Eyes on the Road, Camera in Your Face: Europe’s Surveillance Cars Are Coming for America
Updated
Pay attention. Europe is now tracking distracted drivers. That’s right, effective July 7, 2026, a mandatory small camera monitors every move of the person behind the wheel in all new cars sold across the European Union. Pointing straight at the driver, the camera tracks their eyes, the tilt of their head, and the direction in which they are looking. If the camera decides the driver has looked away from the road for too long, it beeps, flashes, or buzzes their seat. As noted by Brussels, the camera is part of an Advanced Driver Distraction Warning system that is now required in every newly registered vehicle on the continent, from the smallest hatchback to the largest truck. They insist the goal of the camera is fewer deaths from distracted driving. But in reality, mandated cameras are likely the groundwork for extensive surveillance, being installed one windshield at a time.
As written today, the EU regulation only warns drivers about distracted driving. It states that the system is not supposed to use facial recognition. Note the phrasing: not supposed to. It is likewise meant to keep only the data it needs to function. The law limits the camera use, but the hardware carmakers install is capable of far more than the law currently asks of it. For now, regulators insist the new camera does not send your face to a database and does not stop the car. As the current regulation stands, if someone says that new European cars are already sending information to the authorities, they are ahead of the facts.
But hold that sigh of relief. The same regulation plainly states the Commission will adopt expanded requirements by July 2027, and it spells out exactly what that means. They will begin monitoring intermittent distractions, cognitive distractions (as in whether your mind is on the road), and body movements, and it will implement distraction avoidance by technical means. In other words, the car will take matters into its own hands. The camera is the hardest part to install, and it is now mandatory in every newly registered vehicle. What is looming around the corner is frightening.
If you live in Britain and assume this does not affect you because of Brexit, it is wise to look more closely. Before Brexit came into play, EU rules automatically applied to Britain. And because this law was passed after Brexit, Great Britain never adopted it. But in early 2026, the UK’s Department for Transport opened a consultation proposing to mandate 18 of the 19 European safety technologies, and the government has stated an explicit presumption in favor of following the Brussels mandate. Notably, the majority of new cars sold in Britain already carry the camera, because carmakers build to the strictest market rather than manufacture a separate island version. And under the Windsor Framework, Northern Ireland is already fully subject to following European rule. So, the relevant question becomes not whether this tracking reaches British drivers, but how soon will it.
Yes, this is in Europe, but tracking of this nature should certainly concern Americans. Why? Because a version of this requirement is already law in the United States. Tucked neatly inside the 2021 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, which was signed into law on November 15, 2021, exists a section directing federal regulators to require that all new passenger vehicles be equipped with impaired-driving prevention technology. The language in this legislation deserves to be read carefully, as it calls for a system that will passively monitor the driver and then prevent or limit the operation of the vehicle if impairment is detected.
Sure, Europe’s distracted-driving camera nags drivers with buzzing seats and so on. But the statute in the US describes a car that has the ability to decide whether you are too distracted to drive it altogether. Critics have labeled it a kill switch, and regulators have not denied that framing. The only thing holding it back is that the agency missed its 2024 deadline to write the rule, and currently admits the technology is not ready. Nonetheless, it is coming, with rollout is now penciled in for 2027 or later. The surveillance state is not at our doorstep in the US. No indeed. It is already through the door, with a deal sealed by Congress four years ago.
We already know how this scenario ends, because we have watched it happen. Take a look at license plate readers. Under the guise of catching persistent car thieves, Flock Safety sold automated license plate cameras to American towns across the country. It was later revealed that local camera data was routed to federal agencies without authorization from those cities. We must understand completely what Flock cameras actually do. Each one of them automatically photographs every passing vehicle, stamps it with a time and place, and stores it in the cloud (Amazon Web Services, AWS) for police to search through for thirty days, and up to a year upon request. They don’t read our cell phones, but what they do is worse, because a license plate scan is now a doorway to your identity. Through a Flock product called Nova (revealed in leaked internal materials), police can jump from your plate to you, and then to the trove of personal data that brokers already hold on you. When enough cameras are tracked and linked together, those with access to the data have not just caught a car thief; they have built a searchable travel history for every single car and person that has driven past the rapidly expanding Flock camera network.
As security researcher Benn Jordan shared in a June investigation by InvestigateTV, plotting that data on a map is so extensive that it is as if every car had a GPS unit strapped to it for an entire month. As expected, Flock insists that it does not track people and that each camera captures only a fixed moment in time. But its own training videos reveal a much different story. Jordan’s investigation found that Flock was coaching police to follow suspects from location to location. At the same time, its newer cameras use AI to zoom in and trail a person down the street. What? Decide for yourself. Does that distinction mean anything once every moment is stored and searchable together?
To be sure, safety hardware became a means of tracking everyone the minute someone with more power found a use for it, and it is increasingly ubiquitous. In-car monitoring that is underway in the UK is the same architecture arriving from the opposite direction. Flock tracks where your car goes. The cabin camera sets the stage to track what you do while you drive. And here is the part that should specifically worry Americans: the US law requiring these cameras, as explained in the 2021 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, contains no provisions for what happens to the data they create. Likewise, there is no national privacy law offering protection to fill the gap, and state laws do not go far enough. Europe and the UK at least give their drivers some right to see and delete what is collected. But Americans get the camera and surveillance without protections.
None of this is a hypothetical worry about where the data could end up. When Mozilla, the nonprofit behind the Firefox browser, reviewed the privacy policies of 25 modern car brands sold worldwide, it called those cars the worst product category it had ever examined for privacy, with every brand collecting far more data than it needed, and most reserving the right to sell it. Mozilla’s privacy lead noted that the new camera law does nothing to change this. And earlier this year, General Motors paid nearly $13 million to settle claims that it sold the driving data of thousands of its motorists to data brokers.
Propping up the distracted-driving surveillance narrative is a safety case that quickly collapses. A 2024 study in Accident Analysis and Prevention found limited proof that these distraction warnings reliably prevent distracted driving. In fact, some new car owners report the system crying wolf dozens of times per trip, sometimes fooled by the natural shape of a person’s eyes. Read that again. Is the car overlord thinking, hmm, did the driver’s eyes just glance at their phone? How is it fooled by the shape of someone’s eyes? This type of error is a real concern. And the design philosophy indicates more of the same. For example, the speed warning system in Europe can be switched off, but it automatically turns back on every time you start the car. Makes one wonder who the off button really belongs to.
The scale of what is being decided for us—under the camouflage of safety—is staggering. There are roughly 242 million licensed drivers in the United States and about 42 million in Britain, and not one of them was asked whether they wanted a camera pointed at their face for the length of every trip they will ever take in their vehicle. The pitch is always safety. But safety is not the part worthy of an argument to drivers. The tracking is the part they hope we don’t argue with, right up until the day the safety camera becomes a surveillance camera and turns off our cars. Then what?