Bruce Schneier, on the recent Tesla / New York Times kerfuffle:
[…] it gives you an idea of the sort of things that will be collected once automobile black boxes become the norm. We’re used to airplane black boxes, which only collected a small amount of data from the minutes just before an incident. But that was back when data was expensive. Now that it’s cheap, expect black boxes to collect everything all the time. And once it’s collected, it’ll be used. By auto manufacturers, by insurance companies, by car rental companies, by marketers.
Schneier on Security: Automobile Data Surveillance and the Future of Black Boxes
That future is not that far off. There are already plenty of car insurers out there (with a predominant focus on the USA, given the privacy and legal implications in Europe) that utilise either smart phone data or flat out install black boxes and adjust the premiums you pay to how well — and crucially: where — you drive.
But this is clearly going to be a major trend, especially in insurance.
However, also Schneier:
But as we’re learning from this particular back-and-forth between Broder and Tesla Motors, even intense electronic surveillance of the actions of a person in an enclosed space did not succeed in providing an unambiguous record of what happened. […]
This will increasingly be a problem as we are judged by our data. And in most cases, neither side will spend this sort of effort trying to figure out what really happened.