Self-driving cars: What to do with collected data?
Last Friday afternoon we had Deputy Director & Deputy State CIO, Chris Cruz, come to class where he spoke about what the state of California is doing in matters regarding IT. There was no surprise that the state truly is a pioneer in those matters but being a pioneer is never easy. California is the home of new ideas and technology and therefore the government often has to establish a standard of some kind for what is acceptable and what is not acceptable. [1] What I wanted to know is what kind of obstacles governments in the front lines are facing right now. Although this problem that I’m about to address might probably regard IoT in general, I’m going to stick with self-driving cars for now.
While self-driving cars are already out on the street as we speak, the state of California (amongst everyone else) is facing many big obstacles. Most people are familiar with problems such as machine-made decisions and questions such as who is responsible for accidents. During my research I discovered an interesting obstacle that many people may not find so obvious: what to do with used data?
For a machine to steer a car it must collect tons of data such as geolocation and video-recording. In most cases, it only needs to store information for short periods of time. For instance if the car were to turn right at an intersection where s pedestrian is crossing the street, the car would first have to collect data about the pedestrian crossing the street and then make a decision to stop. He would then collect data about nobody being in the way before continuing with his ride. Assuming this particular information is now useless for the car, should the data collected in this simple example now be deleted? Or if possible, should it be shared for profit?
The pedestrian in the example above probably doesn’t care at all that his presence was recorded but when it comes to other information such as driving habits and passenger-information of some kind, people might not want to keep their data available for the world to see. To protect people’s privacy, the California law requires that “autonomous vehicle technology manufacturers disclose the information they collect while the vehicle is in use (such as GPS coordinates, destinations, times, etc.).” [2]
One might feel good about that legislation. However since information is getting more valuable then gold these days, let’s assume that an owner or a user of a self-driving car wouldn’t mind his data being stored. Is that something that he can make profit of? Ben Volkow, the CEO of Otonomo, predicts that by 2020 vehicle data will be more valuable to the automakers than the actual cars that provide the data. [3]
Keeping that in mind, one might wonder if the state of California is possibly making a mistake not allowing manufacturers to collect and share data. If a particular consumer wouldn’t mind, soon he might be getting a free car in exchange for his travels being recorded. Self-driving cars will then be a huge opportunity for companies specializing in buying personal data directly from the consumers, especially if California will be sticking to their legislation. Considering the fact that governments tend to follow California in their doings, this has to be something to be at least rethought of.
[1] This was the case with data breach legislation, where California’s stringent requirements established the industry standard. With revenge porn liability, California moved first and other states followed, so diversity of state action is not in itself necessarily a persistent problem. (https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/jun/08/self-driving-car-legislation-drones-data-security)
[2] (https://www.hg.org/article.asp?id=31687)
[3] (http://money.cnn.com/2017/02/07/technology/car-data-value/index.html)
15 comments on “Self-driving cars: What to do with collected data?”
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I really liked your thoughts on the privacy issue upon data collection. It’s obvious that autonomous car needs a lot of data to work with but it shouldn’t violate other people’s privacy.
Hi Atila!
No they shouldn’t violate people’s privacy without asking.
But how about if the person wouldn’t mind? Should the car-makers then be allowed to?
Well on the one hand, if the person doesn’t mind, it is beneficial for the companies. A lot of engineer will have the possibility to work with real life data and I think that this will increase the speed of innovation in the area.
On the other hand, I don’t think that a control mechanism can be implemented based on consent. I am sure if it is built that way, people will be able keep track of who gives consent and who not but what kind of an authority can be present in digital area to check that. What I mean is, if the system is once built in a way that it can violate privacy, under any sort of allowance; in the long run, it will just legitimize privacy violation of everyone.
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Now I am interested, if there are already any business cases regarding collected data, how can it benefit automotive manufacturers and moreover the consumer itself?
Do you know if any country supports the collection of data?
I think it is quite difficult to allow the collection and sharing of data on a general basis. It might be helpful to differentiate and balance benefits and security aspects.
Hi Christina,
Yes I agree with you, this is a very delicate situation.
I really think that in some situation the consumer should be able to benefit from his collected data.
I did not find any particular countries where personal data companies are successful, but I definitely think it’s the future.
Hi Helgi, thank you for the article. I’m really interested in your point made regarding selling data, and honestly I’ve never thought of this way before. I believe that data selling would be a huge way of making profit in terms of getting better sense of consumer behaviors. A lot of industries, other than the automotive, are also doing this right now by separating their users and consumers by doing B2B business – they provide their products to consumers free while selling data to other business to realize monetization. However, I do think that sometimes there are ethical issues related to this action too that we cannot fail to consider.
