As a bevy of classic Hollywood movies has shown, truck driving is an occupation intertwined with American ideals of freedom and machismo.

But technology is threatening the trucker’s traditional independence. Seeking to reduce crashes, the federal government issued a mandate in 2017 that truckers use Electronic Logging Devices (ELDs) to record their driving hours, replacing pencil-and-paper logs that were easily fudged.

Are ELDs unwarranted surveillance, or are they a vital safety technology? The answer depends on whom you ask, but pretty much everyone agrees that their adoption constrains the role of human drivers in an industry employing over 3 million people in the US.

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