Out-Law News 2 min. read

EU report recommends putting black boxes in cars


A feasibility study has recommended that the European Union make it compulsory for cars to have 'black box recorders' that monitor a driver's actions in the event of a crash. It said driver consent to use of data by police would not be necessary.

The black boxes, or event data recorders (EDR), would be triggered by rapid deceleration and would be designed to record data in the 30 seconds leading up to a crash and the seconds afterwards.

The European Commission's energy and transport division commissioned a study into the technology. It has made its final report and has wholeheartedly backed its compulsory introduction.

"The need of EDR data as 'real-life-in-depth-data' for road safety research purposes as well as for judicial applications in accident reconstruction is pre-eminent and undisputed and justifies the mandatory implementation of EDRs," said the report.

The researchers said that they believed that the machines will not breach data protection rules because the information will not be tied to individuals' details.

"The project team has unanimously agreed that no personal driver data shall be registered by the EDR. It has also to be underlined that there is no continuous recording of drivers' behaviour nor a position monitoring," it said. "EDR data are recorded only in cases of an accident and then only for less than a minute."

"Accident data covers only a time lapse of less than a minute which makes them uninteresting in establishing a driver profile," it said. "After two accident-events the first one will be automatically deleted if they have not already been deleted subsequent to a professional download procedure."

The boxes will measure collision speed; initial speed; time of crash; user actions including steering and throttle use; and the method used by the driver to gain access to the car, such as key, smart card, code.

The researchers said that the data does not identify individuals, but William Malcolm, a privacy and data protection expert at Pinsent Masons, the law firm behind OUT-LAW.COM, said that it would become linked to an individual in most of the cases in which the data was used.

"It won't have any personal information about the driver but that becomes academic if you know who's driving the car at the time of the crash. It becomes personal information about the driver and would be subject to data protection laws," he said.

"Data may be collected for one purpose such as determining the cause of an accident but once that data exists it becomes hard to resist requests for access by law enforcement agencies, insurers and others who may want to know if the driver was at fault," said Malcolm.

"That is not to say that disclosure to agencies is inappropriate or not in compliance with the law, but it would  certainly be for the manufacturers and those administering the boxes to set down the purposes for which it could be used and the safeguards to protect motorists so that it was clear where the data would go in the event of an accident," said Malcolm. "There is an obligation to ensure that data collected is shared and used appropriately and that motorists understand how that's going to happen."

A potentially difficult question for people running the scheme will be how to handle data protection law's demands that the subjects of data consent to its gathering and analysis if a scheme becomes mandatory.

The researchers conceded that consent for processing could not be assumed.

"We recommend, as a prerequisite to private processing of data, making the obtaining of consent explicit and undeniable, as a prerequisite to any private processing of data like in insurance, labour or rental contracts," it said.

It said, though, that law enforcement authorities would not need consent to use the data. "As for data required by the police or the Courts consent cannot be a condition sine qua non. As for road safety research purposes an anonymisation or pseudomisation process will have to be safeguarded in any law requiring the mandatory implementation of EDRs," it said.

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