The feds' vehicle 'kill switch' mandate is a gross violation of privacy
fee.org
fee.org
The real issue here is the issue of our liberty being violated in a substantial way.
The ability for the state to remotely kill your means of transportation, thus remotely controlling our freedom of movement, is a new dystopian level of government control.
You might be wondering how is this different from the current system, the government already has the power to determine who can drive.
A few things:
- The current system works solely via the legal system. The law determines who can drive, there is no technological system to force compliance, yes you can be pulled over by the cops, but this is a case by case process that can't be applied to entire swaths of the population.
- a kill switch allows the possibility that transportation is denied to entire regions, specific minorities, a government could use this power to control people in ways make the power imbalance between state and individual even more extreme.
- The kill switch is a constant threat against our freedom of movement.
- The system could be abused or hacked, exposing us in this way for more power is abhorrent.
E.g. by a hostile foreign power.
In the foreign invasion (or US govt goes full fascist) case, people can remove these devices.
Meanwhile many if not most high-speed chases won't happen any more, because the person being chased didn't plan ahead.
There will still be getaway cars, etc. where the device was removed. That's no different to what we have now, and it'll be an extra violation to charge them with when they're caught.
Since driving is, and has always been a privilege and not a right, I don't see a problem with having a remote kill switch that cops can use in specific cases.
>In the foreign invasion (or US govt goes full fascist) case, people can remove these devices.
I don't follow this logic. Would it stop being a crime then? If anything, it'd start being more severely punished.
High-speed chases don't happen anymore, unless you are talking about helicopter chases in uncontrolled airpsace. There has been no reason to chase a car for at least half a century.
That is, unless you have adrenaline-hungry cops that care more about having fun than actively hurting people. Car chases only happen if you don't criminally persecute cops for them.
It’s funny to read someone write “US goes full fascist” in a negative light while actively arguing to take away freedoms from law abiding Americans.
It’s already illegal to drink and drive. Now you want it to be illegal to modify vehicles?
Can I lobby to shut down vehicles who fail to use their turn signals?
I buy a car and remove the device immediately: how is the law enforced? Do cops check our equipment every time we get pulled over? Do we have to reinstall it for every smog check?
Who do I get to sue when I can’t bring my dad to the hospital because he had a heart attack after I had a glass of wine.
There’s a little risk in life, please learn to coexist with it and stop trying to force people to jump through hoops so you can feel a little safer.
I mean, it's hardly without precedent. You can't remove your license plate, you can't remove the seatbelts, you can't remove the muffler, you can't remove the catalytic converter, you can't remove the side or rear view mirrors. My state requires an annual inspection to confirm these things are all in place and working.
> Who do I get to sue when I can’t bring my dad to the hospital because he had a heart attack after I had a glass of wine.
General advice is that if it warrants drunk driving, it warrants a 911 call for an ambulance.
Of course you can. You just can’t drive it on public roads. Plenty of vehicles aren’t street legal.
I’m sure you can imagine that there are lots of people who live in different situations than you. Waiting for an ambulance might take several hours or may simply not show up. How about that it may cost several thousand dollars?
What happens when your fancy kill switch simply malfunctions and kills a car in a life and death location like a desert in the summer.
Please try to account for more than a suburban environment when passing national laws.
This is the kind of nanny law that pushes people to plug their nose and vote for the other guy.
Edit: then to than
Then it's unlikely your car will count it as such.
> The concern is allowing a computer to make what could amount to life a death decisions.
Your car does this continually. Should it fire the airbags? Tension the seatbelts? Engage the antilock brakes? Oops, one wheel is slipping, adjust power to the others.
> What happens when your fancy kill switch simply malfunctions and kills a car in a life and death location like a desert in the summer.
The same thing that happens if the starter or fuel pump or battery fails.
> This is the kind of nanny law that pushes people to plug their nose and vote for the other guy.
That's the evergreen threat of the folks who always find a reason to vote for the other guy anyways.
no. they should not be installed at all. while were on this topic vehicles have WAY too much insecure crapware in them already, to the point where they can already be remotely controlled by hackers
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chrysler
> In July 2015, IT security researchers announced a severe security flaw assumed to affect every Chrysler vehicle with Uconnect produced from late 2013 to early 2015.[112] It allows hackers to gain access to the car over the Internet, and in the case of a Jeep Cherokee was demonstrated to enable an attacker to take control not just of the radio, A/C, and windshield wipers, but also of the car's steering, brakes and transmission.[112] Chrysler published a patch that car owners can download and install via a USB stick, or have a car dealer install for them.[112]
i don't know what people don't get, no matter how many times it happens it will not change: some company making a thing that communicates will always fuck it up beyond belief. they simply do not give a fuck about implementing it securely. a vehicle having software automatically means it will have severe vulnerabilities implemented in some stupid web scripting language by a kid who just arrived out of a shoddy college. did you miss the news or are you just coping by thinking "surely the 738th company to do IoT crap will do it right this time"
> Since driving is, and has always been a privilege and not a right, I don't see a problem with having a remote kill switch that cops can use in specific cases.
because you're just applying robotic reasoning to try and sound logically consistent while only knowing and focusing one one small part of law
Are the criminals being pursued "active threats to life and limb?"-- someone in the middle of a spree killing deciding "I've cleaned out this area, gotta move to the next block?" Or are we seeing aggressive reaction to "self-contained" crimes-- drugs, robbery, a single assault, even kidnapping? Is the public actually made safer by creating a 20km long hazard zone for bystanders, rather than having a more deliberate monitoring and deployment process that waits for the target to stop before going for the capture?
It smells like the same sort of overkill obsession that leads to "one American traffic stop" using more bullets than "the entire police force of Germany in a year."
On the other hand, the song lyrics will be sort of funnier. Instead of "We put the sugar in the tank of the Sherrif's car", it will be "we spoofed the Sherrif's VIN and bricked his ignition".
That's because the particular definition we are using for "privacy" wouldn't be attached to the word "privacy" for another 25 years.
https://www.etymonline.com/word/privacy
> Meaning "state of freedom from intrusion or interference" is from 1814.
So instead they used phrases such as "secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects" in the 4th amendment for the same general meaning.
Edit to make the specific point explicit: A right to "privacy" does exist in the US Constitution, however this right can be broached with a warrant and a "reasonable" search and seizure. The right, in and of itself, does not protect against any particular laws, including laws against abortion.
In this case "decide" can mean "did the local government ask nicely" or anything else.
*Freedom of movement* doesn't require that you are able to drive your own car. It's not *new* either. Get pulled over for a DUI, and you won't be allowed to drive for a while.
There is a world of difference between that and not being able to operate the vehicle you own on private or public areas after a computer receives a command.
Which is not a feature described by the bill or claimed in the above article.
If the AI or whatever determines that you are impaired is offloaded to the cloud, then it can send a stop command remotely, and will almost certainly be abused by malicious actors (and some governments). If it is onboard, then it is still likely going to be a closed source software or hardware module that can send a stop command to the car.
In any case it creates a mechanism within cars for disabling it outside the control of the owner or operator
Indeed, this is the reason they are forcing EVs onto us.
I always knew that USA opposed USSR because it's dystopia. I didn't know that USA wanted to have a monopoly on dystopias.
but seriously, if you read cyberpunk dystopias of the 80's, it pppears some people are treating them as a manual
I'm not arguing that this case is ok, though.
The gaslighting about something that was barely 3 years ago that we all saw happen is getting wild.
You and I read about very different things. In the bill I read, the vehicle was making the decision locally, not a government power, remotely.
Based on what? Are you asserting that data determining the decision, isn't in any way guided by law or regulation?
Of course not. Airbags and when they deploy are also guided by law and regulation. That doesn't mean that the government can suddenly deploy all the airbags in Arizona like the parent is claiming this mechanism could be used for.
This clarifies that 'local decision' is actually a 'government decision' - and that local refers to it's application. That helps.
With some tweaking tho, I think we can improve on that comparison. In order to accommodate the inevitable mission creep, we'll want nextgen airbags systems to accept updated programming - to always be ready for new mandates.
Airbags could then deploy whenever officer determines the public is at risk. And then whenever an officer fears for their safety. And then whenever the State fears for it's safety.
With these changes I absolutely see the similarities.
In other words your arguing against a hypothetical that only exists in your own mind, and by your own admission, software updates are already and thing and this law already wouldn't be required to issue a software update that disables your car, and this doesn't actually bring us any closer to that.
So already a moot point I guess?
Considering generations of legislative compulsions to control unliked behavior
that is increasingly enabled by Gov's history + means + ever-ratcheting desire for surveillance of every possible person
and then allowing those astoundingly plain realities to coalesce into the world's least unlikely outcome
[pause]
this process of obviousness isn't actually restricted to just my head - as is evidenced by post after post after post on the very same page you're posting to.
In the first place, rights are not granted by interpretation of the law. They exist naturally unless circumscribed by it.
In the second place, airlines are private companies and have a wide mandate to deny service based on various conditions stated in their terms.
The legal system in the U.S. isn't based on some Hobbesian philosophical notion of "rights," even if the Founders were inspired by it. It's based on interpretations of how our rights, enumerated in law or a Constitution or otherwise, may or may not have been violated under the circumstances of a case.
