Cars collect a startling amount of data about you
bbc.com438 points by 1vuio0pswjnm7 11 hours ago
438 points by 1vuio0pswjnm7 11 hours ago
With cars, networked computers are encroaching on privacy from two sides: the computers inside the car sharing sensor data and the computers outside the car sharing camera data from known points on the road.
Older cars may not have cellular data, and some new cars (e.g. the Slate electric car) may be specifically designed without cellular connections or with easily removable chips, but so much can still be inferred from omnipresent roadside surveillance.
It's not enough even to have private cars. The solution must be legislation that limits all of: data collected by cars and cameras, data shared among third parties, and placement of cameras without informed, specific, continuing public consent.
And every time flock-style cameras "could have" done some good, the surveillance state's cheerleaders will beat their drums and bleat their demands.
> The solution must be legislation that limits all of: data collected
Let's finish the sentence there. Being spied by corporations 24/7 while we game, watch entertainment, drive, talk with friends, work... it's fucked up.
We live in a hell of our own creation and only new legislation and regulations can get us out of here.
It's also akin to Roko's basilisk's - the people who don't realise how pervasive and invasive it has become seem the happiest while the ones like us who've often been around computers since the 80's and just watched our society sleep walk into it feel the worst.
That many of us then end up working for the companies doing it makes for a bad feeling across the industry.
Except unlike Roko's basilisk, this is not absurd pseudo-game-theory extrapolation based on the hypothetical existence of a supreme superintelligence that is simultaneously infinitely vengeful, infinitely omniscient, and infintely omnimpotent; instead it's just the same authoritarian police-state privacy encroachment that has been tightening around our throats for years.
>only new legislation and regulations can get us out of here.
From the same goverments that want more state surveillance and even buy the private profile data from data brokers?
Only a new ...revolution would get us out of here...
Unemployed revolutionaries are a lot cheaper than responsible senators, and as history shows, selling claims to territories that belong to others is exactly what makes state violence so profitable. The descendants of someone in Africa are glad their photographs and souls weren’t taken a century ago.
Most of the governments you are talking about are voted on by the people. And when the people care, the governments change. When the people don't care, yes, the government does want lots of data. However, people do often care about such things and that limits the government.
Voted on by the people, and yet in 2026 we have no way to actually confirm our votes are counted or factored into who gets elected. Every single US president is related, sans Van Buren, but there's no way our elections are rigged! Not sure how many corrupt politicians have to take office before people will start questioning the legitimacy of elections.
> And when the people care, the governments change.
When half of American lives paycheck to paycheck they care about putting food in table instead of petty politics or data collections.
The vast majority of Americans are not working 100 hours a week just trying to get enough for the basics (goodwill clothing, food, and a shelter...). They might be living paycheck to paycheck, but it is with 40-60 hour per week job, and the are living paycheck to paycheck because they spend money when they make it (this is a sensible thing to do with most of your money - though having some emergency and retirement savings is a good idea, for most people the risk of death before they get old is too high to make saving much more sensible.).
Which is to say the vast majority have plenty of time to think about politics. They don't but that is because they choose to do other things, not because they lack time. (even those who do take the time often only think about it superficially)
Not sure how your comment relates to the one it is replying to except to appear to reject its argument in favor of another train of thought. Politics is playdoh. Tax the bots for UBI.
> From the same goverments
As alluded to, it doesn't have to :) The French are currently on their fifth iteration of "the government", and we're bound to get a new iteration hopefully soon! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Fifth_Republic
I wish people would stop saying we created this hell, as if everyone had a choice as to whether or not they grew up in this increasingly dystopian reality. Blame the people that are actually to blame, not everyone else. It's a tired tactic to shift blame from those who are actually accountable for these systems and technologies.
Let's finish that thought too.
You're asking for new legislation written by governments that a/ want that data to spy on you too and b/ are lobbied by corporations to write the legislation corps want.
It's a closed loop of crap, that goes in one direction only.
No worries, next generation won't even understand what we are blabbing about. Look at that cute cat video! Privacy what? Oh that puppy is rolling on his back!
Once your intergenerational wealth is offshore you can pick any of your nepo offspring and make them a hollywood star or unicorn startup CEO with a clean wikipedia page. Their wealth is also tied to national security jobs, because those make you immune in front of the law plus you have the benefit of constructing identities (and death certificates) out of thin air.
For example very rich people in the US receive vanity SSNs. Ghislaine Maxwell has one that spells out "Leet Babe". It's like number plates to show off.
“Leet Babe” is not even the right number of letters. Doesn’t seem like “leet” would even be in her generation’s vocabulary. Are you trolling? Very rich get vanity numbers? Where is there evidence of that?
Bothered to check it? It's not literally the letters "leet babe", it's in "leetspeak" as the parent said:
"Ghislaine Maxwell's Social Security Number (133-78-4883) is recorded in U.S. law enforcement documents, such as historical NYPD files, as part of her official identification and background records".
