On the contrary, the how you do it includes where and when you do it, which is a major privacy concern. Sure, a black box to get telemetry after the fact might make sense, with specificity and my explicit knowledge when access happens. I'd have a hard time turning that into free data for any particular company or government to have though, vehicular deaths aren't the only issue in our world.
Not really/depends. Florida has the Public Records Act (which is why we have "Florida man" and "Florida woman" headlines) so there the police's crash report is public, but if your car hits another car on a backroad in any other state, more often than not only the two drivers, their insurance, and the police know about the event.
The last accident I got in (a fender-bender) was about 10 years ago -- and only myself and the other driver knew about it. No insurance companies or police were ever told.
Generally, information recorded (or maintained by, and often if contracted through a third party) by a government agency is made public if that state's public records law does not consider it to be private. "Private" is usually defined on a state-by-state basis. Every state has a public records law.
Some states consider license plates to be private, while others don't. Foe example, Illinois considers license plates private only if it's associated with other personally associatable information.
Aggregate or redacted information on accidents might be accessible in the case of privacy exemptions. Unless it's all on paper, which dramatically complicates things because of the efforts required to review/redact where needed.
In other words - if an agency has access to records on traffic incidents, it's probably accessible.
Wouldn't think so, although I live in Germany so YMMV on that question.
Around here there would be a public record of an accidents location if it was big enough to bother waiting for the police, although the public portion of that would not be tied to my name or license plate. Announcements (by authorities) on larger accidents mostly contain maybe an age, gender, and generic vehicle information. Other than that only the two insurances involved would get more data.
The only thing I could think of that made more information public might be lawsuits that could occasionally result from an accident but I'm not sure on how public those currently are. Our news around here usually refrain from naming people in reporting anyway if it's not too relevant or it's a public person anyway.
If it's reported, it'll be a record somewhere, if only in your insurance company. They seem to get sold on a lot to third party claims companies.
If there's a police report, then of course it's a public record.
In the EU, the "e-Call" system is being rolled out which mandates that the car automatically phones home in the event of a crash: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECall
The location of the crash is public. Who was involved is not. AFAIK You can download the locations of fatality crashes here. ftp://ftp.nhtsa.dot.gov/fars/
