All right, call me naive

but I am nothing like so worried about the CIA having access to all the “smart” gadgets in my house as I am about the manufacturers having it.

Two reasons:

One, I don’t like being product, and I am fairly sure that once they have collected all the details about me that they can they will sell them on to other people. (If they are going to make money out of me, I want my cut!)

Two, their security will mean that the archetypal bored sixteen-year-old will also have access, probably to all my gadgets. Do I want my house to be controlled by a clockwork orange type off his head at two in the morning? No, Sherlock, I do not.

In the same way, driverless cars: I don’t worry much about the police knowing where I am, but I do worry about kids thinking it funny to crack in and cause accidents. Mind you, I also worry about those cars’ ability to dodge the potholes round here: my bet is that they will lose a lot of axles before that one gets sorted out in a satisfactory way. That includes A-roads and motorways: there are several places where there are holes I steer to avoid, but would the car know about them?

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The problem is, it all goes together. A back door that only the “right people” can use, whoever you may think they are, becomes, in a matter of weeks, a back door that anyone can use. The only way to make things secure, insofar as this is possible at all, is not to have back doors in the first place. The more people can get in, the more people will get in.

(And then one should consider that the police, local councils, media companies, etc., all the bodies that are getting casual access to everyone’s Internet browsing information under the latest snooping bills, all have terrible records of keeping confidential the secret data that they acquire.)

If the police know where a car is at all times, they will arrest people for being near too many “incidents”. (They do already, with traffic camera data, but it’ll get vastly easier.)

The current generation of autonomous cars can’t cope with bicycles; the designers simply didn’t think of them.

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