Talal Rashid – This month, Ford Motors announced that it is planning to invest $1 billion in Argo AI, an artificial intelligence start-up that focuses on self-driving vehicle technology. The automaker is joining a group of companies, including General Motors, Uber, and Google, who are developing self-driving cars. The time and money being spent on self-driving vehicle technology is a testament to these companies’ vision that self-driving cars are the future of the automotive industry. At the same time, critics have been outspoken about the downfall of self-driving cars. The focus of criticism has mainly been safety concerns and whether these cars are truly safe for consumers. Nonetheless, these companies are speeding through to get to the finish line and develop the best possible self-driving car.
This begs the question: why is the automotive industry insistent on developing self-driving cars? The answer is, possibly, vehicle data.
Currently, cars have sensors and cameras that track their performance and generate data that can be analyzed to make money. For self-driving cars, the amount of data can be much greater than your typical car, with 30 seconds of driving generating enough data to fill up an iPhone. For companies developing self-driving cars, this means more data they can sell to those looking to gain information for safety, security, municipal, and commercial benefits. An example of this is otonomo, an Israeli startup that sells vehicle data to parking apps, who use the data to identify nearby open parking spaces for users. Ben Volkow, the CEO of otonomo, believes that the potential for making profit off vehicle data is so great that in the future, automakers will be making more money selling vehicle data than cars themselves.
This is great news for the automotive industry. However, the collection of data can possibly come at the price of consumer privacy protection. At a Congressional hearing about self-driving cars last year, representatives from companies, such as Google and General Motors, did not provide any clear answer when asked if they would implement a minimum standard for protecting consumers’ vehicle data. Ellen P. Goodman, a professor of law at Rutgers University, believes the conversation about self-driving cars focuses too much on physical safety and not enough about the privacy issues that can arise from use of these cars. Existing state laws that address self-driving cars focus on issues such as safety, manual control, and the registration of these cars. The issue of data privacy, however, is nonexistent. As a result, details about the lives of owners of self-driving cars are at risk of being sold off as vehicle data.
The only major protection for consumers is a set of Fair Information Practice Principles that a group of automakers adopted in 2014. These principles include providing consumers with transparency and requiring heightened protections for sensitive types of consumer information. While these principles sound promising, they do not do much. The problem with these principles is that their terms are ambiguous enough that various automakers can have their own standards for what is “sensitive information.” This can result in one consumer having greater or lesser protection than a consumer who owns a self-driving car by another company. Furthermore, consumers who own a self-driving car by a company such as Google that has not adopted the Fair Information Practice Principles might not have any protection at all.
The uncertainty about the future of self-driving vehicle data collection means that states will need to take a stronger initiative to protect their residents or legislation will need to be enacted at the federal level that would require these automakers to protect critical consumer information. One thing is certain—self-driving cars will be a big part of the automotive industry in the near future. To make the transition from manual to self-driving cars as smooth as possible, it is in the best interest of automakers to achieve a balance between using vehicle data and protecting the privacy interests of their consumers. The legal implications that can arise from vehicle data usage are too great for automakers to ignore. If these privacy concerns are not addressed, we can expect this muddled issue to be addressed in a future courtroom.
