Baltimore Injury Lawyer Blog

I know I've been tagged by Ron Miller to continue a "meme" including my five favorite legal and non-legal blogs. That's upcoming, but I couldn't pass this one up.

Today's Daily Record reports that Progressive Insurance has convinced some of its customers to allow the installation of a "black box" in their vehicles that will track "abrupt starts and stops, speed, and even time of day." The data from this device will be used to compute the auto insurance rates for the customers who consent to its install. They concede this device is not something that will appeal to all drivers.

My personal belief is that anyone who would want something like this is an idiot. I want my insurance company tracking my driving habits about as much as I want the NSA reading my email. However, this blog isn't about the relative intelligence of Progressive customers.

What I am interested in is the possible effect this could have on litigating car accident injury cases. It seems to me that the data compiled by this device would be a proper subject of discovery in litigation, since it's a real-time recording of the actions of the vehicle. This will probably lead to a host of objections based on proprietary data, privacy of the driver, etc. Also, how would one get this decoded?

I can't imagine very many people would consent to such a device being installed, but eventually somebody who has one is going to get sued, and some smart plaintiff's lawyer is going to ask for the data. Then things will get interesting.