Ars Technica: Why cops [think they] won’t need a warrant to pull the data off your autonomous car

Ars Technica: Why cops won’t need a warrant to pull the data off your autonomous car by Cyrus Farivar. Said a local law enforcement officer:

“It’s like instant replay in the NFL; I can tell what happened.”

“I felt like I was in heaven,” he said. “It’s like instant replay in the NFL, I can tell what happened. The engineers looked at each other like, ‘Aw, crap.'”

Instantly, Jaeger realized that the promise of AVs to not only be safer for those inside the car, but it may also, potentially, be a way for law enforcement to collect data and information about everything else around it.

For now, law enforcement in one major hub of AV development and testing seems to have few clear ideas as to how they will integrate these vehicles into their traffic enforcement practices, much less their investigative process.

I submit that the owner and maybe riders in the car will certainly have a reasonable expectation of privacy in the computer that runs the car. They do in the “black box” and the GPS device, (Treatise §§ 24.13 n.11 & 24.20A), and they do in their computers and cell phones. So why not the operating system and memory of an autonomous car?

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