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Comment on Killing car privacy by federal mandateparent

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You seem surprised, but this is an indicator that you're not reading a good article. They are covering something and don't even accurately describe the proposal by NHTSA. But thankfully they link to the proposal itself. So here's the summary:

This document proposes to establish a new Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standard (FMVSS), No. 150, to mandate vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communications for new light vehicles and to standardize the message and format of V2V transmissions. This will create an information environment in which vehicle and device manufacturers can create and implement applications to improve safety, mobility, and the environment. Without a mandate to require and standardize V2V communications, the agency believes that manufacturers will not be able to move forward in an efficient way and that a critical mass of equipped vehicles would take many years to develop, if ever. Implementation of the new standard will enable vehicle manufacturers to develop safety applications that employ V2V communications as an input, two of which are estimated to prevent hundreds of thousands of crashes and prevent over one thousand fatalities annually.

As to your questions,

what about the safety benefits of [the] proposed technology? ... How's this supposed to increase safety?

From the executive summary, the benefit of this is that it provides more information without requiring line of sight to other vehicles. It can "see" through cars allowing it to perceive dangerous situations around corners and behind other cars. It provides more information like breaking force and path prediction so that more corrective action can be taken. If vehicles are updating each other with steering inputs and break inputs along with path prediction its hard to not envision how this could increase safety. A car can react to emergency breaking far far faster than a human can.

From the linked proposal, there's a whole section VII Estimated costs and Benefits. Section D there is Estimated Benefits with subsections 1. Assumptions and Overview 2. Injury and Property Damage Benefits 3. Monetized Benefits 4. Non-Quantified Benefits. From the monitized annual benefits section,

Table VII–38 provides the undiscounted annual fatal equivalents, monetized benefits, and property damage and congestion savings of the proposed rule from the year 2021 to 2060. As shown, by Year 5 the proposed rule is estimated to save 129 to 169 fatal equivalents totaling approximately $1.3 to $1.6 billion annually. Approximately 12 percent of the monetized savings, $176 to $237 million, are from the estimated reduction of property damage and congestion. By the year 2060, with V2V fully deployed, the proposed rule is estimated to save approximately 5,631 to 7,613 fatal equivalents annually. Finally, the total associated monetized annual savings would range from $54.7 to $73.9 billion. Of these savings, $7.7 to $10.6 billion is estimated to be property damage and congestion savings.
Also, who is going to pay for these boxes

Section VII (Estimated Costs and Benefits) B (Quantified Costs) 1. (Component Costs) has your answers! Physical hardware is estimated to add $245.79 for one radio and $347.18 for two radios with an estimated $17.80 installation fee. The added weight is expected to add $0.19 - $6.97 in fuel costs per year. Summarizing "The cost per new vehicle would range from $135 to $301...". As to the who, presumably the consumer.

What is the penalty for not installing one?

From Section I (Executive Summary) the wording is that "to require all new light vehicles to be capable of Vehicle-to-Vehicle ("V2V") communications, such that they will send and receive Basic Safety Messages to and from other vehicles. This seems to be a regulation aimed at manufacturers, and non-compliance would probably come from marking the fleet of manufactured cars as not road legal.

It sounds like most of the security/privacy objections revolve around the ID. If the purpose is safety, why even bother to broadcast an ID? All you need to know for safety purposes is that a large hunk of metal and glass at distance D is approaching or receding at velocity V and angle theta.

Would eliminating the ID component of the proposal satisfy the critics?

Would eliminating the ID component of the proposal satisfy the critics?

I'm not a critic and I have no idea.

As to the rest, just about everything we do in interaction has an ID. This comment will have an ID. I as a hacker news user will have an ID. My cellphone and its sim card both have id's. My google account somewhere has an ID. These are just the requirements of data persistence.

As to this system for cars, in humans we call this object permanence. We track things with our eyes and maintain that a thing we were aware of has moved to a new location. Removing IDs seems to remove this fundamental notion of how we think. "Car x was here but now is here" seems like we have knowledge of the scene; there was 3400 pounds going 72 mph to the left of us earlier, now there's 3200 pounds going 71 mph in front of us. How many cars are in this scene? Did a care move in front of you and brake or have you encountered another car and lost track of the first one?

And from the proposal, > Finally, the Temporary ID is a fourbyte string array randomly-generated number that allows a receiving device to associate messages sent from the same device together.

So its a random number generated every five minutes and that "[a]dditional research is being conducted to further investigate the ability or limitation of the five minute time period to mitigate the potential for tracking and protect privacy".

How many cars are in this scene? Did a care move in front of you and brake or have you encountered another car and lost track of the first one?

The updates are sent at 10 per second, aren't they? The basic concept of inertia will let you keep track of what cars are around you for collision-avoidance and even ad-hoc communication purposes. A car simply can't warp in or out at timescales faster than that.

You don't need to know that the cars you're tracking are the same ones you were tracking five minutes ago. There's no safety application for an ID feature.

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