Driverless cars: a privacy minefield

United Kingdom
31/07/2014
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This article was produced by Olswang LLP, which joined with CMS on 1 May 2017.

For self-driving cars to function and deliver the safe service they promise, they will need to process a huge amount of data. One of the key issues here is ownership of that data.

Privacy is increasingly at the centre of the debate in anything that relates to our digital lives and the advent of the driver-less cars will only add to the concerns. If you buy or use a car that knows where you are going, where you have been and where you are likely to go, you will want to make sure that that data isn't used without your consent. Who owns that data? Is the manufacturer of the car, the owner of the platform on which the data is processed or the individual?

If, as is predicted, driver-less cars are provided as a service and not owned by the user then the question of the ownership of the data becomes even less clear. It's a privacy minefield. In the EU it seems that there is no consensus on whether the current Data Protection Framework is sufficient to cater for connected cars, the Internet of Things and M2M. What is currently at stake is the right to be invisible within the concept of connected living and how to guarantee that proportionate and adequate protections for an individual's privacy are maintained in this ever changing and fast moving technology landscape.

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