The year 2013’s most hotly debated topic so far is the privacy scandal sparked by former NSA employee turned whistleblower Edward Snowden, and his contested revelations.

We now bring your attention to Google, one of the names thrown around in the NSA leaks scandal mentioned above, which would like, as per the proposition of top US safety official Deborah Hersman, to also have its self-driving cars record every little move that the owner makes. The argument for is that most new cars are already fitted with some kind of black box, while the argument against infers that not only is the latter completely wrong, but that data gathering has no place fitted to self-driving vehicles either.

Granted, it does help locate the vehicle in an emergency situation, but weren’t emergency situations the ones autonomous cars were being designed to avoid in the first place – the only real reason (other than a bit of convenience) for them being thought up in the first place.

Something doesn’t add up in this vast and far-reaching story, laced with some conspiracy theories. But we now have proof, as per the event discussed in the first paragraph, that the privacy fears some may have had before, and far more are having now, were justified and the theory part became certainty.

In an interview given to The Huffington Post at the Governors Highway Safety Association’s annual meeting, Deborah Hersman was quoted as saying: “When you have a driverless car, you have to demonstrate on the front end that you have the data that shows it’s safe. But we would also say, you need to make sure you have good data recording capabilities, so when there is an event, you can understand what happened. There’s got to be good data demonstrated and good data captured.”

So is it justified? What do you say?

By Andrei Nedelea

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