If you said what you just said to a judge in court, they'd either laugh in your face, or laugh about you with staff in chambers after you leave.
And if no case is before the court? What then? Is it automatically illegal?
It's a massive violation of an individual's freedoms, but not everything has to be about privacy all the time. Your car deciding it doesn't want to drive because its sensors decided you steer too funnily impairs your freedom of movement, the privacy aspect is minor in comparison in my opinion.
I'm also not too happy about the prospect of cars, which have been proven to be hackable remotely, having yet another point where an evildoer may insert motor control inhibitions. Perhaps a shitty car will let the media console inject false data about driving behaviour to trigger the system, or perhaps a particularly bad car will allow the kill switch signal to be injected directly. Either way, if I were a highway robber it worse, I'd start investigating the wireless stacks of cars common in rural areas.
With how much data car manufacturers are already sucking out of you as a driver (https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/privacynotincluded/article...), this kill switch is such a minor thing to add to the list.
There is almost no remaining device-local data in consumer products, since everything that’s collected is usually exfiltrated or “shared with our partners to improve your experience”.
It’s not strange that people assume device-local info doesn’t exist anymore. It’s a reasonable simplification that almost always turns out to be accurate, sadly.
I worry we’re never gonna turn this around. Say gen Z, who have grown up after the compulsive data hoarding started. They won’t care because they don’t even remember another time..
Otherwise you'd be able to drive drunk when out of cellphone range, drive drunk by messing with your car's antenna, drive drunk during system downtime, etc.
It seems plausible that car manufacturers will keep "kill-switch triggered" events local, if only because it's a huge liability, or because of the sentiment behind articles like these.
I think the more interesting question here is a discussion about the public policy tradeoffs of a local-only drunk driving kill-switch.
Cons: lack of user control over their own software and hardware, a slippery slope, cars will be self-driving on a roughly similar timeline anyway, and false-positive edge cases, like someone having a medical emergency getting blocked for driving weird on the way to the hospital.
Pros: 100s of lives saved in the first years, ~100,000s lives saved globally after full global saturation, a reduction in the need for drunk driving enforcement (which itself is extremely totalitarian, with traffic stops, checkpoints, court fees, jail time, suspended licenses, manslaughter convictions, lost jobs, etc.)
I lean against on software freedom principles alone, but it's an interesting decision space, because it's easy to limit specific harms and there is a lot to be gained, even in pure liberty terms. A world where someone who blacked out wakes up with a manslaughter or murder charge does not feel entirely free or fair either, since the conscious action they took was "drink until lose control of drinking." Many of us would rather get pulled over by their car than by a cop, I suspect.
Driving is a licensed privilege anyway. You aren’t even allowed to drive at all unless you pass a written and physical test to prove your road-worthiness. There is no second amendment for driving. Your freedom to drive aggressively or drunk doesn’t outweigh everyone else’s physical safety.
It’s more unfortunate that the United States is built around driving where most people can’t get around and cover their basic needs without the ability to drive a personal vehicle.
I think the article is interpreting the law as a bunch of cops in the surveillance center monitoring us when what it’s asking automakers to do is make a basic feature that disables the car if it can’t detect an alert driver, just like how today’s driver assist systems disable themselves if they see you dozing off or not touching the wheel.
In my opinion, the vagueness of the language in the law is there for the benefit of automakers. As written, a carmaker that disables a vehicle after 20 minutes without detection of a hand on the steering wheel would be in compliance.
It’s not an either/or situation. In 2023 it’s most likely to be cloud-first with local as a backup.
What do you know about AI inference that I don't? I thought most LLM models ran in the cloud because they are too power-hungry to run purely locally. If that's already true for text analysis and synthesis, doesn't that apply doubly so to 3D vision and motion analysis?
It already looks passed the idea that the kill switch and government determined ability to drive on a car level is already acceptable.
If the issue is people driving drunk, there's a lot you can do to mitigate it, such as making it unnecessary to involve operating a car in order to drink.
How can you in one paragraph say it's not a violation of privacy for your car to decide you're too drunk to drive as long as that information stays local, then in the very next paragraph decry car manufacturers allowing too much information to be remotely accessible?
Do you really think it's going to be a priority of car manufacturers to protect the privacy of their customers who they are, by federal mandate, already forced to (if not willingly) spy on?
Your phone keeps track of how many apps you open when and how often to get good battery life, and it's not a problem unless you're a dissident living in an oppressive state. Sure, your phone may be full of trackers and other privacy violations, but that particular tidbit isn't accessible anywhere but locally.
I wouldn't want one of these cars, but that has very little to do with the car storing a flag that says I'm not drunk. It's all the other crap that irks me.
People had a problem with Apple monitoring CSAM on their phones. But monitoring blood alcohol in cars gets a pass.
It’s not quite the same, because the phone would report you to authorities rather than shutting itself off. But in modern times, it seems unlikely that the data will remain on the car. Which means if someone somehow gets ahold of the data, they can easily drag you on social media if your car ever detected any alcohol.
(Personally, I’m undecided.)
If you are travelling between two cities in winter in Russia by car, and it refuses to start halfway, you die.
> People had a problem with Apple monitoring CSAM on their phones. But monitoring blood alcohol in cars gets a pass.
I.e. the objection would be fine if it was "Apple monitoring ${X} on their phones" for most values of X, but for X=CSAM, this is a qualitatively different issue - false positives are life-destroying, and you'd be at risk just by having an iPhone - a far more common situation than finding yourself in the middle of nowhere in a Russian winter.
> Robert Strassburger, president and CEO of the Automotive Coalition for Traffic Safety, is involved in a public-private partnership with NHTSA to develop an alcohol detection system for vehicles. He said the partnership agreement includes a requirement to build security measures that would prevent third parties from accessing any data collected by the technology.
A requirement to prevent third-party access to collected data heavily implies 1) data collection 2) by parties to the partnership agreement, namely the manufacturer’s interest group and the government.
The omission of these limits effectively guarantees there will be a privacy implication. Manufacturers are going to want to know the feature works, how often its triggered, etc. They will send the data back via the already onboard telematics unit. Insurance companies will want the data as well and they will buy it unless legally prevented from doing so. Similarly, its only a matter of time before law enforcement must be notifies "for drivers' safety".
Fuck new cars. Buy an old toyota hilux. Good luck turning that shit off.
Let's all take it down a notch. Trying to save lives is a good goal. Compared to those other things? An order of magnitude more human and sensible.
It's good to be cautious. So put some rules in place, sure. But to castigate the effort is not helpful or moving the conversation forward.
The entire point of this article is that other news sources and “fact checkers” are being obtuse (or simply lying) to deny the fact that a kill switch has been called for.
This is typical Overton window bullshit; “no, no, that’s not what they want to do,” and of course five years later it’s completely apparent that indeed we have implicit (and probably even explicit) kill switches in cars.
More importantly, freedom violations should be treated as seriously and physical injuries and even deaths, it really is that important. The mild safety gain is worth the loss of your rights.
Why is it always government with you people, when 90% of abuses are private firms or control freaks. Visa and mastercard abuse their power daily, random people pay scammers to write fake reviews on amazon to shut down your listings, thousands of fraudsters abuse automated systems to nuke your account on Youtube for fake copyright violations, etc.
The same things will happen with cars, and it will be used for extortion.
The law appears to be worded with no such stipulation. Which means it's up to the manufacturer how and where they process the data. The odds of the data being processed locally to the car are long.
Which does give rise to some questions:
if the car can't get a data connection, and therefore can't get the data analysed, will it assume the driver is incapacitated and refuse to start? If not, circumvention is simple.
If the manufacturer's servers have an issue, will the car refuse to start?
Will the data be the property of the driver, not the manufacturer? (hahaha, I'm kidding, of course the data will belong to the manufacturer, ready to be sold to anyone who wants it)
edit: clarified first question
Having said that, there are arguments to be made for a standard that uses heuristics to detect impaired driving for sure. Its harder to make the case if theres like a homomorphic data situation going on where your car can 1) use data and processi locally to detect potential impaired driving, 2) it stipulates loss of function in terms of abillity to further drive (pulls you over) in exchange for eliminating the potentialitt for crime, damage, and criminal chsrging process.
Its a goddamn loss of time, energy, and life to still have this problem. A car should not need to necessarily measure your BAC as evinced by breath to detect you're driving like a maniac and maybe it should pull over, lock, and contact assistance to the extent the law allows for you to be pulled aside and deal with a simple ticket/instant fine, no need for due process (instant feedback + administrative approach to offences).
The criminal aspect is bullshit because yes its a fucked up thing but people who are impaired are not thinking clearly or able to consent to committing a criminal act in th same way they can't consent to something as simple and hands-off (no pun intended) as being sexually fucked and still be considered to have had the agency to have been lawfully able to consent to that in the first place.
It really makes zero sense: 1) simple thing: receiving sexual intercourse 2) complex thing: driving car
You can do both these things drunk but your only assumed to have lacked agency in #1. Makes no sense to me, you're almost guranteed to fuck (up) your car [car non-consensually] if not yourself as the end result lol
EDIT: i'd appreciate if any lawyer or legal person or someone you know could critique this rationale and discuss how/why it is or isnt cogent and elaborate on the extent to which it could even be theoretically implemented, even [GASP?!] if it costs us all a lil bit of money/taxes/legislation to get us to that point in legal dtae of affairs
But yes, if your condom could detect if your partner had an elevated blood/alcohol level and requested them to confirm that they consented to the sexual act, would it be the same? And would it be useful, or would it just elevate the stats of condom-less rape?
