Driverless Car Makers Can Handle Cybersecurity Issues Better Than Government: New at Reason

When most people think about driverless car policies, they tend to focus on philosophical life-or-death scenarios. This isn’t surprising: the question of how autonomous vehicles should behave when faced with the unfortunate decision between harming a passenger and harming a pedestrian is an eye-catching one indeed.

But many of the policy concerns surrounding robot cars are far more prosaic. How much data will connected cars collect, and how will this be stored? Will the data be secure? How secure? How will software be maintained and improved? Will the code be viewable by outsiders? And just who should oversee the whole process?

At the end of the month, regulators at the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) will hold a policy workshop to discuss just these issues. On June 28, policy experts, academics, industry representatives, and the general public is invited to take part in a conversation on “the consumer privacy and security issues that automated and connected vehicles” may pose. Rather than worrying about the typical questions of physical safety and accident liabilities involving autonomous cars, this workshop will focus mostly on the cybersecurity and data integrity of autonomous car software. Andrea O’Sullivan examines the debate.

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