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

that shouldn’t be the discussion at all, it should be opt-in. But we seem to have passed that completely. I don’t have a car with a phone home function, but if the car does, the antenna will be disconnected or blocked in some way. My car my data.

The first question is whether it is your data. That is a purely legal one, by the way, I don’t want to start a discussion about that, because it gets bogged down in gut feeling.

The next question is whether you can disconnect the antenna. Not for eCall and you don’t want that either, because that system is specifically aimed at helping you if things go wrong. But a home function of a car can be quite deep in the system. Then the car can go into “panic mode” if it doesn’t 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 you need to go to the garage. I don’t want to talk about what disabling parts of your car does for your warranty, because that too gets bogged down in a gut feeling discussion.

So assume that within a few years every car will generate data that will be sent to the manufacturer. And whether that comes from the car, or from, for example, a navigation system (in the car or on your phone), that 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 sold to, what can you do with it and how much are people asking for it?

The simplest thing you can look at is the flow. Now you see a loop somewhere on the road with a box on a lamppost that counts how many vehicles are driving through that street. You can also easily obtain that with that data. Just supply how many cars are driving down the street. This can be done easily and anonymously. The supplier of that data then says, for example, 2451. This does not require AVG approval. Now we’re going to make it a little grayer. How many unique vehicles are driving down the street? Then you take out the cars that have been here more than once. Even more grey: how many cars drive on the street whose owner does not live in this neighbourhood. The supplier (probably) does have an overview of the address details. Leased cars are a bit more difficult and you may not have to provide your address for every navigation system you buy, but we’ll leave that out for a while. As a more specific question is asked, it is possible that individual drivers can indeed be recognized and at a certain point you also slowly move across the border where a GDPR comes into play.

This is the doomsday department by the way.

The other department in my head sees great benefits if road turners can get more information from manufacturers. For example, a combination of the (anonymous) locations of vehicles and data from the suspension could provide a good idea of ​​the condition of a particular road. And if you can keep track of that historically, you may also be able to gain more insight into the wear and tear of a road. This could be cheaper than deploying road stewards for this.

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

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