In the aftermath of the NSA spying revelations, our society is struggling to equip itself with the laws and public understanding necessary to deal with the spread of technology into every corner of our lives.
Self-driving cars are one place we can start to get it right. They provide yet another example of the challenges to autonomy and freedom brought by technology, and have the potential to bring the debate home for people who don’t feel as concerned by privacy issues related to email and laptops.
On Tuesday, Google unveiled a proper self-driving car, with no steering wheel, no brakes, no pedals. Google expects these no-hands-on-wheel cars to hit the roads in 2017 and it is up to us to craft the laws and policies that will govern their use. Such decisions cannot be left for tomorrow. As Google’s working prototype reveals, the robocars of the future are here. And because people have a long history of projecting personal freedom and autonomy onto automobiles, they will have an innate understanding of the stakes.
#### Camille Francois
[Camille Francois](https://twitter.com/camillefrancois) is a Fellow at the Harvard Berkman Center for Internet and Society. Her research focuses on cyberwar and cyberpeace, and related issues in surveillance, privacy and robotics. She is also a Fulbright Fellow and a Visiting Scholar at the Columbia Arnold A. Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies.
My grandmother is an inspiring, smart, and fiercely independent 80-year-old Frenchwoman. Recently, she mailed me a folded up New York Times article entitled “Close the N.S.A.’s Back Doors.” I called her, eager to know why she suddenly cared about backdoors. We often have passionate political conversations, and I have tried many times to drag her into discussing the Snowden leaks and their consequences to no avail. She explained she had happened to see “N.S.A” in the article title, and knowing it might interest me, slipped it in the letter she had just finished writing. Was she concerned about NSA back doors, I asked? No.
Her lack of understanding and concern can be blamed on at least two things: poor metaphors and a narrow view of computing. For non-techies, a “back door” is not a very helpful metaphor. Technically, a back door is a method used to bypass the normal authentication process to secretly and remotely access computers. In the New York Times article, the term is mainly used in its broader sense, “to describe a range of policies and practices whereby governments compel, or otherwise get the cooperation of, private sector companies to provide access to data they control.”
>When my grandmother starts to consider technologically-enabled constraints on how she can drive; or people knowing exactly where she can go—abstract issues of “autonomy” and “privacy” become much more real.
“So someone could access your computer without you seeing it, like if someone entered by the backdoor when you were watching the front door,” I tried to explain to my grandmother. “Nonsense,” she told me, "if there was a backdoor in my house, I would see it. It’s my house after all--the thing you’re describing rather sounds to me like someone having a spare key of my house without me knowing it.”
A back door, indeed, is a programmer-centric metaphor: from inside the code, you can tell there are different ways to get in. It’s not a user-centric metaphor: by definition, from outside the code, the user can’t see it. That makes it challenging to discuss.
This brings us to the second problem: a narrow view of computing. My grandmother owns a desktop computer she uses once a year. It sits in a corner far from her daily life. Miss Teen America fears people activating her camera remotely on her laptop to take naked pictures of her: my grandmother doesn’t. Nor does she own a smartphone that could make her worried about remote access and GPS tracking. For people who envision their personal computers as crucial means of empowerment, freedom and autonomy—most of my hacker friends for instance—back doors are a fundamental source of vexation. My grandmother is not one of them. She isn’t as emotionally invested in these tools so potential vulnerabilities to them do not threaten her way of life. And she is not alone. This is sometimes the case even for people whose opinion on the topic matters supremely: in 2013 for instance, Justice Elena Kagan revealed that eight out of the nine U.S. Supreme Court Justices don’t use email at all.