Privacy Concerns
Autonomous vehicles use sensors in adapting and reacting to the external environment. They have sophisticated software that gathers data from their environment. Most of the data is collected in "autonomy," and thus, it is likely that it will be stored. As technology continues to advance, it is an indication that the data will be shared between different systems. This indicates that it will gather data about its users, such as facial recognition, experience preferences, among others (Dave, Boone, & Roy, 2019). According to the USA National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, it has acknowledged that there is a need for autonomous vehicles to take into consideration privacy concerns. This is by ensuring that the people who use autonomous vehicles are well informed on how the data is going to be used. However, the major challenge is that there are still questions about who is going to own the data, whether it is the manufacturer, vehicle owner, vehicle user, or software developer. This indicates that the intellectual property rights of the data are going to become a legal tussle between many entities. Moreover, there is bound to become an increased poaching of engineering talent and trade secrets. An engineer can move from one company with data about the operation of autonomous vehicles into another.
The safety of autonomous vehicles has raised any questions amongst users. They have been involved in various accidents, and companies have been involved in legal struggles on how they will protect the proprietary data. The decisions by the vehicle majorly rely on the information they have gathered for many hours of collective driving and not from what they are programmed to do. The collection of relevant data and its review is going to become a challenging process for electronic discovery experts.
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The insurance coverage of autonomous has become a contentious issue not only in the USA but globally (Bagloee, Tavana, Asadi, & Oliver, 2016). Several states have passed various bills on the insurance liability of the vehicles. The manufacturers of the cars have been asked to assume full liability and insure all cars within their fleet. However, this is going to become a challenge for most autonomous vehicle users in the USA who have been forced to adapt to their premiums and policies. Autonomous vehicles do not have a driver; an indication one will not have someone to blame. This will shift the focus of possible design defects in the car. This is bound to affect other policies such as product liability insurance, cyber liability, and infrastructure liability.
Security Concerns
With the introduction of autonomous vehicles, various states are still debating how they will become regulated. The Internet of Things has become very complicated, and most of the laws being set-up are mostly inconsistent and fail to address the risks. Most of the statutes aim at managing physical security instead of privacy and cybersecurity issues. For the autonomous vehicles to fully function, they must gather some personal identifiable information, and this is bound to raise the alarm mostly among the users. This data can reveal intimate details about the user if not regulated (Dave, Boone, & Roy, 2019).
A majority of the manufacturers and supporters of autonomous vehicles claim that they make our roads safer through the elimination of human errors. However, the opponents of the vehicles indicate that as the cars continue to increase their presence on the roads, they will bring about product defects, and these might not meet these safety standards. In traditional vehicles, the first component investigated in case of an accident includes what the driver as doing or not doing just before the accident. However, with autonomous cars, this uses does not come into play as it is operated using a computer. Glancy (2015) states that this is an indication that there will be a need for accident exerts to investigate the defects in the vehicles, such as hardware and software used in driving the cars before coming up with final judgments.
The legal implications of autonomous vehicles have become major hurdles (Westbrook, 2017). A self-driving Uber killed a pedestrian, and the significant issue from the accident was whether one could sue a robocar. The supporters of self-driving cars have cited that the autonomous vehicles will bring about safety on the roads as a significant amount of car crashes are caused by driver error. In the case of the Tempe accidents, it is an indication that technical issues do not matter as the vehicle led to the death of a pedestrian. Therefore, criminal liability is bound to shift from vehicle negligence to product liability.
References
Bagloee, S. A., Tavana, M., Asadi, M., & Oliver, T. (2016). Autonomous vehicles: challenges, opportunities, and future implications for transportation policies. Journal of modern transportation , 24 (4), 284-303.
Dave, R., Boone, E. S., & Roy, K. (2019). Efficient Data Privacy and Security in Autonomous Cars. Journal of Computer Sciences and Applications , 7 (1), 31-36.
Glancy, D. J. (2015). Autonomous and automated and connected cars-oh my: first-generation autonomous cars in the legal ecosystem. Minn. JL Sci. & Tech. , 16 , 619.
Westbrook, C. W. (2017). The Google Made Me Do It: The Complexity of Criminal Liability in the Age of Autonomous Vehicles. Mich. St. L. Rev. , 97.
