erent standards and some of these standards will allow re-identification. Manufacturers might choose to allow consumers to opt in before collecting their data, but if the smartphone market is anything to go by then consumers would have a much impaired experience if they declined.
At the federal level, a bill has been introduced that does a little less than nothing: it requires a government audit of the Department of Transportation to see if that agency is capable of enacting consumer protections. Anticipating that there will be federal policy at some point, tech and car companies (Uber, Google, Lyft, Ford) have formed a lobbying group to shape autonomous vehicle policy.
What is happening in the autonomous vehicle space recapitulates drone regulation. A spate of state laws have addressed drone flights over private property and critical infrastructure, government drone use and image capture. What federal regulatory policy there is comes out of the Federal Aviation Administration, so just as the NHTSA is an agency that sees to the safety of cars, so the FAA sees to the safety of aircraft. The FAA’s draft drone regulations, as might be expected, address the licensing of pilots and the prevention of drone crashes and flight interference.
And again, these regulations don’t address information privacy and cybersecurity – matters way outside the FAA’s competence. Into this vacuum has stepped the Department of Commerce, whose advisers have convened various interested groups to discuss drone privacy, and in May came up with a voluntary guide to best practice. Yet some of those groups, including the Electronic Frontier Foundation, criticized the process for being too dominated by industry, and refused to sign on.
In the absence of any federal capacity to regulate for data privacy and cybersecurity, these issues are bound to fall between the cracks of state and federal rule making.
The physical side of self-driving cars, and drones, may be significant, but the informational side is revolutionary. And for now, we have to trust those industries to regulate themselves.