Google’s Self-Driving Cars Will Have the Added Bonus of Targeting You with Ads Based on Your Location

It’s already being claimed that in just 25 years, almost no one will even own their own car. As more and more people are pushed into large urban centers, it is theorized that most will use public transportation services, such as the driverless car.

Question: just how private do you think your ride in a driverless car will really be?

Audi boss Chief Executive Rupert Stadler, as reported by Daily Mail, recently warned that software-driven, self-driving cars will have the capability to monitor and target people with advertisements based on their location while traveling in them down the street.

‘A car is one’s second living room today,’ Audi Chief Executive Rupert Stadler said on Tuesday at a business event in Berlin attended by Google Chairman Eric Schmidt.

‘That’s private.

‘The only person who needs access to the data onboard is the customer,’ Stadler said, adding Audi ‘takes that seriously.’

Information about the location and speed of a car could be attractive to advertisers, insurance and communications companies who could use the data for their own commercial purposes.

Stadler says your car is private… well, at least it should be, right?

But like everything else on the smart grid, we have to wonder if our privacy will even exist in the “smart” future currently being built all around us (if it isn’t nonexistent already).

So now, instead of merely having to worry that the artificial intelligence in a driverless car might “consciously” make the decision to kill us if the car is put in a life-or-death situation with two different outcomes that may end in a mortal decision, we also have to worry that traveling in a driverless car will result in the future predicted in the Terry Gilliam movie [amazon text=Zero Theorem&asin=B00MGFX0O0] where we live in a world dominated by hyper-scientific materialism as the targeted ads literally follow citizens down the street on pervasive telescreens.

In the near future, apparently the targeted ads will literally follow us down the street… thanks to our artificially intelligent, connected, “smart” driverless cars.

Kid of the not-too-distance future: “Mommy, what was privacy?”

(On a sidenote, Google Chairman Eric Schmidt has previously said it was only an error of scientific discovery that we are even allowed to drive our own cars at all because if the driverless car had come first, governments would have never even allowed us to drive in the first place. Yay.)