The Wall Street Journal
U.S. Edition
Friday, August 30, 2013 As of 7:01 PM EDT

When Your Car Is Spying on You

Driver-less vehicles pose a bigger threat to privacy than the NSA ever will.

  Nissan  certainly knows how to create a headline. All major car makers are working on driver-less cars, but Nissan this week made a splash by becoming the first to announce a year certain—2020—for delivering an affordable version the public could actually buy. Cue the tweet machine.

Be careful what you wish for, however. A driverless car would be a marvelous safety and productivity booster. At home, Japanese car makers are under special pressure to make the world safe for (and from) elderly drivers. Head-on collisions have been epidemic due to oldsters motoring down the wrong side of divided highways. At age 75, Japanese drivers already are required to mount special badges on their cars so other motorists can see them coming.

When Robbie the Robot is driving everyone will also have more time for work and social networking and watching YouTube. No wonder Google has taken such an interest.

But the challenges are greater than the much-cited one of adapting our driving laws and liability rules (who pays for an accident?). The behavioral problems, for instance: Knowing that driver-less cars are programmed to avoid collisions, other drivers will inevitably learn to exploit their algorithms. Human drivers will feel free to cut them off or race them for parking spaces. Teenagers will delight in playing chicken with them. If you're in the back seat of a robot car, how would you like your algorithm to respond when the choice is between colliding with an oncoming punk or driving off a cliff?

Admittedly, these will be transitional headaches, which brings us to the real problem.

We take a back seat to nobody in defense of liberty, but the Edward Snowden surveillance controversy is overblown. By our count, this is the fifth public uproar over post-9/11 surveillance, including the outcry that nixed Admiral Poindexter's Total Information Awareness in 2003, two debates over the Patriot Act and its renewal, and the furor that ended warrant-less wiretapping.

In Britain, whose "surveillance state" is considered more intrusive than ours, the government was recently obliged by voters to withdraw a Patriot Act-like bill that had been touted in the Queen's speech to parliament.

Meanwhile, the real threat to our autonomy gathers speed. "Autonomous" vehicles are part of the threat—because they won't be autonomous at all.

This column has warned for years about plate-recognition cameras, increasingly armed with face-recognition capabilities, that will make it impossible to go anywhere or do anything in public without being monitored. Ann Arbor, Mich., is a federal test bed currently for a network of receivers to which experimentally-equipped vehicles report 10 times a second their position, speed and other data to central computers.

Nearly every car trip Britons take already is recorded and saved by networked plate recognition camera. Yes, there is umbrage. The government's information commissioner recently chided the rural village of Royston for its "ring of steel," a network of cameras enclosing the town.

But the future is coming anyway. Nothing is stopping private operators from creating databases of plate numbers, faces and identities—crossed referenced by matching photos you and others post online on your Facebook profiles and elsewhere.

These will be indexed by place of residence. Stores will know who you are the minute their cameras catch your plate arriving in their parking lots.

The real battle will be between us and us. The population is aging. An older, more timid society is likely to be in favor of penning up fellow citizens in a mesh of monitoring to regulate routine behavior.

The authoritarianism of the weak, always a problem in society, will find an ally in the bureaucracy's craving for resources. Traffic cameras in Britain as well in Los Angeles and other jurisdictions overwhelmingly ring up drivers for offenses that wouldn't trouble a cop. New Jersey is just the latest state scandalized by discovery that yellow lights are set below the state minimum in order to yield more red-light camera tickets. London uses its cameras to levy special fees on those who drive SUVs in the city's financial distract.

In some future discrimination or hate-crime lawsuit, will vehicle records be called up to show you locked your doors in a minority neighborhood but not in a white neighborhood? Will the state decide to raise your ObamaCare copays because a face-recognition camera also recognized a cigarette dangling from your lip?

When our every action in space and cyberspace can be monitored and policed, we no longer police ourselves to any meaningful extent. We become not citizens but children. The state is our parent. The real threat is that many of our fellow citizens will like it this way.

A version of this article appeared August 31, 2013, on page A13 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: When Your Car Is Spying on You.