Does your car have a black box?

Do you even know whether it does? Do you want to know? Do you feel you have a right to know? Well, now you do have that right, that is, you will beginning with 2011 model cars.

How much would your driving change if you knew you had one of these things in your car? Under the new regulations, the devices will "collect at least 15 types of data, including vehicle speed, whether the driver was wearing a seat belt, and whether the driver hit the accelerator or the brake before the crash." But maybe you already have one of these things in your car. It would seem to me that the main value of the device is to change your behavior in all the many drives you take that don't end in a crash.

Interestingly, the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers supported the new rules. And the ACLU has a problem:

Jay Stanley, a privacy expert with the American Civil Liberties Union, said the government "punted on the most important privacy issues," such as whether the data is accessible to third parties without a judicial order or an owner's consent and whether the devices can be turned on or off.