The Automotive community doesn't have a clear and simple response to bank robbery. Nor are they expected to, because they are not a law enforcement agency.
Measures against auto theft are well established to have brought down incidence of robbery, because it makes it harder to get a getaway car. And the auto industry has absolutely been given the responsibility of overseeing that.
Measures against theft are driven by the market because car buyers don't want their cars to be stolen. Some incidental effect on getaway cars is nothing they had an obligation to provide.
And it's questionable whether that is even true, because anyone could just steal an older car or different make with no such anti-theft features, or use their own car and steal someone else's license plate.
Does that seem reasonable? If not, then phone scanning probably is not reasonable either.
https://www.sfgate.com/cars/article/Front-license-plate-cars...
This is exactly my point. Yet we have people trying to get tech corporations to act in the role of law enforcement, which they ought not to be doing and certainly ought not be to required to by law.
> nor have I ever heard anyone in that industry vocally minimizing the problem of vehicular crime to avoid some commercial inconvenience.
If you have people demanding that all cars come with government tracking devices under the pretext they could be used in bank robberies and someone in the auto industry notices that bank robberies aren't actually all that common, what should they do? Pretend it to be otherwise?
This is not a matter of commercial inconvenience. The economic cost of writing or installing the code is not the issue. The issue is that this is totalitarianism which once installed would not be limited to enforcing laws against child abuse. One of the reasons privacy is a human right is to protect the public against abuses of the state. It doesn't cease to be a right because the state finds it inconvenient -- the state is meant to find it inconvenient.
It also kind of defeats the entire concept of self-driving cars, which is that they can work without that. They have to be able to work in places with bad wireless reception or a power outage in the traffic control system, not only because of the single point of failure but because things like that could happen while the vehicle is in motion.
Meanwhile there is no legitimate reason to make them mandatory because people already have the incentive to use a system that provides quicker routes. There is no law requiring people to use Waze, but they do.
