Comment by rconti
I think this is a pretty black and white and simple view of things, fault is not always 100% clear, and CLAIMING fault is different from explaining what happened _from your perspective_, and letting the other driver do the same. But I'm not actually speaking about simple fault in a basic traffic collision.
Obviously 99.999% of traffic collisions never get this far, but I'm speaking more of the world of courtroom legal drama where you'd rather not have your in-car conversations recorded, or the fact that you drove around the block of the house where the murder occurred at 3am.
I think there's a huge asymmetry between the upside of the dash cam and the downside of self-surveillance. I'm much more likely to be in a fender bender than accused of murder, but I also _simply don't care_ if the police say I'm at-fault when I don't think I was, driving my insurance rates up for a few years. But I'm deeply uncomfortable with the idea of recording myself 24x7 whenever I'm in my car.
> I think this is a pretty black and white and simple view of things, fault is not always 100% clear, and CLAIMING fault is different from explaining what happened _from your perspective_, and letting the other driver do the same. But I'm not actually speaking about simple fault in a basic traffic collision.
Seems like having video (and GPS speed, etc.) can only make it clearer who (which may include both parties) is at fault? I still don't see how that can be a bad thing if you also aren't interested in lying about what happened.
> I think there's a huge asymmetry between the upside of the dash cam and the downside of self-surveillance.
I almost addressed the generalized surveillance angle in my original comment, but didn't since it seemed that your comment was focused exclusively on the context of having been in a traffic collision.
Addressing it now, I guess I am just not too worried about this angle when my dashcam simply records videos onto an SD card that I have complete control over. If I was a person likely to be targeted by my authoritarian government, I would probably think twice about having such an unencrypted SD card sitting around where it might be swept up in a bogus search and used to gin up additional bogus charges against me, but that is currently not my situation. Really, I can only imagine the video evidence collected by my dashcam being used to exonerate me in a scenario like the one you describe, e.g. if an LPR tagged me on the block where the murder happened but my dashcam clearly showed that I was just passing through.
In fact, this exact thing recently happened (https://www.cbsnews.com/colorado/news/flock-cameras-lead-col...) to a woman who was falsely accused of theft based on LPR data and used her Rivian's dashcam recordings (among other data) to get the police to drop the charges. It's insane that this happened in the first place, but that's beside the point here.
Of course, people using cloud-based dashcams are certainly exposing themselves to dragnet surveillance—which I do have a problem with simply on principle—but the data on my dashcam's SD card are fundamentally inaccessible to law enforcement until they obtain it in a physical search of my car.