Hi Ziru,
Yes absolutely. Many of the biggest tech-companies make most of their money by collecting data.
I didn’t realize how close this situation I talked about is to internet-companies like Facebook. I said you might be getting a free car for allowing data being collected, and like you pointed out, that is exactly what we are seeing at Facebook and many of those other industry-giants.
A question you might add here is whether the consumer himself (especially in the matter of self-driving cars) should be making money directly instead of the product maker. What do you think?
First of all, great post Helgi! I wanted to add some insights that are relevant to Ziru’s point.
With the rising potential of autonomous driving cars, many owners of driving schools, including my co-founder, are trying to find a way to survive through providing customers driving data to OEMs.
Also, autonomous cars are a disruptive innovation that changes the entire landscape that involves automotive and it is amazing to see how non-traditional players are entering the market. Autonomous cars require enormous amounts of gateways and sensors that increase the connectivity of the car, but at the same time, a robust security is becoming a huge issue. Hence, sensors, as well as security solutions, are becoming a huge market. Seeing that as an opportunity, Samsung, and Intel, two big non-automotive semiconductor companies entering the market. Also, frequent M&A and strategic partnership are occurring to secure better positions to enter the autonomous driving market (e.g., NXP and Qualcomm).
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Hello Helgi!
A very well written blog post I must say!
One of our fellow classmates actually made a blog post about UK being ready for self driving cars. The UK government has passed a Modern Transportation Bill which has rules and regulations regarding self driving cars and the issue you mentioned of who do you hold responsible in case of any mishaps. I think UK could be one of the leaders in putting its foot in the door to make driverless cars drive on the streets soon!
Hi Saran and thank you for your comment!
Yes, I think UK definitely compete with leading governments such as California. However I have not found information on how they tackled big problems such as data-collections.
Do you know their ruling on this matter?
Tesla has a fairly extensive description about what data they collect, also stating they offer data sharing controls to the customer [1]. It is very true that collecting data is valuable. For the automakers this can be used to actively improve the auto-driving features of all the vehicles through sharing of anonymously collected data, which is one of the most efficient ways to make the system more secure due to collectively learning from the unusual circumstances. For the customer it is probable that for instance car insurances can in the near future be determined according to statistics on your driving behavior considering previous accidents, speeding, safety distances and more.
[1] https://www.tesla.com/about/legal?redirect=no
Hi Rasmus and thanks for this comment.
I really like the data-sharing-control idea. Correct me if I’m wrong but this is just general terms @Tesla though.
I hope this will be the case when we’ll have self driving-cars on every corner.
In my opinion it’s always best if the consumer himself sets his own boundaries and profits accordingly.
I also forgot to mention the efficiency of sharing data to the self-driving industry. I agree with you 100% on that one!
Hi Helgi,
I really like your article. The issue with data for autonomous cars is a complex one. Saving sensor and behavior data would of course be a great help to manufacturers in training and improving their algorithms. However, there will of course be the issue of privacy. Maybe in the future manufacturers and consumers can come to an agreement where consumers can “sell” the data to the automakers and get paid for it based on its quality or variety. This would help solve privacy issues since it will be the decision of the consumer whether they want to hand over the data or not. Of course there is also the issue of storing the data. Hours on hours of sensor data and video feed would very soon start taking up a large amount of space. How much data storage an automaker can afford to put in the car would then also be an issue to consider in this scenario.
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Great post !
I think that the topic of self-driving cars is well-chosen because this industry lies on the availability of a huge amount of data. In addition, you showed that this industry also provides many data itself. As you said, these new data could not only be used for improving self-driving cars, but also for a range of other purposes.
But what are these purposes ? I think it is worth asking the question, since such data may soon revolutionize the automotive industry, but not only… What about every car becoming part of a video surveillance system ? Allowing manufacturers to collect and share data is a tricky question and I think that it should be analyzed in depth before taking any action…
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Hey Helgi, great article and thanks for sharing your view point on this. I agree that the ownership of data and the value of data is going to be the next front line battle between governments, users, businesses and other stakeholders.
Traditionally in exchange for access and use of data…companies would provide a service (Google search, Facebook, etc.) its a simpler relationship that involves two parties agreeing and gaining some sort of benefit. The issue that jumped out to me is, at what point do others that don’t see any type of benefit start to push for some sort of compensation and what does that ultimately look like? The lines of who really owns the rights to what are becoming ever increasingly blurred. Another example…if I film a movie on your street and sell it for profit, in many jurisdictions I’d need to compensate you for that. At what point does somebody want compensation for capturing data on their property?
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