I wear a helmet cam, and yes, as an individual it's basically impossible to get traction, even when you have a clear plate and face shot. But when the self-driving car company has thousands or millions of these incidents on record, they'll quickly find themselves wielding enormous power.
They'll be able to correlate across time and space, similar to how phones running Google Maps are reporting their position and velocity to create up to the minute traffic overlays. They'll be able to approach politicians and police forces with a message like "hey, want to get serious about safety? These are the top one hundred drivers in your area who need to be taken off the road now— click through to our portal to find dozens and dozens of videos of each one speeding, weaving, failing to yield, running stop signs, etc."
Each individual incident may be hard to prosecute, but when you have all of them in a bundle, a few a week for months at a time, it'll become impossible not to act on it. When crashes happen, they'll be able to shame the jurisdiction after the fact by publishing dumps of the incidents leading up to it that were not acted on.
Heh, imagine "vigilante" network justice. Oh, hey, you messed with our cars one too many times. We'll arrange for some cars to line up in front of you and drive 25.
They would simply report their customers just as well. Covering them up is a liability, they would probably have another way to tell anyways. I got an automated parking fine from a shared car a few weeks ago - it's real.
Eventually, money. You have to imagine that info about dangerous drivers would be tremendously valuable to insurance companies as well, if it could be shown to predict crashes.
They'll be able to correlate across time and space, similar to how phones running Google Maps are reporting their position and velocity to create up to the minute traffic overlays. They'll be able to approach politicians and police forces with a message like "hey, want to get serious about safety? These are the top one hundred drivers in your area who need to be taken off the road now— click through to our portal to find dozens and dozens of videos of each one speeding, weaving, failing to yield, running stop signs, etc."
Each individual incident may be hard to prosecute, but when you have all of them in a bundle, a few a week for months at a time, it'll become impossible not to act on it. When crashes happen, they'll be able to shame the jurisdiction after the fact by publishing dumps of the incidents leading up to it that were not acted on.