Mobi Sense Stijn Storms Researcher Prof dr Peggy

Mobi. Sense Stijn Storms, Researcher Prof. dr. Peggy Valcke, Promotor KU Leuven, Centre for It & Ip Law What is Mobi. Sense ? Instantaneous, reliable and area-covering information on road surface and infrastructure state is of great interest not only to individuals, but also to infrastructure owners, as it would reduce pre -emptive maintenance costs and avoid damage claims. Current monitoring state-of-the-art involves expensive equipment and manpower, and does not provide timely data. Mobi. Sense addresses this need, by providing a robust and cost-effective set of on-board hardware and software modules for vehicle-based collection of geospatial information on road infrastructure and the environment. Mobi. Sense combines data from different sources (dedicated low-cost sensor box with microphone, tri-axial accelerometer, GPS and CAN-bus access, and smartphones) in a secure and privacy-respecting way, and applies advanced machine learning algorithms to transform vehiclebound data into location-bound data. Good spatiotemporal coverage of cities can already be obtained when only a very small number of vehicles are equipped with the hardware, resulting in a system that has only a fraction of the cost of state-of-theart techniques and that provides more up-to-date information. Figure 1. Effects of road surface irregularities on sound, vibration and vertical car movement. Legal challenges Legal outcome 1) Data Protection - How can we make sure Mobi. Sense respects the data protection rules set out by GDPR? - Location data are stored using dedicated GPS-equipment and / or smartphone. In order for our measurements to give useful information about the state of the road / the environment, information about the driver’s geographical position is needed. - There is also the processing of sound data. A sensor box containing a microphone will be placed in the back of the car. Sound waves reaching the microphone will be processed by the sensor box. - Apply data protection principles in initial stages - Render data anonymous as soon as possible - Location data -> ‘Aggregation Engine’-phase. Only information about road segments as such is retained. This aggregation makes the re-identification of individual trips (and consequently of individual persons) impossible. - Sound data -> ‘Preprocessing’-phase. Sound wave level features are immediately extracted in the first phase which make further identification impossible. 2) e. Privacy - Does the principle of confidentiality of communication (e. Privacy Directive) apply to machine-to-machine (M 2 M) communication? - Is the Mobi. Sense consortium an addressee of the confidentiality of communications obligations? - Confidentiality of communication vs. M 2 M - ‘Rage against the machine: Does machine-to -machine communication fall within the scope of the confidentiality principle? ’ (to appear in International Journal of Law and Information Technology) - Multifaceted approach - Conceptual-philosophical - Genesis of e. Privacy - Values protected by e. Privacy - Practical - Confidentiality of communication applies to M 2 M - Mobi. Sense consortium no addressee (‘electronic communications service’) 3) Product liability - Can the resulting Mobi. Sense software give rise to product liability claims? - Software as such can probably give rise to product liability claims (tangible vs. intangible, teleological interpretation, purpose of Product Liability Directive) - Mobi. Sense software not expected to be involved in product liability claims as things stand (proof of ‘defect’, ‘causal link’) Figure 2. Overall dataflow between devices for raw data collection, backend, and display of results. Figure 3. Illustration of the collective valorisation of the Mobi. Sense project. Figure 4. Data collection model, showing dedicated sensing campaigns and opportunistic sensing as the two extreme solutions concerning data quality, amount and price. Contact Stijn Storms Ci. Ti. P Email: Stijn. Storms@kuleuven. be Website: https: //www. law. kuleuven. be/citip/en/research/projects/ongoing/mobisense Phone: +32 16 32 39 47