Dual Use

Ann Althouse points to this story about a dispute over installing "black boxes" in private automobiles. I responded with this comment:

What a terrible article.

What's really going on is that these devices are part of the airbag system.

When airbags first came out, they were one size fits all. Your front end would crumple, the airbag would deploy and, if you were a normal sized person, it would likely saver your life. Unfortunately, if you were short or fat or an infant, it might kill you. And sometimes the airbag would deploy for no reason at all. Of course, the car companies got criticized and got sued. They then developed a new airbag system.

Modern airbags inflate differently depending upon the situation. The trigger is more sophisticated, so airbags don't go off unexpectedly. But in order to work properly, they need to keep track of the last few seconds of driving data in order to tell what speed the car is going, whether it's been braking, is it suddenly decelerating from hitting something, etc.

A few years ago, insurance companies and lawyers discovered that they could recover the last information monitered by the airbag controller. So they could tell, for example, whether a person in an accident had been braking, or how fast they were going.

This was kind of spotty, however. There wasn't any uniform information, nor was the device particularly well protected. The insurance companies lobbied the car companies to beef up the devices, and the car companies realized that it might be in their interest, too. (For example, during the sudden acceleration scare they could have proven that the driver was pressing down on the gas.)

That was the state of play when the ACLU and the government got involved.

So, if you have a relatively new car with a modern airbag system in it, you have some version of these "black boxes," and you can't take them out because, if you did, the airbags wouldn't work.

You can't possibly understand this story with knowing the history, and the author included none of it. Even worse, the history is more interesting than the story.