Session 02: High Speed Surveillance: The Risk (Governance) of Connected Vehicles
SESSION 02: MOBILITIES DATA CAPTURE AND BEHAVIOUR
This presentation delivered by Dr Jathan Sadowski was recorded at the 2024 ADM+S Symposium.
High Speed Surveillance: The Risk (Governance) of Connected Vehicles
Dr Jathan Sadowski (Monash University), Dr Emma Quilty (Monash University)
Vehicles are often described as computers with wheels. But as cars become connected, they are more than just digital processors, they are also now data servers and network nodes. Newer vehicles are now extremely instrumented devices. Hundreds of sensors gather digital data about nearly every operation, condition, and interaction in the vehicle: mechanical, electrical, and social. In addition to information about the tire pressure or battery status, this also includes data about when, where, and how the car is driven. That data is shared with data brokers who use it to create risk analytics, which are then sold to insurers and used to inform key decisions. By analysing this political economy of connected vehicles, we show that cars are not only connected in the digital sense, but also through their deep entanglements with a broader industrial complex of risk governance that oversees people’s everyday lives and underlies decisions about their life chances. We argue that connected vehicles—and the futures of mobilities they are crucial to constructing—are now being designed to serve the interests, and facilitate the practices, of corporate risk governance.