There's no way searching someone's car, based off their legal driving behavior, could be misused!<p>The police have no repercussions for sending warrants to Google for phone information. Is searching someone for their legal driving behavior any better?<p><a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/google-geofence-warrant-appeal-murder-rcna67028" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/google-geofence-warrant...</a>
This system seems to work by using the locations a car has been to compare see if other cars with a similar location history are more likely to be used to transport drugs if I understand correctly.<p>Assuming that this is how that system works I can't see how this is legal. Let's say police is only searching cars between place A and place B, but not between place A and place C. Therefore they find drugs in cars that drive between A and B. This system therefore is now flagging all cars that drive between A and B as suspicious due to the bias of the searches the algorithm was trained on. It could be that there are more drugs being smuggled between A and C, but the system wouldn't know due to data containing no searches on cars between A and C.<p>If we now say A=downtown, B=lower income area and C=high income area I think it becomes very obvious how such a system that allows police control cars based on past searches is discriminatory and everything but fair. It enables searches without any reasonable grounds and I have honestly no idea how any of this could hold up in court, but what do I know.
I’m not in favor of predictive policing. It’s not illegal to be suspicious. So I can’t get on board with this program.<p>But I am a huge fan of speed cameras from a public safety perspective. Excessive speed is a huge contributing factor in accidents yet I rarely see it enforced. There’s no point in having a law if it’s only going to be enforced against the poor or minorities. I don’t see it as a privacy violation since any person can plainly see you’re speeding.<p>I’m also in favor of more cameras to catch criminals. The first order effect of this is immediate: fewer criminals are around to crime. The second order effect is that fewer crimes will be attempted as the chance of being caught and punished approaches 1. This actually <i>decreases</i> the amount of police work that has to be done.<p>Having cameras is effectively the same as having a police officer. Except cameras don’t shoot people, and footage is a lot more reliable than sworn testimony.
Most new cars come with telematics, some have always-on cellular connectivity for data collection (and supposedly for automatic crash notifications).<p>It's only a matter of time until that becomes required (like the backup cameras became required in 2018 for example), and then it's only a matter of time before accurate / GPS positioning becomes part of the "required telematics" that get automatically shared with authorities (in addition to data brokers, advertisers and so on).
Ugh. Their model will guaranteed to be borked: PR(is criminal | visited locations) != PR(visited locations | is criminal).<p>In other words, drug traffickers probably follow patterns typical for a larger subset of the population, which in of itself is not an indicator of guilt.
To me this smacks of guilty until proven innocent. AI or any automated enforcement assumes checks everyone all the time. Put simply data like this should never be collected in the first place as that's the only way it will never be abused.
IMO there should be strict controls on who can access this data and for what, and how long data can be retained, but given those limits, this is exactly the type of thing we should be doing to catch criminals.
It is getting clearer by the day that humans will use AI for laws written for humans. And this will cause a lot of grief for the people on whom these laws are imposed.
The title is ominous but we have had speed cameras for years and I can guarantee that if I do 15 over the limit I’ll still get passed by someone doing 25 more.
Almost every article about this has glossed over the fact that probable cause for the vehicle search was a K-9 unit alerting on the car, not the traffic AI.
In Soviet Russia, police chase your car and has to stop traffic to get you.<p>In Capitalist America, traffic stop AI chase your car and has police get you.<p>... hmm, not quite there :-\