What Recent Stories on Google and GM Data Collection Mean for CAVs

Two recent news stories build interestingly on my recent blog post about CAVs and privacy. The first, from Forbes, detailing law enforcement use of “reverse location” orders, where by investigators can obtain from Google information on all Google users in a given location at a given time. This would allow, for example, police to obtain data on every Google account user within a mile of a gas station when it was robbed. Similar orders have been used to obtain data from Facebook and Snapchat.

Look forward a few years and it’s not hard to imagine similar orders being sent to the operators of CAVs, to obtain the data of untold numbers of users at the time of a crime. The problem here is that such orders can cast far too wide a net and allow law enforcement access to the data of people completely uninvolved with the case being investigated. In one of the cases highlighted by Forbes, the area from which investigators requested data included not only the store that was robbed, but also nearby homes. The same situation could occur with CAVs, pulling in data from passengers completely unrelated to a crime scene who happen to have been driving nearby.

The other story comes from The Verge, which covers data mining done by GM in Los Angeles and Chicago in 2017.  From the article:

GM captured minuted details such as station selection, volume level, and ZIP codes of vehicle owners, and then used the car’s built-in Wi-Fi signal to upload the data to its servers. The goal was to determine the relationship between what drivers listen to and what they buy and then turn around and sell the data to advertisers and radio operators. And it got really specific: GM tracked a driver listening to country music who stopped at a Tim Horton’s restaurant. (No data on that donut order, though.)

That’s an awful lot of information on a person’s daily habits. While many people have become accustomed (or perhaps numb) to the collection of their data online, one wonders how many have given thought to the data collected by their vehicle. The article also points out scale of the data collected by connected cars and what it could be worth on the market:

According to research firm McKinsey, connected cars create up to 600GB of data per day — the equivalent of more than 100 hours of HD video every 60 minutes — and self-driving cars are expected to generate more than 150 times that amount. The value of this data is expected to reach more than $1.5 trillion by the year 2030, McKinsey says.

Obviously, creators and operators of CAVs are going to want to tap into the market for data. But given the push for privacy legislation I highlighted in my last post, they may soon have to contend with limits on just what they can collect.

~ P.S. I can’t resist adding a brief note on some research from my undergraduate alma mater, the University of Illinois. It seems some researchers there are taking inspiration from the eyes of mantis shrimp to improve the capability of CAV cameras.