We're on the cusp of a whole big can 'o worms here. Our frogs are getting boiled, and we're being put in the pot in the name of safety.
With the dropping price points of various techologies, the capability exists to collect, store, and transmit various 'metrics' The questions are 'should we?' and more importantly 'what happens to the data'. Even more sinister: 'do people know they're being tracked?'
Right now, these black boxes can only store the very last few seconds of a trip, right up to the crash. The technology exists right now to store the last several hours of data, from whatever sensors they choose to install. It's entirely possible to store GPS coordinates, brake and drivetrain data. You could reconstruct someone's trip quite easily.
So who gets to see the data? There are already precedents where it's been used in court cases. Then there was the case where a car rental company used GPS data to issue "speeding tickets" to it's customers. The same technology would render traffic radar obsolete - the car would confess every time you sped.
If you're going through the effort, why not just set up transponders on the side of the road that broadcast the speed, and the receiver in the car would pick it up and limit your speed accordingly.
Oh yeah, the revenue - forgot about that