In the same vein; if you could rip out the processor of your car because it refused to drive because it thought you were drunk, would it increase safety or reduce it?
If you were sober and took the time to criminally alter your car in the same way (but criminal) you cant have totalky tinted windowsand must have catalytic converter, i think basically everyone can agree you're prolly a piece of shit who needs judicial intervention
I get where you're coming from, but I think the blanket application of fixed rules with no consideration of context is pretty much always wrong.
In case (2) you are the offender. In your sober state, you're expected to know your limits. While sober, you had a chance not to take the action (i.e. taking the first drink) that eventually resulted in you losing your faculties and hurting innocent people, yet you did anyway. That makes you responsible.
I might be mixing up the points here and implementationetc but its asinine we dont just find a way that is the last invasive to prevent instead of waiting for destruction and the PUNISHING the CULPABLE OFFENDER.
Why should the law and traffic policy be so reactive as opposed to enlightened and as privacy respecting as possible proactive in nipping the issue in bud.
To say nothing of all the criminal cases that are fundentalh the stand in for treatment that as a society we both shame people in seeking before the fact and refuse to offer same and also after the fact when its wayyyy too fucking late (sorry for swearing but its passion) and that there exists enough technically-based or mental health related defenses to so as to render the process in my view a giant joke and waste of time
> maybe it should pull over, lock, and contact assistance to the extent the law allows for you to be pulled aside and deal with a simple ticket/instant fine, no need for due process (instant feedback + administrative approach to offences).
My own property should hold me hostage on the side of some random street if a pothole causes a false positive for drunk driving in some inscrutable algorithm? Not in a million years. Don't punish me for other people's failings.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base_rate_fallacy#Example_2:_D...
Sorry, with all due respect, i could not care less about your convenience. If you can't already appreciate the convenience over that whicb came before and you're really that selfish fundamentally, I'm not going to spend more time sitting with you trying to teach you to do what Jesus would do (if you're religious or just being a good world neighbour in general, its pointless anyway. At the end of the day, theres a disconnect between people who do what fails and doesn't work (using the criminal justice system where its just not an effective tool) and want to punish their way out of everything, or there's people like Einstein who suggest when something isnt working its insane to continue thusly, and to find a new approach. Not my finest example but you get the point. I'm washingmy hands of this lol
Its not always about just your convenience respectfully and obviously the tech has to be refined to reduce that absolutely, its def some bullshit but we need to find a lateral solution to this stupid persisten issue and punishing often sick people protestant style clearly isnt working, sorry
Sorry again, I know how much everyone likes to be dismissive of a rational and balanced discussion and use `sorry` as a glib silver bullet to escape scrutiny and resonance but here we find ourselves. I care about you in any case but this selfish and lack of collegiality or desire to problem-solve is a cancer and I will pull every stop to quarantine and stifle it :(
Nothing personal, its just my selfish conceit that I have to prioritize above your feelings in turn. At least we can speak the same language temporarily :/
> Many would answer as high as 95%, but the correct probability is about 2%.
Your system would be orders of magnitude less effective than you are imagining. It's a common enough mistake that it has its own example on that wikipedia page.
You really want to mandate a system where something like 98% of the calls to police would be false positives? Who will pay for all these extra officers who do nothing but drive around the city freeing innocent, sober people from their cars all day?
The seat belt situation is fine, because:
1. Your car doesn't refuse to drive if you don't wear one (such as on private property where it's legal to drive, drunk, with no seatbelt, if you choose)
2. Your car won't hold you hostage for hours if some AI algorithm makes a mistake. The seatbeat detector is 100% accurate under normal conditions and if it fails, the worst thing that can happen is your car will beep at you.
Still sounds like an inconvenience cuz maybe they don't wanna and thats the extent of their articulable issues with it but it still constitutes a violation of "muh freedom/convenience", no?
If they could get the inconvenience/false positive rate to 0%, would you still have philosophical issues with it to the extent you wouldn't accept it or would uou? I hope thats true but what I worry about is that its efficacy is not the actual issue (like in sales where people put forth unknowingly false objections)
> police
Why do police have to be involved? Are there no other means or approaches to civil enforcement? Who said anything about police?
Sorry, I hope I'm not being a total dick cuz I feel like we're listening to each other now but I'm just exhausted currently and the previous response kinda rubbed me the wrong way :(
> it still constitutes a violation of "muh freedom/convenience", no?
Yes, but "muh freedom" doesn't apply when you're on public roads with other people. My problem isn't with the law, but with co-opting a device that I paid for to work against my own interests.
Would you be okay with a similar system for seatbelt laws, where if you or your passenger or your child takes off the seatbelt while in motion, your car pulls over to the side of the road and holds you hostage for hours while you wait for someone to come write you a ticket?
> If they could get the inconvenience/false positive rate to 0%...
Simply isn't possible. And even if it was, there are edge cases where it should be allowed, such as:
- wife needs medical attention, and you've had a glass of wine
- wildfires, which can spread surprisingly quickly
- I want to drive on my own property where DUI laws don't apply
Don't kill my wife or make me burn alive in a wildfire because of other random people's mistakes.
> Who said anything about police?
You suggested someone comes and writes you a ticket before freeing you from your car. Who else writes tickets other than cops?
Haven't you ever passed one of those speed-testing automated tracker thing that issues people speed tix in the mail automatically?
[A surveillance and hierarchical control] architecture that is no longer built simply to be seen (as with the ostentation of palaces), or to observe the external space (cf, the geometry of fortresses), but to permit an internal, articulated and detailed control - to render visible those who are inside it;
in more general terms, an architecture that would operate to transform individuals:
- to act on those it shelters,
- to provide a hold on their conduct,
- to carry the effects of power right to them,
- to make it possible to know them, to alter them.
Stones can make people docile and knowable. The old simple schemaof confinement and enclosure - thick walls, a heavy gate that prevents entering or leaving- began to be replaced by the calculation of openings, of filled and empty spaces, passages and transparencies.
Foucault has written tomes on this topic — the transformation of the ‘architectures of surveillance and control’ and its internalization as a means of unconscious self-policing. He didn’t live to see the internet and the pervasively present microphones and cameras and “surveillance capitalism”, but he did write the book on it.
—
See also (for a contemporary consideration of Foucault’s “Panopticon”):
Foucault, Power and the Modern Panopticon, Connor Sheridan , 2016 (thesis)
https://digitalrepository.trincoll.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?a...
This is a nitpick, but it seems relevant given how the word "privacy" is actually being used in the article (and by lawmakers).
"Privacy" means to be free from intrusion or interference. It's the latter word that people are talking about when saying that this violates privacy.
And the same HN users on this thread will say that's not such a big deal. Law enforcers can already track people and arrest them physically, that's just a faster way to do that.
But no, it's bonkers.
And yes, a kill switch in cars is bonkers.
You want to stop a car? You should do that manually because:
- it requires efforts and has a high cost, for something that should not be common
- it implies skin in the game
- it's very hard to mass scale
- it's not nearly has much subject to hacking, corporate abuses, rogue cops, dirty politicians or bugs
- you can throttle things like speed and capabilities from the car, no need for a kill switch
The fact that some people here even debates that shows how much we are screwed.
A significant part of our population, even the educated and smart one as this thread demonstrates, cannot think in a way that will lead to maintain a decent amount freedom given a enough time.
You could never, you cannot, and you will never be able to assume benevolence and competence from the people in power. Their power must always be restricted, for us to keep being free on the long run.
It's not a matter of morality.
It's causality at work.
But sure, the biggest problem is that "it's a not violation of privacy".
And sure, it's just "for impaired drivers". Just like the patriot act was only temporary, right?
It's really sad to see that even after centuries of countless examples about how the authorities of the time will end up abusing any power that's granted to them there's still people (even a majority of people) who think it'll be different this time as opposed to our whole known human history. We surely are doomed to repeat the same mistakes again and again and again.
You give them too much credit.
I don't think they believe it will be "different this time".
They believe: "This time it will be done on my behalf".
I think it's because of the power imbalance between the state/corporation and the public. Those who seek to control have the resources, including an army of educated and smart people, to persistently push forward on their agenda, lobbying to shape laws, and mass media to shape the public opinion. They own the mainstream narrative, what is discussed and how.
We might fend off this particular attempt at further restricting our freedoms, but it's guaranteed they will try again and again, each time the gear of their infernal machine turns like a ratchet.
In the hypothesis that it’s actually kind of easy to figure out if somebody is impaired, I’m pretty conflicted because the upside of not having an impaired person driving is really high. Just I don’t know how possible it is, nor how reliably that would work. On top of that it seems like one step between that and “and the car reports you”.
How many people rushing to the hospital with a pregnant wife in the back will no longer make it before giving birth?
I assume you are unfamiliar with rural living, a common shortsightedness I see on this forum.
A women having early contractions, most likely would not qualify even for emergency lights.
This is the core problem: If we assume that the drunk driving protection is 100% accurate and there are never any false positives under any conditions, the bill seems more reasonable.
