Are We Ready for Driver-less Vehicles? Security vs. Privacy- A Social Perspective

TL;DR

This paper examines the technological, privacy, and social challenges of autonomous vehicles, highlighting the difficult trade-offs between safety and privacy in their development and deployment.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive analysis of current autonomous driving systems, compares vision-based and LiDAR-based approaches, and discusses privacy implications from technical and legal perspectives.

Findings

Computer Vision may outperform LiDAR in certain scenarios

Privacy concerns are deeply intertwined with safety requirements

Trade-offs between privacy and safety are unavoidable in autonomous vehicle design

Abstract

At this moment Autonomous cars are probably the biggest and most talked about technology in the Robotics Research Community. In spite of great technological advances over past few years a full edged autonomous car is still far from reality. This article talks about the existing system and discusses the possibility of a Computer Vision enabled driving being superior than the LiDar based system. A detailed overview of privacy violations that might arise from autonomous driving has been discussed in detail both from a technical as well as legal perspective. It has been proved through evidence and arguments that efficient and accurate estimation and efficient solution of the constraint satisfaction problem addressed in the case of autonomous cars are negatively correlated with the preserving the privacy of the user. It is a very difficult trade-off since both are very important aspects and has to be taken into account. The fact that one cannot compromise with the safety issues of the car makes it inevitable to run into serious privacy concerns that might have adverse social and political effects.