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Comment by johnnyg | Hacker News Reader

Civil liberties are under attack on so many fronts, it seems like the few who cared initially are punch drunk. This is such a painfully bad idea on so many levels. Here's a list:

1. This adds cost without adding value to the consumer of the product.

2. The only value add is the ability of a democratic government run by the people...to track its people.

3. We already carry cell phones and use facebook. Do you really to build a whole new physical platform to get this done? Can you do it better than the cell phone providers and facebook?

4. We're not deep enough in debt yet? Want me to skip to the end game and just cut out my liver and hand it to you?

Every day I read HN and politico. I think politico is destroying things faster than HN is building them.

I want to see a PG post titled "Lets Hack Washington". I think the RIAA is too small a target.

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You could conceivably use the data to protect yourself against false claims in the event of an accident ("he was going too fast when I pulled out").

This is why many of us have video cameras on our dashboards continually logging our drive. Note that this is completely voluntary and under the control of the driver.

Is that submittable in court? Do you do this? You should write a blog post about it?

Probably can be used in court but doesn't need to be. Tons of people have these. When there is bad behavior by the other party, you upload the film to youtube and then stand back and watch as the legal problems resolve themselves through nationwide vigilantism, which is far more just than our current corrupt court system.

I'm interested in preserving civil liberties, but it's tough when there's so much misinformation out there.

I have to fact check everything, and frequently find these alarmist articles to have nothing behind them. If the powers-that-be are conspiring against us, a big part of their methodology must be blowing all this smoke in our faces so that whenever we see a "big brother" or conspiracy story we immediately assume it's false.

I'd like more facts in articles like this, e.g. the specific wording in the proposed law that requires transmission, not just recording, of data.

Once the data is recorded, it's only a matter of time before it becomes convenient to use in wider and wider contexts. The problem with requiring transmission to begin with is the infrastructure (business, legal, etc., not just tech) for all that doesn't really exist yet. But if in the future your fridge has an IP address, it's unlikely your car won't. With both data and connectivity, it would be a small decision to put the two together - an over the air firmware update and your car could be compliant within a few weeks of a new law.

This is logic that suggests we should also outlaw hard drives. Who knows what the government might find out about us in the future by passing some terrible law?

We can control hard drives - not just with software, but with encryption the government is (hopefully) unable to break.

If we had the same degree of control over these recorders, I'd be less concerned.

I would have no problem with an article that made the argument you just made. I do have a problem with an article that says "the primary function of the black box devices would be to record and transmit data" when the "transmit" part is pulled out of thin air. This bill does not require technology that enables active tracking.

The other value add is for insurance companies. They can use that data to alter rates.

Pushing through my own cynicism here, you can't ignore the fact that there is added value to the consumer if she/he is a defensive driver. In the event of an accident, there is significantly more data for the insurance companies to use to determine fault and liability.

"If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear"

Possibly one of the worst quotes ever.

http://www.computerweekly.com/blogs/the-data-trust-blog/2009...

I have read a number of articles on "debunking" that statement, but they always have large holes.

This one in particular attacks what it considers consistency. It suggests that we cannot be sure that the data that is collected will consistently used accurately. It suggests that having ones fingerprints on file were the cause of a number of false arrests.

While I agree that if we collected no data, we'd probably have less false arrests, they convinently avoid talking about how many people have been correctly (as far as we can tell) convicted because of that data.

I'm not saying this has anything to do with the whole car article- I'm just saying that if someone is swayed either way by that simple computer weekly article, they haven't really thought the issue through themselves.

They already do this on a voluntary basis:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-16969509

Makes it a lot cheaper for young drivers to get insurance.

> 4. We're not deep enough in debt yet? Want me to skip to the end game and just cut out my liver and hand it to you?

By very definition of the capitalist society, no.

The only reason you exist in the wheel is to spend money, so of course more and more creative ways to do so will always be found.

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