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Suddenly I'm not as sure I want a self-driving car. Then again, if there are no tracking cookies, maybe they can't tell if I'm in it? (Wishful thinking, I'm su

Suddenly I'm not as sure I want a self-driving car. Then again, if there are no tracking cookies, maybe they can't tell if I'm in it? (Wishful thinking, I'm sure...) Of course a self-driving car would defeat the need to catch someone after a party perhaps, so bad example? :)

estebank 13y ago
Think of this: face recognition is only as good as the pool of identities you're checking against. If the police car scans the plate of a car being trailed, it knows the owners identity. From there, the police mounted camera (you know that's coming) can check the drivers identity against the owner as well as the owner's social graph, and with a high degree of certainty have the identity of everybody in the car, within seconds of stopping the car. If you couple this with broad camera coverage, where you can track anybody backwards in time just long enough to get a shot of that person getting out of its car (it's easy to follow a body across cameras, much easier than identifying a face against 350 million possible persons), or from a public transport where you've used an identifiable rfid card, you now have a small pool to check against, and because you have a selection of headshots from every angle, you can confirm the identity. Now just do that with everyone with every data's ounce you can get your hands on, and you've got yourself The Machine from Person of Interest, without the silly "identify crime before it happens" angle, but with enough information to also flesh out everybody's social graph independently of the attack surface you might have online. This is how A Scanner Darkly becomes true. I remember watching PoI to you and thinking, "this is silly, it's impossible to do this, without human operators and secret access to private feeds". Now, it feels like the screen writers I was underestimating after years of silly "electrical outlet viruses" and the like in movies were much more forward thinking and acurate than I was.
_mulder_ 13y ago
But a self-driving car would be the perfect antidote to DUI offences! Interesting that you would place overblown and misleading fears over Government tracking before the increased personal safety a self-driving car could potential bring (eliminating DUI being a great example)! Also, you seem to suggest the government tracking is vehicle related. A mobile phone would be a much easier method of determining whether you're in a vehicle or not.
- lstamour 13y ago
  I was using the existing car-focused example. And I'd point out that I can travel with my phone off but it's signifacntly harder to travel when I need to turn off a car's computer ;-)
aestra 13y ago
What exactly would a self driving car have to do with this? This is talking about tracking by cell phone data and license plate, not car data. A self driving car would be the same as a regular car, just with extra sensors, the ones they have now are at least. Who is to say that it would have extra tracking?
- lstamour 13y ago
  Your car has a computer and needs to know both where it is precisely and if the roads have changed since it was last there. This is always on and possibly worse than a cellphone for tracking given how hard it would be to "throwaway".

estebank 13y ago

Think of this: face recognition is only as good as the pool of identities you're checking against. If the police car scans the plate of a car being trailed, it knows the owners identity. From there, the police mounted camera (you know that's coming) can check the drivers identity against the owner as well as the owner's social graph, and with a high degree of certainty have the identity of everybody in the car, within seconds of stopping the car. If you couple this with broad camera coverage, where you can track anybody backwards in time just long enough to get a shot of that person getting out of its car (it's easy to follow a body across cameras, much easier than identifying a face against 350 million possible persons), or from a public transport where you've used an identifiable rfid card, you now have a small pool to check against, and because you have a selection of headshots from every angle, you can confirm the identity. Now just do that with everyone with every data's ounce you can get your hands on, and you've got yourself The Machine from Person of Interest, without the silly "identify crime before it happens" angle, but with enough information to also flesh out everybody's social graph independently of the attack surface you might have online. This is how A Scanner Darkly becomes true. I remember watching PoI to you and thinking, "this is silly, it's impossible to do this, without human operators and secret access to private feeds". Now, it feels like the screen writers I was underestimating after years of silly "electrical outlet viruses" and the like in movies were much more forward thinking and acurate than I was.

_mulder_ 13y ago

But a self-driving car would be the perfect antidote to DUI offences! Interesting that you would place overblown and misleading fears over Government tracking before the increased personal safety a self-driving car could potential bring (eliminating DUI being a great example)! Also, you seem to suggest the government tracking is vehicle related. A mobile phone would be a much easier method of determining whether you're in a vehicle or not.

lstamour 13y ago
I was using the existing car-focused example. And I'd point out that I can travel with my phone off but it's signifacntly harder to travel when I need to turn off a car's computer ;-)

aestra 13y ago

What exactly would a self driving car have to do with this? This is talking about tracking by cell phone data and license plate, not car data. A self driving car would be the same as a regular car, just with extra sensors, the ones they have now are at least. Who is to say that it would have extra tracking?

lstamour 13y ago
Your car has a computer and needs to know both where it is precisely and if the roads have changed since it was last there. This is always on and possibly worse than a cellphone for tracking given how hard it would be to "throwaway".