Car Companies Tracking Drivers With AI
| Car Companies Tracking Drivers With AI | |
|---|---|
| Short Title | Car Companies Want to Monitor Drivers Movement With Emotion-Detecting AI |
| Location | Global |
| Date | 2020 |
| Solove Harm | Surveillance |
| Information | Behavioral, Location |
| Threat Actors | Cerence, Affectiva, Xperi, Eyeris, GM, Toyota, Honda, Volkswagen, Kia |
| Individuals | |
| Affected | Car drivers |
| High Risk Groups | Driver |
| Tangible Harms | |
Technology companies found to planning in-car camera systems, that are marketed as safety features and would track every movement of the driver, as well as would use AI to identify driver's emotions.
Description
In 2020 software companies like Cerence, Affectiva, Xperi, Eyeris appeared to plan to roll out emotion- and object-detecting systems for cars in partnership with many of the world’s largest automakers, like DM, Toyota, Honda, Volkswagen and Kia.
In-car camera systems are being marketed as a safety feature.
In February 2020 technology firm Cerence pitched a strategy designed to help double the company’s revenue in five years: record every movement, every glance, every smile, frown, and wrinkled brow of drivers across the world—then sell the resulting data for a profit.Surveillance
Company's technology—including microphones, virtual assistants, and gaze-monitoring cameras—is already installed in more than 325 million vehicles, from which it uploads more than 100 million data transactions to the cloud every month, according to its investor documents. Very soon, Cerence announced, it plans to deepen that data mining operation with in-cabin cameras linked to emotion-detecting AI—algorithms that monitor minute changes in facial expression in order to determine a person’s emotional state at any given time.
Their plans are bolstered by a European Union law mandating that all new cars be equipped with at least rudimentary driver-monitoring by mid-2022, and a similar bill recently introduced in the U.S. Senate.
In January, the European Data Protection Board issued guidelines governing the use of data from connected cars. They mandate that, among other restrictions, no personally identifying information can leave the car without explicit driver or passenger consent
In the U.S. the laws currently in place are insufficient to protect consumers from the technology that will soon be rolling off production lines.