Google's driverless future: will self-piloting vehicles rob us of the last of our privacy and autonomy?

• Author: Beato, Greg

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Compared to, say, the slat-armored fighting vehicles commandeered by the U.S. Army's 1st Stryker Brigade Combat Team, Google's expanding fleet of autonomous Prii hardly seems threatening. (Yes, for the record, Prii is the official plural of the Toyota Prius.)

The Google self-driving cars, of which there are now a dozen or so, have the company's familiar, friendly logo plastered on their doors. Their roofs sport laser scanners rotating on spoilers so clunky they seem purpose-built to make the cars seem less technologically disruptive than they really are. "That thing?" you can't help but ask when you look at one. "That's the thing that's going to make Mothers Against Drunk Driving as pointless as a radiator in a Tesla factory?"

Remember, however, what company we're talking about. This is the Google that was recently fined $7 million by 38 states and the District of Columbia for collecting email messages, passwords, and other personal information that had been transmitted over unprotected Wi-Fi networks. (Google says it never looked at the information.) This is the Google that agreed to pay a $22.5 million fine to the Federal Trade Commission in 2012 for bypassing privacy settings in Apple's Safari browser and that already maintains a massive dossier about your interests and social ties using data obtained through its dozens of disparate services.

"Our cars have sensors with which they magically can see everything around them," Google engineer Sebastian Thrun exclaimed in a 2011 TED talk. And yet no one ran out of the room screaming. That's because Google has done such an excellent job of positioning self-driving cars as an unmitigated social good that the privacy implications of these lumbering, 3,000-pound tablets have barely been acknowledged, much less discussed. Instead, the discourse has focused on the thousands of annual traffic deaths self-driving cars will prevent, the billions of gallons of gas they will save, and the carbon emissions they will reduce.

Along with Google, more than two dozen car manufacturers and other entities are currently at work on driverless automobiles. But it's Google that is piloting us toward the radical new transportation reality just around the bend. Earlier this year, in a presentation to the Society of Automotive Engineers, Google product manager Anthony Levandowski said the company "expect[s] to release the technology in the next five years."

Already a blind person can safely...