Are you riding on a black box?

When a plane crashes, one of the first things that investigators do is to try to find the flight data recorder or "black box". It allows investigators to determine what may have gone wrong and caused the crash. Black boxes in cars can function in about the same way.

In the United States, there are approximately 190 million drivers. If you are driving a car manufactured by GM or Saturn, you could be carrying around an event data recorder (EDR) and not even know it. The EDR senses various conditions in and around the vehicle and that can then be obtained by various individuals for various purposes. EDRs record the following data: * Vehicle speed (five seconds before impact) * Engine speed (five seconds before impact) * Brake status (five seconds before impact) * Throttle position (five seconds before impact) * State of driver's seat belt switch (On/Off) * Passenger's airbag (On/Off) * IR Warning Lamp status (On/Off) * Time from vehicle impact to airbag deployment * Ignition cycle count at event time * Ignition cycle count at investigation * Maximum velocity for near-deployment event * Velocity vs. time for frontal airbag deployment event * Time from vehicle impact to time of maximum velocity * Time between near-deploy and deploy event (if within five seconds) more...

and further down in the article...

Though this may sound a little paranoid, there is a very high dollar marketing value to determining information about where certain people go and what they do. Simply adding an inexpensive global positioning device would track everywhere you went and this data could be made available to anyone willing to pay the price for it. You may not have any secrets but do you really want your whereabouts being made available to mega-marketing companies?

http://www.seniormag.com/headlines/blackboxcars.htm

I have a ford and it's not on this list. I suppose all the automakers will be doing this eventually. Is this a case of big brother attempting to watch us..yes, I think so.