by Giulio Coraggio

Here are the main legal topics on connected cars covered during the Connected Automobiles conference where I gave a presentation named ?Privacy and regulations: state-of-the-art and future issues? on legal issues relating to connected cars.

I already discussed in this post about some of the legal issues affecting connected cars, but the discussions at the conference raised additional topics of concern and here is my top five of the legal topics covered during the event:

1. Who is the owner of the data?
Car manufactures often don?t have the technology necessary to support connected cars? devices and therefore they have to rely on third parties? suppliers of hardware and software components. Such suppliers might be in a better position to handle the data collected through the devices, but car manufacturers might not be willing to let them have the control of such data.

It is good to mention that under European data protection law the owner of the personal data is always the individual to whom the data pertain while there is the category of the so called ?data controller? who is in charge of defining the modalities and purposes of processing. The qualification as data controller and the roles of the other entities involved in the processing of personal data is based on a factual situation and cannot be contractually amended at the discretion of the parties. And with reference to specific sectors, the competent data protection authorities even gave their position as to the roles on the entities involved.

The above has to be reviewed on a case by case basis and the entities involved shall be quite careful in creating privacy structures which might be challenged in case of privacy audits.

2. Can connected cars be hacked? What liabilities for automated cars?
The massive amount of data that are collected and processed by connected cars will make them a potential target for cybercrime attacks. I discussed of the issue in this post, but the peculiarity in the case of connected cars is that a cyber attack might cause also accidents and potential harms to the individuals in the connected cars.

For instance, if the system managing distance sensors of connected cars is hacked and drivers will assume to be able to rely on them, a very large number of accidents might occur.

Read the complete article at the link below.