Driving Under Big Brother’s Gaze

Thank you for the informative article “Witness on Board” (by Salley Shannon, Special Auto Issue, July 17). However, “witless” is the best word to describe the underlying tone of concern and anxiety about the perceived privacy invasion caused by on-board recording devices in most automobiles. Driving a vehicle is just about the single most public activity in which most of us engage in our lifetime. Most of us do it every day in front of thousands of friends, neighbors and strangers. Driving a vehicle is also highly regulated and completely voluntary. It is inconvenient but not impossible to do without a motor vehicle.

Thus any expectation of privacy regarding where and how one drives one’s car is utterly irrational. Since driving a car is also the single most risky thing that most of us do in our daily lives, anything that provides more accurate data about where and how we are doing it is fair game. People who claim otherwise are either grossly misguided or implicitly admitting that they drive very badly and would prefer to count on the unreliable observations of eyewitnesses to enable them to continue with their selfish, reckless or criminal behavior.

Paul Cliff

Riverside

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1984 is here. In his book “Nineteen Eighty-Four,” George Orwell presented a negative utopia about a totalitarian regime that used technology to spy on its members as a means of social control. While I am not yet willing to argue that a black box in a car amounts to the kind of government conspiracy Orwell feared, I am convinced that it is important to be mindful of the possibility that such technology could be abused. At least, as Shannon points out, the public should be made aware that they are being watched as they drive.

Kenneth Michael White

Upland