By 2030, Cars Will Provide City Wide Video Surveillance?

John Honovich

•Mar 30, 2017

IPVM

A partner at Silicon Valley's top VC firms, in a post about the future of cars, has a prediction about the impact on video surveillance:

By implication, in 2030 or so, police investigating a crime won't just get copies of the CCTV from surrounding properties, but get copies of the sensor data from every car that happened to be passing, and then run facial recognition scans against known offenders. Or, perhaps, just ask if any car in the area thought it saw something suspicious.

The partner acknowledges that exact dates are, of course, hard to predict. However, the underlying presumption is that these self driving cars will be packed cameras looking in every direction and that a combination of these cameras from various vehicles would effectively provide mass video surveillance.

There are questions / issues:

Will the mounting heights of these cameras obscure / hinder identification?
Will it be legal for the policy to tap into these cameras? Privacy objections?
Will the video be recorded and if so for how long?

What do you think? Sounds like the future? Or not?

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Undisclosed Integrator #1

•Mar 30, 2017

Im surprised it would take that long.

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Brian Karas

•Mar 30, 2017

IPVM

I can see them having buffer storage of a few minutes to an hour, in the case they are involved in an accident, much like how some data about brake and accelerator positions can be retrieved from cars today. But I am not sure by default they would retain data long enough that it is still there by the time police figure out which cars they would want sensor data from.

Also, many of the visual sensors are not 'cameras' as we think of them, but technologies like LIDAR, which do not capture fine details.

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Christian Laforte

•Apr 03, 2017

While it would be technically possible, in the USA I doubt that the cars manufacturers and operators (e.g. Uber) will volunteer that information.

See this precedent: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/02/amazon-wont-disclose-if-alexa-witnessed-a-murder/

I can see it happening in countries like China, Singapore, Middle-East, that have a more powerful central government and low concern for individual privacy.

Integrating government fleets (e.g. buses) should happen within the next 5 years, at least for the government entities that aren't paralyzed by politics.

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