But I’m struggling to understand why people on HN of all places are assuming this drunk driving protection will be absolutely perfect and never trigger unless absolutely justified. Anyone who works with technology doing fuzzy classification or detection tasks knows how impossible it is to get the accuracy being implied in this thread.
Firstly, I've seen people who have DWI get a special license to drive to work and to get groceries. We simply do not have the public transit infrastructure. Come back with this when we have decent coverage of public transit.
Secondly, we don't have universal health care. You could end up with thousands in just ambulance expenses if you are out of network. If I am not imminently dying (how can I judge that?), we are driving ourselves.
Thirdly, this likely makes cars more expensive. See first point. We can't do that without decent public transit coverage.
Yes, we have a lot of people die on the roads in the US. No, the solution isn't as easy as adding a kill switch.
Do they get a licence to drive while intoxicated? Or people with a history of driving while intoxicated are bared from general driving, but get a special licence so they can drive but only to work and to get groceries?
Drunk driving penalties in almost all states include a minimum six-month license suspension. However, if that were universal it would completely destroy lives and have massive downstream effects. The Occupational License is an (on paper) license solely limited to driving between specifically classified types of places - work, church, healthcare, basic shopping, school, some stuff for your children, etc. Not only is it not a license to drive drunk, many of them have the added condition that the vehicle needs an "ignition interlock" device (paid for by the driver) that requires a breath sample before the car will move. Many of them also have functionality where you need to periodically blow into it while driving before the device shuts the engine down.
Of course enforcement here is an issue. Many people drive with completely suspended/revoked licenses, no insurance, etc and get away with it everyday. However, many police departments deploy either stationary ALPRs (automatic license plate readers) or have them installed on police vehicles. They're creepy but amazing - I was on a "ride along" with the police once and we'd be driving down the road at 45 mph. It would sound an alarm and have a synthesized voice that says something like "Florida license XYZ - suspended". The cop would just turn the car around and pull the person over.
And this would stop them from driving drunk. How is that bad? Or are you suggesting they should be able to drive drunk as it's the only way they can get to work?
Unexpected road debris? A car flipping in front of them?
I can understand the others on your list as they are things that can follow you, but I'm having a hard time seeing how unexpected road debris or a car flipping in front of me would be problems. I might have to drive erratically for a moment to evade them, but then even if the system decided I was impaired and made the car stop I'd be past the danger.
No, it could not. These rare edge cases have nothing on the number of lives taken by reckless drivers.
Just because something is hard to measure, doesn't mean it's not significant.
No estimates for the "lives saved while driving pregnant wife to hospital drunk and speeding" will ever get close to those numbers.
This algorithm is going to have speed,acceleration, traction, steering vs direction as some of the inputs. A good rainstorm or snowstorm is going to tough to differentiate from drunk or high driving. Those aren't edge cases. And how long then will the car decide you need a time out? 5 mins? 1 hiur? 4 hours? There is no way this doesn't get pushed back from a 2026 implementation anyway. You can't just drop this in when those model year cars are almost fully designed by now
Also it's perfectly possible to drive safely in severe weather. You shouldn't be swerving or driving erratically in bad weather either. If sight is limited, you're supposed to use hazard lights or (if it's due to severe fog) fog lights to alert other traffic to your presence and drive very carefully and slowly. If the road is extremely slippery you should use season-appropriate tires or snow chains if appropriate and otherwise drive carefully and slowly.
Those are very different patterns of behavior from the dangerous and reckless driving the law is clearly concerning. The pot head carefully going 20 because it feels like going 60 is clearly not the target for this. The drunk swerving into oncoming traffic because the alcohol is elevating their confidence while tanking their reaction time and fine motor skills very much is.
(edit: I don't have a strong opinion on the original subject, but I think you're right. I just don't like your example, hence my comment)
What would be the problem with that? If you don't make it to the hospital before giving birth, you don't need to go to the hospital at all. The reason you might want to be in a hospital while in labor is in case something goes wrong that prevents you from successfully giving birth.
Much like CSAM, this is one where there not clear daylight between the advertised situation and other similar situations (why would you want to stop pedos but leave mass shooters able to communicate?) other than the targeted class being particularly villainized by society at large. People should really have the faith of their convictions and discuss this as a generalized thing, “what is the benefit of having killswitches in all our cars for impaired drivers” and not just pretend that it’s only alcoholics who are dangerous on the road. This will eventually be coming for anyone who displays dangerous driving even if it’s “medical” and should really be viewed in that context.
I’m not saying that’s entirely a bad thing either. Maybe we’d all be safer if our cars spied on us 24/7. But people are generally repulsed at that idea because I’m not a filthy drunk driver, how dare you treat me like one. It was never about road safety at all, it was about getting one up on the underclass who we’ve socially determined it’s ok to scorn and hate.
If you think that’s not the case, contrast our social attitudes towards using a cellphone, which is equally dangerous to other drivers, and equally willful, and is so broadly accepted that people get upset about new laws to stop it. Clearly with some of these medical issues, it’s not because of the harm per se but because of the social villianization - it’s okay to hate drunk drivers or fat people, and we don’t have that radicalization 24/7 against these other (equally if not more dangerous) behaviors.
https://journalistsresource.org/economics/cell-phones-and-dr...
Also, reminder that alcoholism is a medical problem too, not sure how that take gets started in the first place. But overweight and alcoholism are definitely villianized because of the perception that it’s “your fault” whereas not getting enough sleep last night is not your fault at all! It’s quite difficult to talk about some of these topics for a lot of people because “drunk driving bad”… but in a harms sense it’s no more harmful than grandpa getting behind the wheel and crossing the centerline because he’s 75 and not a good driver anymore. And both individuals do consciously make that choice.
And if grandpa or a narcoleptic have a right to drive to work because that’s what our society requires of them… so does the alcoholic. It’s weird to give people a “drive while impaired” pass when the idea is supposedly about harm reduction - again, you’re just as dead if grandpa crosses the centerline as if a drunk driver did it.
For the average medical emergency, everyone would probably be better off with the car stopping by the roadside: heart attack, stroke, confusion, … are not improved by hitting other cars, buildings, pedestrians.
> How many people rushing to the hospital with a pregnant wife in the back will no longer make it before giving birth?
I would say if this is anything more than a movie trope it would be solved better by fixing your medical system, and not having to drive dangerously and illegally in the first place. Planted into a tree is not a great way to give birth.
Why are you assuming the person with the problem is driving? That’s not what anyone is talking about. The point was that someone driving a passenger to the hospital would be in a justifiable rush.
> I would say if this is anything more than a movie trope it would be solved better by fixing your medical system, and not having to drive dangerously and illegally in the first place. Planted into a tree is not a great way to give birth.
It’s not a movie trope, rushing sick people to the hospital is a real thing that happens.
It’s not a problem with the medical system. It takes longer for an ambulance to drive all the way to your location first and then to drive to the hospital than it would for someone to put you in their car and leave for the hospital immediately in most cases.
You’re taking the most bad-faith interpretations of what people are suggesting, but you’re really just setting up straw man arguments and missing the point.
Because it's what the average "medical emergency" involving "driving as though impaired" is.
> That’s not what anyone is talking about. The point was that someone driving a passenger to the hospital would be in a justifiable rush.
No, the point was "medical emergency", and "driving as though impaired".
> It’s not a movie trope, rushing sick people to the hospital is a real thing that happens.
It absolutely is a movie trope, having to endanger everyone because you need to drive like a maniac due to a medical emergency is a rounding error occurrence in the real world.
> It’s not a problem with the medical system.
Of course it is, the fact that you entertain is as a genuine possibility very much speaks to a lack of pregnancy care and access to emergency services and medical care.
> You’re taking the most bad-faith interpretations of what people are suggesting, but you’re really just setting up straw man arguments and missing the point.
Medical emergencies at the wheel are anything but a strawman, it's a daily occurrence in the US.
Even more so in the context of "driving as though they are impaired".
If we're talking strawman, that is absolutely what "rushing to the hospital with a pregnant wife who otherwise won't make it" is, it's a nonsense movie scenario entirely made up to pull on heartstrings.
If you're already in the actual process of giving birth, you definitely shouldn't be in a car going anywhere. The last thing you want to do with a pregnant person in labor is drive recklessly and endanger the lives of everyone involved including passengers of other vehicles and pedestrians.
If you have a medical emergency, you should call an ambulance. You're not a trained emergency vehicle driver. You're stressed and potentially in shock. You're not safe to drive. If you drive in such a reckless way that you're indistinguishable from a drunk driver, you're not safe to drive and you're a danger to yourself and everyone else.
Imagine if a robber, intent on making sure you can't flee with your car, douses you with a bottle of vodka.
There are no penalties if you don’t get caught.
I think the OP is saying that if it’s triggered, you can override it, but a report would be filed with the police so they can investigate.
Filing a report would be interesting, although I'm not sure feasible it would be to track and intercept every vehicle filing a report. Not to mention, the habitual offenders will just use old cars without the tech, or bypass it.
Yes, minor speeding here in the US is similar. Many states will arrest you and impound your vehicle if you do 26mph (or 31, etc) over the limit or exceed some predetermined spped like 99mph. Similar if you are found to be racing, or performing any action the police see as "reckless endangerment" (including of oneself and nobody else).
Are you saying it’s more important for people to have the ability to drive road-legal cars dangerously on private property, than it is to prevent fatal accidents caused by drunk drivers?
