Look no hands ... or privacy

Here's something to make your heart flutter: By the end of the decade there could be driverless cars prowling California's streets and highways. Not that there don't seem to be a lot of cars on autopilot now.
By the end of the year the Department of Motor Vehicles must finalize regulations for the broad use of  driverless cars. The department is scrambling to come up with rules telling companies what they must do to test their technology on public roads ... before the public gets its hands -- if that's the right term here -- on such vehicles.

Testing the driverless technology

Tuesday the DMV held its first public hearing on how to regulate the public's use of the technology. What was the focus of much of the hearing? Preventing rolling stops? Slowing down speeders? Whether a drunken owner of such a car could climb aboard, free to press a few buttons telling the car to head for home?
Nope. Privacy?
State lawmakers already have decreed driverless cars must be able to log operational records, data that could be mined to reconstruct what happened in the event of an accident. Privacy advocates want to make sure technology companies can't mine a vehicle's data to track our movements.
Consumers have reason to be concerned given that practically every keystroke a computer user makes while on the Internet already is quietly grabbed by some company -- or government agency -- for whatever use they want. That "location services" function on your smartphone? It isn't there to help find you if you get lost on the way to the doughnut shop.
Google, according to testimony Tuesday, fought attempts to add privacy guarantees when the company pushed legislation two years ago for driverless vehicle testing and public operation. You're not paying attention if you think Google is just a company that wants to help you find gardening tips on the Internet.
It's not hard to imagine riding along in one of these Jetson-esque vehicles, passing a shopping mall only to be bombarded inside the car with advertising from nearby stores. We don't need our cars telling us we need a new pair of Dockers or what the special is as the restaurant we're approaching.
Obviously we want DMV regulations making this new technology as safe as possible. We also want rules that make all of us as safe as possible from this technology.