“Autonomous vehicles continuously record their surroundings and have the potential to contribute to investigations,” reads an internal training document. A resounding admission from the San Francisco police that, in fact, they admit to using unmanned cars as mobile surveillance cameras. It all stems from the fact that various prototypes of such machines circulate in the US: the experimentation began five years ago and the manufacturers of driverless cars have a decent fleet of cars that constantly roam the city. Cars loaded with an array of sensors, including cameras that capture everything that happens around them to travel safely and analyze cases where they don’t.
Mobility
What are the 5 levels of autonomous driving and at what level we are now
by Emanuele Capone
12 Maggio 2022
But while Waymo of Alphabet and Cruise of General Motors point out the enormous benefits that their services could one day offer, no one says that these machines also have another, much less hypothetical use: that of spies, putting their surveillance cameras on. provision of the police. An extraordinary potential aid for investigations, but also a new frontier for the problem of privacy protection because until now no one had declared that they could access the video recordings of self-driving cars.
Among other things, the police said they use these videos very frequently – already now – and this alarmed the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF): “It is very worrying”, said Adam Schwartz, senior lawyer of the association – who cars (now a mine of consumer personal data) are transformed without any kind of legislation into a new source of evidence. Very worrying “.
The case
Too easy to hack a car, demonstration at the French show
by Vincenzo Borgomeo
05 April 2022
We are faced with cars that are transformed into wheeled surveillance devices and given that the police already have access to systems that automatically read license plates, all types of surveillance cameras, facial recognition systems, this is of great concern because in fact the surveillance network – already very invasive – will soon become total.
What a Tesla sees
by Massimo Canducci
January 25, 2022
Among other things, all the companies that work in the self-driving car sector have always declared that they do not collect data to identify people. But the San Francisco police, by admitting the use of cameras, effectively deny the policy of houses that produce self-driving cars. Of course, officially the use of driveless car footage is officially limited to cases where public safety is at risk. But in what types of investigations are these recordings used? And how are they acquired? Where are the videos kept? Mystery. There is no specific legislation and this casts a shadow on the development of self-driving cars.