more important?
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