We don’t yet own any vehicles new enough to have “black boxes,” although they all do have onboard computers of one sort or another. I’d always figured the privacy geek in me would want to do some shade-tree surgery on any newer car we acquired with a black box latched to its innards somewhere like a tumor. Never did enough research to know if that would mess with other computerized settings or not, etc., etc.
But now, a California appellate court has ruled that onboard computer / “black box” data from your vehicle is protected by the 4th Amendment.Hooray!
Held: The data was protected by the Fourth Amendment, the retrieval of the data was unconstitutional, and the conviction had to be overturned. From the opinion:
“We do not accept the Attorney General’s argument that defendant had no reasonable expectation of privacy in the data contained in his vehicle’s SDM. The precision data recorded by the SDM was generated by his own vehicle for its systems operations. While a person’s driving on public roads is observable, that highly precise, digital data is not being exposed to public view or being conveyed to anyone else. . . . We conclude that a motorist’s subjective and reasonable expectation of privacy with regard to her or his own vehicle encompasses the digital data held in the vehicle’s SDM.”
That’s my data, dammit!
Now I want the data on it to be encrypted with a private key that I control. That way when the black box ‘disappears’ it’s only good as a paperweight.