Connected Vehicles & Automatic Decision-Making

• Published date: 12 April 2022
• Subject Matter: Consumer Protection, Transport, Privacy, Data Protection, Consumer Law, Rail, Road & Cycling, Privacy Protection
• Law Firm: Frost Brown Todd
• Author: Jean Paul Yugo Nagashima

Connected cars are the next step to bringing mobility to everyone. Automotive companies have claimed that more than a half-dozen cars sold in 2021 were considered almost self-driving. The 2021 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act requires new cars built after 2026 to implement systems to passively monitor the drivers' performance to detect drunken driving. H.R. 3684 '24220. Some of the proposed technologies monitor the drivers for signs of impairment through built-in cameras of the car's interior.

Eliminating drunk drivers on the road is a sound policy. However, monitoring drivers and allowing cars to prohibit driving raise privacy and autonomy questions. Should behaviors like speeding be automatically monitored for chronic violators of speeding tickets for purposes of traffic safety? As more automated decisions are made from the data collected from connected cars, this policy starts to resemble the contours of the social credit system. This article focuses on conflicts the automotive industry will face'between government policies requiring automated decision-making and the rise in data privacy laws that protect consumers from certain data collection and subject them to automatic decision-making.

Social Credit Scoring System

The social credit score system is a credit rating system that attempts to link public and private data on financial and social behavior of individuals and entities and to track and evaluate their trustworthiness. China originally developed this concept to combat financial fraud and non-compliance of civil court judgments during the mid-2000s. China first rolled out this system in 2014 and has rated individuals in China to place them on a blacklist or a whitelist depending on the individual's social credit score.

The social credit score system is built on two parts: data collection, and reward and punishment based on the credit score.

Data collection is performed on a multitude of monitoring systems. Although the exact methods for the evaluation are kept secret, credit information, purchasing behavior, criminal background, compliance with court or administrative orders, traffic violations, online behavior, and actions in public are collected. Any information or behavior that is considered negative leads to an individual receiving a lower score, and behavior considered positive will increase the score.

The social credit score system then implements a punishment reward system depending on the individual's score. Chinese authorities...