Public Opinion Regarding Autonomous Vehicle Privacy and Security
Open Access
- Author:
- Berman, Danielle Hope
- Graduate Program:
- Civil Engineering
- Degree:
- Master of Science
- Document Type:
- Master Thesis
- Date of Defense:
- March 28, 2018
- Committee Members:
- Martin T Pietrucha, Thesis Advisor/Co-Advisor
Eric Todd Donnell, Committee Member
Alan Richard Wagner, Committee Member - Keywords:
- autonomous vehicles
public opinion
survey
privacy
cybersecurity - Abstract:
- The purpose of this thesis was to investigate privacy concerns related to autonomous vehicles with a focus on people’s level of comfort with autonomous vehicles collectingdifferent types of information and sharing that information with different entities.A survey of 154 United States residents was conducted through Amazon's Mechanical Turk crowdsourcing survey tool to probe opinion regarding these issues and model trends within the sample. The findings of this study indicate that there is concern over information privacy in autonomous vehicles and that people would be hesitant about purchasing a vehicle that used their personal information in certain ways. Study participants showed the most comfort sharing non-personally identifying information and sharing locational information,but the least comfort with sharing personally identifying information. People were the least willing to share information with marketers and most willing to share information in emergency situations. Respondents also indicated that they would like control over their data in terms of being able to remotely erase sensitive information and they are concerned about security of their information. To attempt to alleviate concerns and address privacy issues, a series of recommendations for education efforts and data collection techniques were proposed for automakers and policymakers.