Road authorities can receive data from Mercedes cars during the new pilot – IT Pro – News

This shouldn’t be the debate at all, it should be a subscription. But it looks like we’re completely over that. I don’t have a car with a home phone function, but if the car does, the antenna will be disconnected or block somehow. My car is my data.

The first question is whether this is your data. This is purely legal, by the way, I don’t want to start a discussion about it, because it’s steeped in gut feeling.

The next question is whether you can separate the antenna. Not for eCall and you don’t want that either, because this system is specifically meant to help you if things go wrong. But the home function of the car can be very deep in the system. Then the car can enter “panic mode” if it does not detect the system and in the best case scenario it will remind you every time you start the car that the system is not working and that you need to go to the garage. I don’t want to talk about what broken parts of your vehicle do to your warranty, because that also gets into the gut feeling debate.

So suppose that within a few years, each car will generate data that will be sent to the manufacturer. And whether it is from the car, or from, for example, a navigation system (in the car or on your phone), it is not so important.

Now there are a few interesting things to ask yourself: First of all, what data are we talking about, who is it being sold to, what can you do with it and how much do people demand?

The simplest thing you can look at is flow. Now you see a ring somewhere on the road with a box on a lamppost that counts the number of vehicles traveling across that street. You can also get that easily with that data. Just add up the number of cars driving on the street. This can be done easily and anonymously. Then the supplier of that data says, say, 2451. This does not require AVG approval. Now we’ll make it a little more gray. How many unique vehicles are on the street? Then you take out the cars that have been here more than once. And even gray: How many cars are on the street and their owner does not live in this neighborhood. The resource (most likely) has an overview of the address details. Rental cars are a little trickier and you may not have to provide your address for every navigation system you buy, but we’ll leave that out for a while. When a more specific question is asked, it is already possible to identify individual drivers and, at some point, also slowly move across the border where the GDPR is triggered.

This is the doomsday section by the way.

The other section in my head sees great benefits if road dwellers can get more information from the manufacturers. For example, a combination of (anonymous) vehicle locations and data from the suspension can provide a good idea of ​​the condition of a particular road. And if you can trace it back historically, you may also be able to gain more insight into how much the road has eroded. This may be cheaper than deploying road guards for this.

And what is and is not allowed, there will be some litigation about that in the future…