Would you complain that you couldn't reach speed greater than 20mph on stock electric scooter?
Surprisingly, but absolutely, not true. For instance, in most places in the US at least, you can be prosecuted for DWI on a private road on your own property (as it is about operation of a motor vehicle regardless of place).
The fact that people think it’s a privilege graciously given by the government to a grateful people is a big part of the problem.
In the US, the ability to drive commonly determines other abilities such as working, buying food and keeping scheduled appointments - inc medical ones and ones mandated by governments.
For a sizable % of the population: Driving is a privilege in the same way that being housed, eating, keeping needed health and not suffering persistent government penalties are all privileges.
Why are you so convinced this technology will never false positive flag yourself?
I’m baffled that so many HN commenters look at a bill written by lawmakers and assume that 100% perfect, no false-positive drunk driving detection technology can be produced and shipped in a couple years and that it will never, ever trigger on themselves. Only the bad people.
A manufacturer that makes their detector too aggressive won't sell any cars, while there are no penalties in the law for making the detector too weak.
If not, why is 1:1 even remotely acceptable for this?
you are confusing two ratios. the number of fairly executed people and the number of guilty people who are acquitted are obviously totally different.
Personally, I'd say that number is really high, possibly infinite. I'm not inherently opposed to the death penalty, but I can't think of any fair number of actual murderers I'd be willing to execute if it meant the death of somebody who truly didn't deserve it.
The whole point of the "Better 10 guilty men go free..." aphorism is that the two harms are not equal, and that a guilty man going free is less than 10% of the harm of an innocent man imprisoned.
The driving interlock case is just a straight up classic trolley problem.
I suppose have some sympathy with that argument, which is why I said a minimum of 1:1 (a lower bound on the ratio).
Drunk drivers kill innocent people as well of course.
...and even then, prison time or executions are not the same as vehicle rules.
I suspect these kill-switches will need to configure lights, etc. No matter what, you'll end up with a dead car in the middle of a road, potentially right around turns or on the edges of cliffs. I suspect this kill-switch would kill more people than the "suspected drunks" ever will.
In-vehicle breathalysers have existed for decades. They way they work is they give you a warning that the vehicle will shut off in X amount of time. Eg 5 minutes. The car doesn’t just shut off without warning leaving you without boosted brakes or power steering mid-corner.
With modern technology, most cars could also take over control from the driver when they deem safe to do so.
If your car just cuts off after beeping at you for something it has never beeped at you before for, you are likely to just continue straight on ... thus ending up exactly in the situation you say it won't work.
A modern system doesn’t have to beep. It can tell you what it’s doing, in your language, visually on the dash and audibly. Also, there’s no reason a modern vehicle designed for this type of system needs to cut all power immediately. It could cut power or limit speed over a period of time, allowing the driver to safely pull over. And there’s no reason for it to ever cut power to steering or brakes.
I think a lot of people, yourself included, are having a visceral gut reaction instead of looking at this rationally. The people responsible for the safety of vehicles aren’t going to write a law that requires a vehicle to cut its steering and brakes while the driver is cornering, when there are so many alternatives that would be equally effective but safer. You need to take a step back and apply logic and common sense to the situation.
Not that I think a kill-switch is a good idea as it's a technological solution to a law enforcement issue - that rarely works out well, especially when the tech is in the hands of the consumer.
Unfortunately, there's a huge public bias towards driving and whenever there's discussion of limiters, people often come out with rare edge cases and ignore the very large numbers of problems that comes with unlimited vehicles. Personally, I think the problems are best solved with standard law enforcement procedures - a cop sees someone speeding, so they pull them over and get them fined.
Why are people okay with computers automatically judging gray area situations?
Because the odds that the impaired or distracted driver has crashed before the officer is anywhere near (if they even respond to the call at all) are significant.
Helicopters are also prohibitively expensive and often not even covered by insurance. People faint over a 1K ambulance ride, but you could be looking at 30K or more for a helicopter ride. Which is really more the point. Some people are poor. At least the hospital will work with you. I remember when I was poor and couldn't afford an ambulance ride but needed it, it was the only thing that couldn't be negotiated down and it was a huge financial burden on a collegr student. All I took away from that experience was that next time I was on the ground bleeding from a head wound, I should call a friend. Which I did later in an emergency that ended with me passed out in my car in a parking lot. My friend took me.
As long as you can be severely financially hurt by taking ambulance people are gonna avoid them if you're not actively dying. And if you take away people's ability to drive people, they'll just not go. This is already happening with normal doctors and is one of the reasons hospitals are overburdened.
2. They may all be busy with other rescue ops.
3. (US-specific) You might wish you'd died after getting the medical bill for being helicoptered to ER.
1. Surely algos don't produce false positives. You will be hostage to an obscure algorithm than can shutdown your car at any moment.
2. If it's possible to abuse this, it will be abused. This is another Trojan Horse under the guise of safety.
OTOH, perhaps we should not expect a right to privacy regarding our sobriety when getting in a car.
Here's a good one (trying to outrun a pyroclastic flow, maybe NSFW, most people seen in this video do not live):
https://www.reddit.com/r/WTF/comments/13ou6df/escaping_pyroc...
https://old.reddit.com/r/funny/comments/5bcfy1/driving_sober...
My 2015 Ford has an automated "Driver Rest Suggested" feature with some kind of basic algorithm that detects the driving pattern of someone who's tired (supposedly). I assume it would do the same with an impaired driver?
Anyway, at least a couple of times a month it goes off for some random reason. Right now I just hit "Ok" and it goes away. Thinking that it could now lead to forced immobility of the vehicle is horrifying to me. Every time I get in my car I would be thinking "am I going to get to where I'm going"? Telling someone you missed something as minor as a meeting because your car thought you were drunk is ridiculous. Although if this was widely mandated the response would be "Yeah, I hate when mine does that". What a future.
Impaired driving is unacceptable but this functionality would either need to be calibrated such that you're ridiculously impaired (repeatedly swerving completely across the road) or it would lead to a lot of stranded motorists (and probably still would). In cold climates especially this could absolutely lead to death.
Getting to meetings, funerals, and the hospital on time for your baby to be born so the mother and child don't die in your immobilized car... This is all super ripe lawsuit territory.
This particular law should be rolled back, though.
E.g., seatbelts save about 15000 lives a year in the US. But occasionally someone is killed who would not have been killed if they hadn't been wearing a seatbelt, like this guy [1] whose neck was fatally compressed by his seatbelt. Politifact had occasion to look into deaths due to seatbelts [2] and found them rare, and worked out that if every crash that ended up with the vehicle on fire or in water with the occupants wearing seat belts ended up killing them it would be a couple hundred or so per year. The real number is going to be much lower than that.
I can't find any statistics on pyroclastic flow in the US, but in the last 100 years it looks like there have been under 100 deaths from volcanoes, which should be a superset of pyroclastic flow deaths.
How many more would there have been if those who avoided being one of those 100 by fleeing in their cars had cars equipped with the new system? I'm guessing that it would be less than 10x as many, since it is mostly only going to people who stuck around long past when evacuation was called for. So 10 per year.
As a check on that, I've seen estimates that over the last 2000 years in North America there were around 5000 deaths from volcano, so on average less than 3 per year. Since most of those were at times when people didn't have cars, volcanology was much less advanced, and communication was much slows that number should be higher than what we'd have nowadays even if cars were very flakey when fleeing from volcanoes. This suggests that my guess of 10x is very generous.
Drunk driving kills about 10000 per year in the US, so to make a persuasive argument based on deaths from false positives you are going to need much more than increased pyroclastic flow deaths.
Someone has brought up driving erratically while rushing to the hospital to give birth. I haven't found any stats on that. I'd guess that it is not super uncommon, but also that most of the time if you don't make it to the hospital in time it is not fatal. (And also increased deaths due accidents causes by rushing to the hospital should be considered...).
Anyone have other ideas? If the anti-drunk driving technology only prevents a quarter of drunk driving deaths that would 2500 per year, so we probably need at least 50 to 100 deaths per year due to false positives for that to be an effective argument.
[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4608342/
[2] https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2011/jul/13/joseph-tri...
But with technology like this, now the manufacturers are open to lawsuits from false negatives and false positives.
So thinking in terms of lives saved, a correct (albeit cold) computation, isn't really where this ends. Nothing beats the almighty buck!
But you are missing the forest for the trees. The point is, was this implemented, every single one of those people driving away would be dead (due to the traffic jam created by just one or two of these cars)... so, it's actually really hard to tell what the impact will be because you prevent what was once easy (evacuation using both sides of the road in hurricanes/volcanoes/etc), into impossible or probably impossible.
There simply isn't a way to predict how bad this will be.
When I drove a Smart over a tiny snowy incline without the ability to turn ABS off I realized what "city" in "city car" meant. I doubt this would work well in anything except city a road. Driving on snow, especially over the inclines of a mountain, would match my definition of "drunk driving"
So, your car is stolen, and a helicopter is following your car in a high-speed-chase that we see on TV/YT? No more! Now the relevant agencies will be able to kill you engine and you will slow down - to a halt.
Not to mention that false positives could leave someone stranded in a potentially dangerous situation with their primary transportation disabled.
