Since yesterday, July 7, no new car can be registered in the European Union without the ADDW system (Advanced Driver Distraction Warning or Advanced Driver Distraction Warning), the final phase of the General Safety Regulation. We already had recently What does this system technically consist of? and why the car is going to beep at us more now than before. The melon that we had not yet fully opened was about what happens to the images captured by that camera that looks at your face while you drive.
About what goes the regulations. He text of the regulation requires ADDW to function as a warning tool, not a recording tool. It analyzes the driver’s image in real time, decides whether or not the driver’s gaze is on the road and generates only a binary signal: attentive or distracted. In theory, the raw video never leaves the vehicle. Article 6(3) of the General Security Regulation itself establishes that the system must not record or retain data beyond what is strictly necessary to fulfill its function.
The problem is what the standard does not say. “The regulations do not mandate any independent audit mechanism to verify that installed ADDW systems actually operate in a closed loop,” account the specialized media All About Cookies. It also does not define precisely what is considered “necessary” or how long that information can be retained before being deleted. In practice, the guarantee that your biometric data does not leave the car depends, today, on the manufacturer’s word.
It is not the first time that word fails. The recent history of the sector does not help to generate confidence. An investigation by The New York Times revealed in 2024 that “several manufacturers, including General Motors, shared information about their drivers’ behavior with data brokers such as LexisNexis, which in turn they transferred it to insurance companies”, which came to translate into premium increases for drivers who did not even know they were being evaluated.
For its part, a special investigation by Reuters documented that, between 2019 and 2022, “Tesla employees privately shared, through an internal messaging system, especially sensitive videos and images recorded by their customers’ car cameras,” including scenes of accidents, traffic fights and intimate moments captured in garages individuals.
Neither case is directly related to ADDW nor did it occur in the European Union, but both perfectly show what can happen when an automaker accumulates sensitive data under vague rules.
The road safety argument. On June 16, the Swedish data protection authority (IMY) ruled that the company Securitas Sverige had violated the GDPR by installing cameras with artificial intelligence that continuously analyzed the behavior of its drivers. ”The security argument alone is not enough to legally justify this type of behavioral surveillance,” they shared in Tech Times. Although this case is not specifically about ADDW, but rather about corporate fleet cameras, it also sets an uncomfortable precedent just when that same argument, that of road safety, is the legal basis of the entire European regulation.
The other system, the black box. The EDR (Event Data Recorder), mandatory since July 2024 and of which we already detailed more in depthis only activated in the event of a collision, saves just a few seconds of technical data (speed, braking, steering wheel angle) and cannot be transmitted wirelessly, since it is necessary to physically connect to the OBD port of the vehicle to extract it.
Its own design, designed to investigate accidents, is so limited that the road safety think tank ETSC came to complain that, by not being able to record location or time, the device is almost useless for investigators studying the causes of accidents. In other words, one falls short due to excess caution and the ADDW falls short in guarantees.
And now what. The European Commission has already announced that it will continue developing the ADDW until 2027, incorporating the detection of cognitive and not just visual distractions, which implies even more sophisticated sensors pointing inside the cabin. For our part, we can review the manufacturer’s actual privacy policy (not the commercial website) to check how long the eye-tracking data is retained, if it is shared with insurers or third parties, and if the system ever leaves the vehicle itself. The law requires that the data not leave the car. Now, that it is fulfilled, it is a matter of trust.
Cover image | Vitaly Gariev
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