Current court decisions may decide the privacy of self-driving cars in the future, Slate reports. A Massachusetts court is currently considering Commonwealth v. Dorelas, a case looking at how specific a warrant must be before police can search a smartphone, the report states. That’s because warrants for searching smartphones work in two ways. In some cases, a smartphone is considered a “container” and a warrant need only describe the phone and probable cause. In others, a smartphone is considered a “computer,” which would be protected under the Fourth Amendment. It’s possible, then, that courts could view “smartcars” as smartphones, as “their decisions will depend on how similar they believe the data stored by the two technologies to be,” the report states.
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