I imagine this will be something that beeps at you a lot, and relies on various sensors whose performance degrades over time, such that mechanically-perfect ten year old cars will occasionally become unusable until someone skilled figures out which $5 sensor is sending erratic values.
I am the (unfortunate) owner of a brand new Audi eTron which (unfortunately) comes standard with some form of lane assist.
This "feature" is regularly nudging me (literally) onto steering trajectories I deliberately did not choose - sometimes dangerously so.
These nudges represent judgements made by the software that are understandable from a primitive and one-dimensional view but shockingly bad from the viewpoint of the entire landscape around me as I am driving.
On some occasions I truly believe I avoided serious injury or death by working against the feature[1].
We will learn these things. There will be blood. It could have been avoided.
[1] Two lane road with no shoulders passing a bicyclist with the California mandated passing margin ... while the steering is fighting to bring me back to my lane and kill the biker.
I have a car, and I enjoy a good road trip. I think cars are fantastic for inter-city transportation, especially with a family. But objectively, I have less practical freedom of movement today when I live in the suburbs than when I was younger and lived in NYC. Having a car is not optional for my current situation -- I cannot run any errands without a car, and can get to very few places of interest without one, and it is outright dangerous to be on foot in many parts. If my car is unavailable to me for whatever reason, I'm very inhibited in my movements.
When I lived in the city, by contrast, I had a many options for errands and fun within a 15 minute walk, and most of the rest of city available to me via bus or subway.
As cars become increasingly complex - especially as they start to become "connected" -- being car-dependent means our freedom of movement becomes even more vulnerable. My general feeling with this story on kill switches is skepticism that it's a good idea, but I feel that if people are really concerned about freedom of movement, they need to be thinking more broadly about how we've made it so difficult for a person to freely move around with just their own two feet.
But not only is this article imprecise in its criticism of the law, it sounds to me like the law (which I haven't actually read) is also imprecise in mandating technology that doesn't currently exist. You want a computer to decide on whether the driver is too drunk to drive, but how do you determine that? And what do you do if you decide the driver is too drunk? Killing the car is a terrible idea if this decision is made in busy traffic at speed. Should an autopilot take over? How well has that technology been going lately?
The article may be bad, but the law also sounds bad. This shouldn't be hidden away in another giant bill, but deserves some discussion on its own.
The technology exists.
The law is at https://www.congress.gov/bill/117th-congress/house-bill/3684... .
The definition is:
In this section:
(1) Advanced drunk and impaired driving prevention
technology.--The term ``advanced drunk and impaired driving
prevention technology'' means a system that--
(A) can--
(i) passively monitor the performance of a
driver of a motor vehicle to accurately identify
whether that driver may be impaired; and
(ii) prevent or limit motor vehicle operation
if an impairment is detected;
(B) can--
(i) passively and accurately detect whether
the blood alcohol concentration of a driver of a
motor vehicle is equal to or greater than the
blood alcohol concentration described in section
163(a) of title 23, United States Code; and
(ii) prevent or limit motor vehicle operation
if a blood alcohol concentration above the legal
limit is detected; or
(C) is a combination of systems described in
subparagraphs (A) and (B).
(4) according to the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety,
advanced drunk and impaired driving prevention technology can
prevent more than 9,400 alcohol-impaired driving fatalities
annually; and
"""Manufacturers such as Volvo have experimented with offering alcohol-detection systems as optional equipment. A public-private partnership called the Driver Alcohol Detection System for Safety (DADSS) project is also road-testing a passive alcohol sensor that detects the driver’s blood-alcohol content (BAC) by measuring the ambient air in the vehicle. How many lives the technology might save would depend on how it is implemented."""
Driver Alcohol Detection System for Safety lists two technologies, "Breath System" and "Touch System" at https://dadss.org/ with https://dadss.org/news/updates/when-might-the-dadss-technolo... listing timelines showing the technology exists, and should de deployable well within the time limits of the legislation.
> You want a computer to decide on whether the driver is too drunk to drive, but how do you determine that?
See the DADSS link.
See https://www-esv.nhtsa.dot.gov/Proceedings/27/27ESV-000293.pd... for "DRIVER ALCOHOL DETECTION SYSTEM FOR SAFETY (DADSS) – A VEHICLE SAFETY TECHNOLOGY APPROACH TO REDUCING ALCOHOL-IMPAIRED DRIVING – A STATUS UPDATE", which also points to "SAE J3214 standard, Breath-Based Alcohol Detection System, finalized in January 2021, which was specifically developed to provide the testing specifications adopted for breath sensors in fleet vehicles" (available For $114 at https://www.sae.org/standards/content/j3214_202101/ ).
See https://www-esv.nhtsa.dot.gov/Proceedings/27/27ESV-000291.pd... for "DRIVER ALCOHOL DETECTION SYSTEM FOR SAFETY (DADSS) – RISK BASED APPROACH TO ALCOHOL SENSING OUTCOMES MODELING" describing how they balance the issues.
> And what do you do if you decide the driver is too drunk? Killing the car is a terrible idea if this decision is made in busy traffic at speed. Should an autopilot take over?
The legislation says only "prevent or limit motor vehicle operation if an impairment is detected". It directs the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration to figure out the details. It could be that preventing the car from starting is determined to be the only requirement.
> This shouldn't be hidden away in another giant bill
This looks very much like what goes into giant bills. DADSS has been in development for over a decade.
Nothing seems wrong with the law.
What amount of error rate is low enough?
Even air bags "occasionally fail to deploy in higher speed crashes or deploy at lower speeds than anticipated, resulting in injuries and deaths that would otherwise not be expected".
A quick look at the literature says DADSS tests your scenario. In "DRIVER ALCOHOL DETECTION SYSTEM FOR SAFETY (DADSS) – PILOT FIELD OPERATIONAL TESTS (PFOT) VEHICLE INSTRUMENTATION AND INTEGRATION OF DADSS TECHNOLOGY" at https://www-esv.nhtsa.dot.gov/Proceedings/26/26ESV-000262.pd...
> After comprehensive research that investigated optimal sensor placement in numerous locations within the vehicle, the sensor was adapted for installation in the DADSS research vehicles in four different positions: above the steering column, above the glove box, in the passenger’s door panel and in the driver’s door panel. These positions improved analysis of the impact of cabin air flow and the driver’s position on alcohol measurements as well as optimized performance. It also allows a sober driver to operate the vehicle while a dosed passenger can provide samples for analysis.
and in proposed field testing:
> Drivers will not be permitted to consume alcohol and only alcohol-free measurements will be obtained from the driver side sensors. Passengers will be asked to consume two different amounts of alcohol, approaching a breath alcohol concentration (BrAC) of 0.02-0.03% and 0.04-0.05%, respectively.
How can you detect the driver's blood-alcohol content by measuring ambient air in a vehicle that might include passengers? Should a taxi get blocked from transporting drunk passengers? And how does this work in a convertible with open top?
I don't think it can be passive. I think the driver is going to have to blow into a breathalyzer before they can start the engine.
You can Google Scholar the DADSS citations yourself about how the technology works.
The regulations haven't been created yet. This bill says the experts need to figure out those details, and if it isn't possible, to let Congress know.
Maybe, if the car requires a button press to start, that button press can also be used to analyze the blood somehow?
Most cars aren't convertibles. If a convertible has its roof down, then maybe there will be a special clause.
Furthermore, breath and blood were only the first two methods I tracked down, from DADSS. The text I quoted earlier mentions technology from Volvo, which https://www.theverge.com/2022/9/21/23363673/volvo-ex90-elect... says is in the EX90. ("Volvo’s EX90 electric SUV will have laser sensors and cameras that can detect drunk driving.")
The law is clearly written to allow that alternative, which would work for convertibles.
There appears to be a lot of research on the topic, and I have (checks watch) a total of 75 minutes knowledge of it.
Any number of sensors on the car can trigger the computer to disable the vehicle. The law is only needing to require a new type of data collection and software kill switch trigger.
The 2021 infrastructure bill requires all new vehicles to have kill switches that will stop vehicle operation and alert law enforcement when drivers are impaired.
In-vehicle technology is coming to stop impaired drivers, but it does not involve law enforcement
* The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act of 2021 mandated that within three years, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration must create in-vehicle technology to hinder people who are under the influence from driving. But third parties, including law enforcement, will not have access to the in-vehicle systems or be able to see drivers’ results.
* The administration partnered with the Automotive Coalition for Traffic Safety to create the technology that is expected to monitor drivers’ alcohol levels using sensors and infrared lights in vehicles. If the system detects a blood alcohol level above 0.08%, the vehicle will not move.Clearly, natural language is not formal logic [1]. And even if it was, the statement doesn't necessarily translate into formal logic so straightforwardly [2].
[1]: https://www.argumentninja.com/view/courses/vl-principles-of-... [2]: https://math.stackexchange.com/a/2359592
People choosing to call this a kill switch are making an emotive, inaccurate word choice to advance an agenda. That is precisely the kind of behavior fact checking is intended to correct.
And the requirement can be pushed back a few years if needed.
A safety interlock is not a kill switch.
The bill does not require a kill switch nor safety interlock! It says only "prevent or limit motor vehicle operation if an impairment is detected". The "or" is important.
