Because late stage capitalism, lobbyists pushed legislators to allow data collection so that it can be sold to insurance companies who also lobbied so that they can charge more for premiums.

Every company makes more profit.

We don't live in a democracy anymore.

Not suddenly. It's been going on at least as far back as 2001. Probably more. It's generally not the gov't either as the gov't is mostly driven by moneyed private interests like large corporations. They always push in different ways to get more power to make profit. Get rid of a regulation, make new regulation, get a subsidy, limit rights to resist some abuse, etc. Sometimes it's just more obvious that others in general, or it's in an are we personally pay attention to, and we're like WTAF.

The commodification of life itself.

Once you understand that we are just livestock to those in charge, a lot of their behavior starts to make more sense.

They're scared of the likes of Luigi and paper Mario. More and more people are getting fed up

Its been like this my entire life. When I was in high school in the 90s one of my teachers said the greatest battle your generation will fight will be for privacy. Little did they know there would be no fight. The general public doesn't seem interested in caring about things and voting with their wallet. Now we've reached this point where the game is up and companies have realized the masses will buy their products because people perceive that they "need" them and can't do without which gives them free reign to do whatever they want.

Control, why else?

There are valid concerns about crazy surveillance bills, but this specific one is overreaction.

Basically the 2021 infrastructure bill asks NHTSA to come with a standard to detect impaired driving (it doesn't say how it should be implemented, the camera watching us is author's imagination how it would be implemented) and if there is no technology available then they should publish a yearly report describing current state of things.

Because of the yearly report requirement I've been reading similar article saying that this will happen in 2026. That's how I learned about first.

You can find the reports here: https://www.nhtsa.gov/reports-to-congress

I think those overreacting articles are doing disservice because they distract us from actually dangerous things like for example bills like the one trying to incorporate age verification into OS requiring for example Microsoft verifying our identity before we can use their OS.

Not many people realized that bill like this already sneaked and was signed into law in California for example. It mandates this starting 2027.

Because the people vote for such governments.