Black Boxes in Cars and Trucks

Personally, it's troubling that Big Brother has instituted black box surveillance of the population by monitoring data in cars and trucks.

In the next few days, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration is expected to propose long-delayed regulations requiring auto manufacturers to include event data recorders — better known as “black boxes” — in all new cars and light trucks. But the agency is behind the curve.

Automakers have been quietly tucking the devices, which automatically record the actions of drivers and the responses of their vehicles in a continuous information loop, into most new cars for years.

When a car is involved in a crash or when its airbags deploy, inputs from the vehicle’s sensors during the 5 to 10 seconds before impact are preserved. That’s usually enough to record things such as how fast the car was traveling and whether the driver applied the brake, was steering erratically or had a seat belt on.

The data recorders have been kept secret until recently.