From the risk paper I linked to earlier at https://www-esv.nhtsa.dot.gov/Proceedings/27/27ESV-000291.pd..., "Depending on the intended use of the device, a range of outcomes might occur; the car could be prevented from being put in gear, could be limited to lower top speed using a “limp mode,” or the driver could simply be given a warning."
The first two of those would definitely "limit motor operation" as required by the law, but the middle is not meaningfully described as a kill switch.
The details of how it should work are yet to be decided.
I think your statement "up in arms" suggests the conclusion, these fact checkers are rating it as false because they are not in arms about the law. But being up in arms is not relevant to whether a statement is true or false.
I think if the fact checkers were being genuine, they would rate it as true and give an explanation about the benefits of the law
I’m curious: Do you also think that automakers can produce good drunk driver detection and ship it in a couple years?
Are you willing to have a car that some times false positive flags you as drunk and shuts down?
Or are you assuming the technology is so perfect that it can’t possibly ever apply to you?
However, I've long thought that motor vehicles should have some kind of black box that monitors various driving metrics such as how "smooth" the driving is. This could provide valuable data to insurance companies and they should provide a sizable discount for drivers who agree to provide that data and have good driving scores.
There's also another benefit to measuring acceleration/deceleration data and that is to highlight if someone's faculties suddenly decline (e.g. illness or old age). Typically, when someone has failing eyesight, they might not be able to predict other vehicles as well and that would lead to more aggressive braking which can easily be measured. This could provide an important early warning system to the drivers that their driving has suddenly worsened and they might want to see a doctor unless they have a known temporary condition (e.g. hay fever).
Also, if the aim is to detect drink-driving, then that's easy enough to do from outside the vehicle with CCTV cameras and the police already have methods to stop drunk drivers. I suspect that the aim is surveillance rather than law enforcement.
This already exists, at least in the UK market. A lot of insurers will give you a discount if you let them fit such a "telematics" box to your car. It's still a privacy nightmare.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2011/apr/28/tomtom-sa...
It would make sense to anonymise the data before sending it to the government and the point of the data is to identify road congestion and problematic junctions. It could also feed into better tracking of traffic lights timings etc. None of those uses have a requirement to know whether it's Mr Jones in his red Corsa or Mrs Malaprop in her SUV.
Fleet cars tend to have these systems, as do trucks. I have a friend that drives 18-wheelers, and often complains about getting nagged by Safety, when he does something out of bounds, or, more often, when drivers around him drive out of bounds.
It’s definitely an insurance thing, with his company. They probably save millions per year, using that system. I explained to him that’s why they’ll never make an “exception” for him, because he’s skilled and experienced. The system is there for all the low-rent knuckleheads they hire.
And for bonus points (pun not intended) will suspend your insurance because they think you're speeding even when you're not [0], with not a lot of recourse.
Driving without insurance could get you a £300 fine and 6 points on your license - enough to cancel it in one go if qualified less than 2 years, which is usually the target audience of these boxes.
> Sterling Insurance made Angela and her son go to the locations of his alleged speeding infractions and take pictures of the road signs next to a digital map on a phone.
Yeah, just show them that their data is wrong - no big deal right? I guess in an ideal world such litigation would happen cheaply and quickly too.
Certainly, if you get into legal trouble for not having valid insurance, you could easily demonstrate the facts as to why the company illegally revoked your insurance and how they had no right to do so.
Great idea!
But on the other hand I'm sorry to inform you that your insurance has gone up, because we found that drivers in your neighbourhood are in general 2498% more likely to have accidents. Maybe you're next. We'll just make sure that rates have already been adjusted to account for that.
Also we saw that you were driving (very smoothly, congrats on that!) around some rather shady parts of town. This will lead to another rise in your fees, we just want to make sure that we got you covered in case your car gets stolen...
These types of statistical analyses are exactly why insurance is as cheap as it is.
I'm no fan of all the discounts insurance companies hand out for handing over private data like driving behaviour or healthcare stuff, but insurance companies with no risk management can't compete in any kind of open market.
I would argue that in terms of broader accessibility of insurance, these microtargeting approaches may actually be an improvement for many. If you live in a troublesome neighbourhood you may be paying through the nose for getting categorised as "one of the bad ones", but these individual data points can help prove you're a responsible driver and escape some of the cost of having a shitty start in life.
I'm still against these data collection practises ("you want privacy? Live in a rich neighbourhood and get a college degree!", plus a lack of any kind of law preventing these companies from sharing or selling that data) but there are solid arguments in favour of feeding insurance companies more data.
Why would you want insurance for predictable events when you can just put the money to one side yourself and not feed the insurance companies' profits?
You have a 1% chance of sustaining $1MM in damage. Do you carry around a million dollars or do you get insurance?
What about a billion? What about a thousand? Congratulations, you now know what you’re willing to pay for a deductible and what you’re going to look for in an insurance policy max.
Similarly, insurance companies frown on people getting insurance when the person knows that they have a claim to make - when there is certainty, then insurance is the wrong product and may be considered insurance fraud.
I think you're mixing up predictable events with probabilistic events. Just because you know the average likelihood of an event occurring does not mean that it is predictable. (e.g. the chance of getting red or black on a roulette table has known odds, but you're only going to be able to win if you can predict the outcome)
My point was that insurance isn’t about unpredictability, it’s about cash flow and risk hedging based on probabilities.
I disagree. If you can predict that your house will never be burnt down, then you wouldn't need buildings insurance - it's the unpredictable nature of these events that makes insurance useful. Yes, the costs of these unpredictable events are spread out across the insurers so that they can turn an unpredictable event that causes a huge expense into a predictable insurance premium instead.
You define predictable as: I can predict if and when this will happen to me.
I define predictable as: I can predict that this will happen one in one hundred times.
Both are correct definitions of predictability. In the insurance context, your view is the one of the insured and mine is the one of the insurer. The switch between the two occurs at some risk-adjusted monetary threshold. In other words, whether you are an insuree or an insurer depends on your risk tolerance. For example, most home owners are insurees for the purposes of fire. Most home owners are also (self-)insurers for the purposes of, say, a leaky faucet. The decision to procure insurance is therefore not predicated on the unpredictability of the event but on a risk adjusted monetary basis (ie, cash flow and risk hedging).
Sorry, but you're using a bizarre definition of predictability. If I were to say that the chances of anything coming from Mars are a million to one, then you'd be considering it "predictable".
That's what happens now. This would be "your insurance has gone up because you are more likely to have an accident. If you drive more carefully you can get a discount."
It's actually a thing already here in the UK. Many insurers let you get a black box and if it shows that you drive carefully you get a discount on your premium.
I would never trust a private for profit company with this much data.
Remote monitoring, aside from the incredible security risks, provides no context as to why.
Frankly, I think it should be illegal for cars to have any form of wireless networked access. I personally disable all of that in any car I buy, typically by removing antennas and replacing with resistors.
What I want is something in cars that makes it impossible to go over X inside city bounds etc. The tech for knowing the speed limit isn't good enough yet to be used for limiting, but some kind of max limit in an area a bit over the highest speed limit would help a lot.
Electric scooters have geofencing and speed limiters. My drone has gps zones it wont fly. Electric bikes have speed limiters. But you can just take your car and blast 150+ down a residential street if you'd like. Just insane. It's a solved problem, just need enforcement.
In reality it's a political problem. Here in the UK, certain right-wing media outlets and personalities are often complaining about the "War on Motorists" which is ironic as when you look at RTC data, it's the motorists that are massacring pedestrians and other road users.
Short bursts of acceleration may be required for evasion sometimes, even at high speeds, but you don't need to drive 160 km/h for more than a minute, and you won't be hitting the Autobahn if your car is sold in South America.
The other thing to realize is the people who go those sorts of speed also tend to modify their cars. They'll just push a new tune that removes the limit. So you still need traditional enforcement.
There are already a solutions, it is called police, speed traps, fines, and license revocation. Not everything has to be done with preventative measures by a nanny state.
Having limits on things doesn't automatically make things a "nanny state". Don't argue like that. Is it a nanny-state that there are speed limits?
No, speed limits are fine. Its enforcing them with technological tools that are not under control of the citizen that is not fine.
Also, at least in my country, the code says that I am allowed to break the speed limit if there is a good enough reason (e.g. I am trying to escape from somebody that wants to kill me, I am bringing somebody urgently to the hospital because he may otherwise die).
For example one of my friends was born during the Oil Crisis of the 70s, and at the time car circulation was limited (odd plates one day, even plates the other). Both the parents had the "wrong" plate that day, but they decided to use the car anyway because it was an emergency. They got stopped by the police, and once understanding the issue, the police escorted them to the hospital with siren and lights.
How do you do that with externally imposed limit ? You don't (sorry your kid didn't make it, but that's the law) ? You prescribe a button that says "I'm in emergency" ? (no-one drunk enough will ever use it, I am sure, and neither will criminals using a stolen car).
Also in general there is the issue that in a healthy society most people will respect the law, and only a few break it. Putting restrictions on otherwise law-abiding citizens tells them the state doesn't trust them, and in the long term citizens will answer in kind.
edit: I will add that even if it were against the law, in some cases breaking the law and paying the consequences (paying fine, losing license) may still be worth it if it is an actual emergency.
That just opens the door to the driving version of "your grandma had cancer, so you won't get health insurance". Unfortunately, it also already exists.
