Autonomous Vehicles: Data Protection and Ethical Considerations

Autonomous vehicles (AVs) are increasingly becoming part of the emerging Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) and they are positioned to advance smart mobility. To enable this, new on-board sensors collect and transmit growing types and quantities of data. This raises new and unique privacy considerations around what happens with this data. As the automotive industry becomes more data-driven, getting consumer privacy rights will become increasingly important for establishing trust and customer acceptance of this technology. At the same time, the algorithmic decision making in AVs raises several new ethical issues that can create new safety risks and discriminatory outcomes. In this paper we analyze what are the new privacy and data protection challenges that emerge in AVs and investigate the ethical and liability concerns surrounding algorithmic decision-making, highlighting research gaps and the need to mitigate these issues by acting swiftly.