Driverless cars: safer perhaps, but professor warns of privacy risks

Driverless vehicles could build a "gold mine" of personal data for private companies and would make it easier for them to target people as consumers, an Australian law professor has warned. Des Butler, of the Queensland University of Technology, said the privacy risks involved in driverless vehicles were a "sleeper issue" that regulators were yet to fully consider, even though car manufacturers say the technology could be on roads in Australia by 2020. "These vehicles will know where you like to frequent, which businesses, and may very well build a profile of you," Butler said. "People will go into these things not realising just how much data the vehicle will be generating about them and not knowing the extent to which the data can be used." On Thursday, the federal government formally launched a $55m bid to answer some of the questions that surround the nascent technology.