east bound. cell phone was out on front seat of car
insurance company raises rates when no witnesses to accidents
it is all about the money
fly the southern state, there is no speed limit
The mass of information produced by vehicles and their technology systems is forcing courts to review privacy rights in these settings. PHOTO: KIYOSHI OTA/BLOOMBERG NEWS
A divided Florida appeals court said police may not pull data from the “black box” of a vehicle without a warrant, ruling that today’s ever-advancing computerized cars should have as much privacy protections as smartphones.
The potentially precedent-setting case is the latest example of how the digital age, and its mass of information, is changing how courts examine privacy rights.
The appellate decision came Wednesday in a case involving a Delray Beach, Fla., man charged with DUI manslaughter and vehicular homicide in connection with a high-speed crash that killed his front-seat passenger.
Delray Beach police investigating the crash downloaded data from the black box of the driver’s car before obtaining a warrant. The 32-year-old man, Charles Worsham Jr. , sought to suppress the information, arguing that police shouldn’t have been allowed to search it without obtaining a probable-cause warrant. Mr. Worsham has pleaded not guilty in the case.
The black box installed in Mr. Worsham’s Fiat 500 tracked vehicle speed, turning velocity and brake positions among other inputs. The majority of new cars are equipped with black boxes, also called “event-data recorders,” which are typically buried in the dash or under the front seats. Like black boxes in airplanes, the recorded data is supposed to help figure out the cause of accidents.
Federal investigators, some insurers and other agencies often request permission from vehicle owners to access black box data.
In a 2-1 ruling, Florida’s Fourth District Court of Appeal in West Palm Beach sided with the defendant, affirming a lower court’s decision.
The panel said it appeared to be the highest court in the country to require a warrant for such vehicle data. The panel’s opinion referenced a pair of other cases in California and New York in which courts ruled that warrantless black-box searches didn’t violate the Fourth Amendment’s guard against unreasonable searches and seizures.
“Just as cell phones evolved to contain more and more personal information, as the electronic systems in cars have gotten more complex, the data recorders are able to record more information,” stated Judge Robert Gross, writing for the majority. “The difficulty in extracting such information buttresses an expectation of privacy.”
Jack Fleischman, a lawyer for Mr. Worsham, said he thought the decision was a groundbreaking recognition of a car owner’s privacy rights.
A spokesperson for the Florida attorney general’s office said it was reviewing the ruling.
The opinion relied on two recent technology-focused privacy rulings from the U.S. Supreme Court. One was the high court’s 2014 decision in Riley vs. California in which justices held that a warrant is required to search a suspect’s cellphone seized upon an arrest.
The other was a 2012 ruling in United States vs. Jones that said police violated the Constitution when they attached a Global Positioning System tracker to a suspect’s vehicle without a warrant.
Judge Alan Forst, who dissented in the Florida case, said he didn’t think vehicle black boxes are comparable to smartphones.
“The private data in a cell phone is, for the most part, created by the owner and is password protected by the owner for his/her own benefit and privacy,” he wrote. In contrast, he said, black-box data “is collected and stored in the interest of public safety, including the safety of the vehicle’s driver.”
University of Washington School of Law professor Ryan Calo, who researches privacy and robotics issues, said the ruling was unusually forward looking. The majority, he said, seemed to be concerned with not just what information is now recorded by vehicles but how much more granular and revealing it could get.
“It’s not often a court says we’re not just looking at this case but looking at how technology evolves,” said Mr. Calo, adding that privacy issues could become more pronounced as cars come equipped with more smartphone-like applications or collect video footage of the road around the car.
Write to Jacob Gershman at jacob.gershman@wsj.com
Appeared in the Mar. 31, 2017, print edition as 'Court: Warrant Needed for Vehicle ‘Black Box’ Data.'
State Sen. John E. Brooks (D-Seaford) and Assemb. Michaelle Solages (D-Elmont) unveiled legislation to improve driver safety on the Southern State Parkway during a news conference at the North Merrick Fire Department on Sunday, March 26, 2017. Photo Credit: Steve Pfost
Two Nassau County lawmakers are calling for the state to review ways to improve safety on the Southern State Parkway, which the legislators called hopelessly — and sometimes fatally — antiquated.
Sen. John E. Brooks (D-Seaford) and Assemb. Michaelle Solages (D-Elmont) Sunday unveiled legislation that directs the New York State Department of Transportation to conduct a safety study of the nearly 26-mile road.
Brooks said the Southern State, intended by planner Robert Moses as a route from New York City to Jones Beach when construction began in the 1920s, is woefully inadequate for Long Island motorists in 2017. The road is too winding to safely accommodate vehicles driving 70 or 80 mph despite the 55-mph speed limit, the entrance and exit ramps are too short, and the highway’s signage is inadequate, Brooks said during a news conference outside the North Merrick Fire Department.
“The road was built when a car was a luxury,” Solages agreed. “We all have to drive. Why not do it in a safe manner?”
Brooks said a state study conducted in 2016 found that more than 10,500 accidents occurred on the Southern State over a five-year period. More than 3,000 of those accidents involved injuries, and 32 included fatalities. Brooks said he did not know what years the study covered.
North Merrick Fire Chief Brian Ellensohn said his department, whose jurisdiction stretches just over a mile on the Southern State and includes Exits 22, 23 and 24, answered calls for 71 vehicle accidents on the parkway last year. The fire department’s coverage area on the roadway is part of a 10-mile section between Exit 17 in Malverne and Exit 32 in South Farmingdale nicknamed “Blood Alley” because of the high number of fatal crashes there.
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The bill asks the state transportation department to identify sources of federal funding that could be used to improve signage, lengthen ramps and make other engineering changes to make the Southern State safer.
Transportation experts say renovations that would turn the winding and sometimes narrow road into a modern thoroughfare would be expensive — and perhaps even impossible to achieve.
The price to widen the Southern State, change its grade and straighten out its turns, the experts said, would be enormously costly, but that’s only part of the challenge. They did not provide a cost estimate.
“Not only can we not afford to fix it — with the homes, schools and parks abutting right up hard against the parkway, it’s virtually impossible, even if we could come up with the money,” Robert Sinclair, a spokesman for AAA New York, told Newsday in 2012. “We’re stuck with it.”
