At the Transport Research Arena 2018 conference in Vienna, there was a strategic session (among a great number of interesting sessions and presentations) on “Transport and Data Security in a Digital Era”. The session was discussing what way advances in connectivity, big data and artificial intelligence are driving the development of increasingly connected and automated systems forward.
It claimed that transferring responsibility from human intervention to artificial intelligence can reduce human errors, which were believed to be the main cause of accidents, and increase efficiencies. At the same time, new challenges to secure the future multimodal transport system and all of its (mode specific) elements arise.
When cybersecurity and privacy issues raised, it often ended up with a traditional approach. The panel was mostly focusing on implications from a technical and a business model perspective, and at the same time, discussing the security for user data. The panel, as well as the conference, focused strongly on users as the operator in the system instead of the referring to human beings in a technological system. Cybersecurity and privacy for individuals are rarely debated. Discussion with DG MOVE representatives and other participants confirm that the society and citizen perspective and demands of the ongoing transition are lacking and is hardly prioritized in the automotive sector.
The success of digitalization and connected and automated systems depends on the trust of users’, its suppliers and upcoming new business models. When strong automotive actors indicated that trust related privacy issues are too broad as an area to cover for their organizations, it gave the feeling of an upcoming crisis within the branch.
My personal reflection on this issue; When big actors in the industry said that they did not have suitable organizations to work with cross-cutting trust-related cybersecurity issues, did they really have a plan B to tackle with the risks emerged?
Written by Anders Johnson, RISE.
