Self-Driving Car Video Footage – Source: www.schneier.com

Clive Robinson • June 19, 2025 10:59 AM

@ Bruce, ALL,

I passed comment on Waymo and Tesla surveillance just the other day in response to @Mr. Peed Off,

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2025/06/friday-squid-blogging-stubby-squid.html/#comment-445993

So as can be seen it’s something that is on my mind.

The reason for the surveillance is two fold.

Firstly as surprising as it is to some Americans the rest of the world sees,

“The reason behind it is the US is a litigious collection of states and people “on the hustle”. So to protect themselves from law suits the “self drive” / “drive assist” companies collect as much “self defence evidence” as they can.

Call it the “Hot coffee problem” people will complain it’s too cold if their coffee is at a safe temperature… So in the past people used the excuse of “burns from hot coffee” to sue for damages.

This “Corps as a cash machine” attitude gave rise to supposed “copy cat claims” since Stella Liebeck’s 1994 claim. Which many still see as a “shake down” even though she was quite severely injured.

The fact that “self drive vehicle” injuries and fatalities happen is not exactly news, here or on other ICT related blogs.

So Corps see “gathering data” that they hold as being the first step of rejecting injury claims.

The second issue is the problem of,

As such data is automatically “third party business records” that are “collected in a public space” arguably not even a trip to court is required by law enforcement and others.”

Whilst you might not be able to get the evidence there is little to stop law enforcement turning up with just a letter of demand.

The real issue is of course the US has no real comprehensive “Privacy Legislation” in fact almost the opposite. That is “Private data” in effect belongs to the people who collect it, not the people it is about.

The US needs such legislation but no Senior US politician appears to want to seriously sponsor it…