Self-driving cars are watching us and recording our data whether or not we’re watching the road — Quartz (Mar 7, 2017)
This article is part good reporting, part opinion, and comes with a clear point of view (which I’d articulate as “carmakers are collecting too much data on us and our driving behavior with insufficient transparency and opt-outs”). But the reporting is well worth reading whether or not you agree with that point of view: the piece does a good job of spelling out all the data that’s being collected by various automakers old and new, and what it’s being used for. And indeed, this data is critical for developing both ADAS and autonomous driving systems, because it’s only by measuring real-world human driver behavior at massive scale that cars can be taught both how to drive like human beings (which is important for trust and comfort) and how to drive better than human beings (which is important for safety). The legacy carmakers obviously have a big advantage here because they have many more cars on the road and hitting the road each year than newcomers like Tesla, let alone non-carmakers like Uber and Google. But it’s how that data is collected and used that makes all the difference here – putting advanced sensors in cars is critical to getting the rich data needed, but it also raises big privacy concerns which I suspect we’re going to hear a lot more about in the coming years.
via Quartz
The company, topic, and narrative tags below will take you to other posts with the same tags. The narrative link(s) will also take you to the narrative essay which provides additional context behind the post.
Vote for or share this post
Use the Like button below to vote for this post as one of the most important of the week. The posts voted most important are more likely to be included in the News Roundup podcast episode I do each week. Or use the sharing buttons to share a link to this post to social networks or other services.