Cars, buses, trains... vehicles now have eyes. Onboard cameras monitor, detect, analyze, and alert. Originally limited to police cars, they have become a staple in transportation and are expected to continue growing: estimated at $8.81 billion in 2023, the global automotive camera market is projected to reach $22.46 billion by 2032 [1].

In the 1990s, the first models of onboard cameras recorded locally on VHS cassettes. However, with technological advancements and the evolution of image collection and storage methods, the onboard camera is no longer just an eye: it perceives images, but also sounds, GPS coordinates, speed, weather context, and interactions with other connected systems. Every second of a journey is translated into exploitable files. In this new context, the question of ethics arises.

From Safety to Threat: The Intersection of Technology and Ethics.

The generic term "onboard cameras" encompasses two main categories of equipment:

Surveillance cameras for personal safety, found in public transport, stations, or public spaces.
Onboard cameras dedicated to operational safety, which ensure that equipment poses no danger to the user and can actively contribute to their protection.

Randstad Digital focuses on this second category. And it is precisely in this area that much of the ethical debate plays out.

Features for Vigilance

Onboard cameras no longer just capture images: they observe, interpret, and trigger automatic actions. Facial analysis, incident detection, behavior monitoring: they extend the human eye, without its biological limits. They are used everywhere:

In automobiles, both inside and outside vehicles. Some monitor the driver to detect signs of drowsiness or inattention (Driver Monitoring System, or DMS). Others scan the road to anticipate incidents or contextualize an accident. For example, dashcam images can be used to gather legal evidence and settle insurance disputes.
In the railway sector, they are beginning to equip cabins and platforms, capable of alerting to suspicious traveler behavior, such as a suicide attempt, or even improving "dead man's switch" devices (detection and alert in case of an isolated worker accident).
In professional transport (buses, trucks, delivery), they become both a risk prevention tool for the driver and a monitoring tool for worker activity, such as measuring driving times.

These are valuable tools, sometimes even life-saving. But every coin has two sides.

A Fine Line Between Vigilance and Respect for Individual Rights.

An infrared camera that detects a simple heat source without identifying the person poses few problems. However, when a camera is capable of facial recognition and linking this identification to personalization features (such as destination preferences or music choices), a line is crossed. Modern vehicles have become mobile sensors. Every journey, every action, every incident generates data: video, sounds, GPS positions, speed, context. This mass of information can be stored onboard, but also extracted, transferred, cross-referenced with other data, and analyzed to create individual profiles... sometimes without their explicit consent.

The ambivalence is clear: onboard cameras increase safety, but question freedom and privacy. Starting with the individuals filmed, sometimes unknowingly, in increasingly interconnected spaces.

Informing, tracking consent, and providing users with simplified access to their own data are essential points for ethical solutions, but Randstad Digital teams believe the reflection must go further. "Ethically, onboard cameras are neither good nor bad in themselves. They are tools, and our mission at Randstad Digital is to support our clients in their best possible use," says François Terrot, technical leader of the Embedded Cybersecurity practice at Randstad Digital.

Ethical Vigilance: A Shared Responsibility.

Faced with the ethical challenges raised by onboard cameras, the issue is not just technological; it is above all systemic. It involves every actor in the chain – designers, manufacturers, integrators, operators – and prompts continuous reflection on the use, limits, and potential abuses of deployed technologies.

At Randstad Digital, this reflection is integrated from the collaboration phase with its clients. The group positions itself more as a provider of expertise than a provider of solutions. Its role is not to impose answers, but to help its partners ask the right questions.

Respect for privacy, legal compliance, data protection, facial recognition, image processing – each project raises these questions, and it is up to the client to determine their choices, but never without a critical eye and a prior alert from Randstad Digital, and always in compliance with the law.

Because to complement the ethical responsibility of each organization, the regulatory framework is a collective safeguard. The GDPR in Europe, or privacy laws in the United States, regulate some practices, but the proliferation of connected onboard objects requires legislators and businesses to collaborate to maintain a balance between technological progress, business constraints, and respect for fundamental freedoms.

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