I think that highlights the stupidity of a privatised health insurance system. Not wanting to know about health problems due to a financial disincentive is not a sensible way of managing a populations' health, when typically prevention is much cheaper and more effective than waiting until obvious symptoms show up. I suppose it depends on whether profit is more important than the population's health.
They already have data readers that plug into your OBD2 port for insurance purposes.
Those events will be much rarer than the type of late braking that poor drivers will make due to lack of observation. It'd be trivial to separate out the emergency stops from the everyday driving data.
So yes, in a population of good drivers it would be simple to select people with higher rates of hard braking. But punishing them without context could lead to false punishment (similar to the cases of nurses that just happened to have higher rates of patient deaths - the prosecutor fallacy I think). Once you surpass a threshold of bad drivers in the population, it's more likely in my mind that the hard braking people may actually be the good drivers avoiding the ones running lights.
This has been available for years from some insurance companies.
There’s no reason it needs to be built into the car or to automatically report it against the driver’s will. It’s an opt-in thing.
My coworker got it when they first came out because she thought she was a safe driver and wanted a discount. She got a monthly report of how many sudden stops it recorded and the number was much higher than she would have guessed. She never could figure out what was triggering it, but began to suspect it was the stop signs between her house and the office. So instead of coming to a complete stop she started slowing down and then rolling through (which isn’t legal in our state). Unintended consequences strike again.
The faith that non-IT people have in "smart" automation always doing the right thing, is really remarkable.
My car also thinks I'm too stupid not to drive on busy roads with lots of parked cars and often thinks I'm about to slam in to a parked car. Like, did anybody test it in the UK? Our roads are narrow and full of parked cars!
I'm sure it's great when in an actually dangerous condition, but it's slightly annoying to feel the engine revving down every other day, when you're trying to get to work, just because the first couple of streets are a bit "unmaintained".
It's also gotten way worse nowadays.
I doubt this mandate will survive the court of public opinion once this becomes adequately known.
The article does a decent job of showing how "Fact Checkers" failed to spread knowledge, probably due to individual biases and a lack of diligence.
Why is that?
My guess it's mostly because police officers are over represented in drunk driving themselves?
However, the police will set up a "sobriety check" road stop, after warning you in the local newspaper where the checks will be! These road stops are usually off highway exit ramps far from any bars. So, yeah, too many cops drink and drive, I'm guessing.
My (European) opinion is the the best option here is really to provide public infrastructure (night buses etc) that enable the drunks to get home without driving.
Everyone likes to go out and eat and drink, and at least here in the US driving cars is just as much a way of life and thus a practical right as it is a legal privilege. Dining venues and residences generally are not in walking distance, and thus necessitates driving a car.
Drunk driving laws exist to police the particularly egregious offenders who end up causing or could cause harm, but the police know that if they try enforcing those laws on everyone they will quickly lose support from the people they need to protect and end up unable to enforce any law.
That's why police don't arrest restaurant goers and also why I suspect this mandate will immediately die once it becomes widely known.
The only part of a system like this that doesn't work is sometimes the actual posted speed limit doesn't match what the insurance company has in its database and I have to call them and tell them they need to update it. The U.S has a lot of roads. Just keeping track of what the speed limit is for a given location in the U.S. would be difficult, but not impossible. Probably involves a whole lot of boring data entry work.
I have a right to travel, but no right to travel recklessly. Just like automated speed cameras, an in-car detection system could help reduce drunk driving and other kinds of reckless driving.
As long as 42,000 Americans per year die in crashes and alcohol is the #1 contributing factor, I think we should think creatively as a society about how to fix that.
I welcome a law which helps save lives - including the lives of drunk drivers - by detecting and limiting impairment at a vehicle level. There is no way law enforcement will ever be able to catch all instances of drunk driving without help and no way people will stop drunk driving in the first place. It’s time for some new policy.
Cameras in every household to catch people who are about to eat unhealthily. Administer a small electric shock through their mandatory headgear until they comply.
This is how we achieve utopia, where everyone is safe and no one dies of preventable causes.
They're evidently not acting in the public interest, either by incompetence, or worse: by collaborating with the authoritarians who are rising in Western government.
It's clear from the truckers protest in Canada (with participants having their bank accounts frozen on order of Prime Minister Trudeau) that Western governments are willing to take draconian measures. And on the basis of this example, it's obvious to see how kill switches in vehicles could be misused by a government that desperately wants its own way.
I certainly do not support honking horns all night in cities for weeks, and I wouldn't have batted an eye if the government declared the protest a riot, arrested every individual involved, and put them all in court the next week.
But the extrajudicial freezing of bank accounts under an Emergency Act was a siren, and I'll certainly view any new proposed new tools through that lens.
The law does not require a kill switch of any sort, much less one that can be activated remotely.
The phrase is "prevent or limit motor vehicle operation if an impairment is detected".
Limit can mean a lot of things besides preventing the car from driving.
Consider that if you fail the test then a warning lamp appears. If you continue to fail the test for another 5 minutes, and are driving over 20 mph, then your car starts flashing its lights and honking its horn until the test passes again or you stop the car.
Or, a governor engages, ramping down to 10mph over a period of 10 minutes.
Those result in limited operation, but are not kill switches.
Yes, the law could allow interlocks which prohibit use completely, just like those convicted of DUI may already required to have interlocks installed.
But it certainly does not mandate it.
The path to hell is paved with generous assumptions that government won't take full advantage of the powers it granted itself
The claim is that the feds mandated a kill switch.
The law does not mandate a kill switch.
You have a several-stage process where the worst-case scenarios has to play out. 1) the technology needs to be more fully developed; 2) the policies need to be put into place (this could take years); 3) there is at least two years after #2 before it's required, and 4) the majority of Congress have to not want to change it.
The materials I linked to earlier pointed out that in the 1970s Congress mandated driver seat belt interlocks, only to repeat it when there was enough outrage. So it's not like #4 can't happen.
The government could raise taxes to 100%. That's not a worst-case event that I'm going to spend time talking about. Don't buy the fear-mongering this link is trying to sell you.
And even if I'm wrong, you have years to advocate for change once the worst-case becomes public.
What is in the bill sounds like some AI or pseudo-AI that disables the car if it detects I would assume swerving, unusual acceleration or the like, which isn’t far removed from existing pseudo-AI in cars (lane keep assist, driver attention detection, emergency braking when radar detects an imminent collision).
People were equally up in arms about the mandate to wear a seatbelt impinging on their freedoms but now most do it gladly. Operating a car is a privilege, not a right, and that's why we have driving tests and licenses and all of that. Maybe this will just be one necessary piece of having that privilege.
And just to be clear, I don't support a kill switch either way, remotely accessible or not; I will never in my life voluntarily own such a vehicle.
But the 'kill switch' might actually happen? It doesn't improve safety nearly as much as speed governors. Annoying.
All the above examples is a violation of something, if not privacy. And who's to say they all aren't possible in the near future? So what if you spent $35K on your vehicle and they infiltrate it, it's not really yours anyway, right? (sarcasm intended)
I think the real question is how long can this go on before the people have no way to stop it if they wanted to.
And some countries already can't be stopped. See Russia, a mafia state. They just beated protests until 'morale improved'.
It absolutely does not mean that they can't tell you you're not allowed to drive. Driving is, and always has been a privilege in the US; not a right.
Triple negative sentence = 'it does mean that they can tell you you're allowed to drive'?
Less concisely, it means that it does prevent the government from telling you you can't move around, but it doesn't prevent the government from forbidding you to drive.
The far more troubling question is a) how the car is supposed to determine you're driving dangerously (and how likely false positives are) and b) how the car is supposed to safely come to a stop in a way that does not endanger other people (hopefully not by just turning on the hazards after coming to a full step on the left lane of a highway). Given that I recently had a car blare at me because it wouldn't believe that I was looking at the road no matter how I turned my head, where I looked and how much I opened my eyes, the prospect of a car deciding its driver is drunk and doing something dangerous seems like a much bigger concern than law enforcement or eco terrorists hacking my car to prevent me from driving to Starbucks.
To all the people who support this, how the hell do you you even start implementing this? Unless you detect only extremely obvious signs, simple manevrouing around shittier roads could trigger this.
I do admit however I have a vast collection of tinfoil hats
Don't like it? Choose a method of transportation that doesn't have a huge potential to kill people.
first of all, whoever proposed this should be fired or in jail
second, who even writes like this? did they consult software and electronic engineers? as a software engineer i have the expertise and experience to know this is a bad idea and will be ridden with false positives and cant be implemented in a secure manner anyway.
It is bad enough that government got a string to our income.
Im not necessarily for it. But there is definitely an argument to be made, speeding is the cause of 30% of all traffic deaths: https://www.nhtsa.gov/risky-driving/speeding#:~:text=Dangers....
What if we level the playing field instead of exacerbating the problem?
Every fed knows where I live, so let's publish where they live. Let's put large LCD screens in the sides of every government building and vehicle announcing the PII (name, cell number, hine address, job title, pay rate) of everyone working there.
I may suggest this to the Libertarian Party to be included in their platform.
> “Our rating: False,” said USA Today.
> “ASSESSMENT: False,” said the Associated Press.
> “We rate it Mostly False,” concluded PolitiFact.
https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2022/dec/05/instagram-...