1337 84883 --> LEET BABBE in leetspeak.
It's a stretch, but to be fair, apparently they already had no problem getting visas and other documents with 3-4 variations of their names (to make database lookup more difficult)
That's exactly it. There was a time before widespread fingerprint checks and facial recognition where they'd all been swapping their first/middle/lastnames around like crazy between passports, and for GM we have the actual immigration documents she filled out with the clear intention to fool the government - for each government entity she sent the form to, she used a different name. She was working in NY without a visa, and after Bush was voted out there was a sudden scrambling to get her an H1B and it was done via one of Epstein's companies.
The vanity SSN thing looks even weirder because someone who I assume was Epstein's great-grandfather was head of US social security administration in the 1920s, a crazy coincidence [Trump family was more department of agriculture]. The 133784883 SSN is clearly a five-eyes meme and one day FOIAs will show what other interesting VIPs have a 1337-range SSN.
Even Donald Trump's officially-curated Wikipedia lists some of his fake identities, and he has some Epstein-related pseudonyms which are not widely known yet which are miraculously also associated with the Kashoggi family name.
Next generations (plural) already doesn't.
The last generation that cared about this in any big way were the Xers (and close to X-er boomers) circa 1990s.
And even them, not enough, and not as a majority. But at least many techies back then did.
> We live in a hell of our own creation
Well not "our" creation since only a few oligarchs control most of the companies that engage in this.
> and only new legislation and regulations can get us out of here.
The same oligarchs control nearly all the legislators, so no way out.
>Well not "our" creation since only a few oligarchs control most of the companies that engage in this.
They're just looking after their interests and kinks. It's the suckers that accept it, which are hundreds of millions, that allow this hell to be created, and continue to not do anything about it, when they're not even supporting and voting for them.
>Well not "our" creation since only a few oligarchs control most of the companies that engage in this
Do not excuse the millions upon millions of useful idiots who lent credence to the "rulers" stupid projects at every step of the way. A lot of this problem is in the mirror. Those oligarchs would have infinity less power if a whole bunch of people din't agree with them.
I mean hell, go look at HN comments from before Flock was helping ICE and every idiot in the comments cooing about how to optimize the ALPR dragnet to fine speeders, flag drug dealers and apply jackboot to every other class of petty deviant they thought they could tease out and everyone pushing back was being shat on for not being "pro social" enough or whatever.
A meaningful amount of the problem is viewable in the goddamn mirror.
I constantly learn the hard way in politics that unintended consequences dominate long term. Often they are things that seem obvious in hindsight but nobody reasonable thought of in advance (the people that did are unreasonable in other ways and generally right to ignore even though they were right this time)
Those few decades where the normal person thought that they are not a servant to a feudalistic lord are over, the aristocrats don't need to hide any more. The old money is out in the open, because the populace has lost all their leverage.
They still lie to us about the true source of their wealth, but if you dig in the few archives that we can actually access it is clear that the same family names pop up over and over again.
If your family wealth came from feudalism/colonialism and was already safely stored in offshore accounts 100 years ago, you can send your nepo child to silicon valley or Hollywood, have your connections invest into them and tell the whole world what amazing self-made person they are. Some years down the line they go meet the King to get their hereditary Lordship title back for the whole world to know.
All of this is in the national security interest, so your kids are above the law even though they might only be a Hollywood talent scout, CEO of some startup or a real estate mogul focused on black neighborhoods.
For several hundred years being aristocrat was really unpopular, but ultimately they got a grip on it by owning all means of mass propaganda plus building a file on everyone.
Unfortunately the legislation that exists requires surveillance tech be installed on new vehicles.
https://www.gadgetreview.com/federal-surveillance-tech-becom...
I think the only problem may be how it's phrased. I don't mind technology checking if I'm alive and awake while operating a two tonne ballistic bullet in publicml.
I do mind, however, if the data is not immediately discarded, once it does its real-time safety purpose.
Yep, which is why I'll never buy another car without an ashtray.
That is the only solution unless something radically changes.
For me, I will never own a car with any kind of screen on the dash.
You can do that just be aware that you will eventually be spending more than just buying a new car just to keep the current one in good repair. Car collectors get around this because they use have a different car as the daily driver, and their collected car is repaired and only used in parades and such.
You are also turning away a lot of the advances in electric vehicles. Paying for gas in your old car, could be more than payments on a brand new electric car. (that would require a lot of driving.)
Parts availability can be a problem, but especially if you drive a once popular model and are willing to do work yourself, the mileage you can get out of junkyard parts is significant.
You are also increasing your risk of death or serious injury. New cars are far safer in a collision than cars made 15-20 years ago.
Are they though? Have there been any major breakthroughs in the engineering that make a 2026 car more structurally secure than one from 2011? I thought the main improvements were made in software, like lane assist and whatever else. But my assumption is that you need to go back considerably more than 15 years ago to see vehicles that are meaningfully less structurally safe.
That’s weird wording, it’s not live-streaming the DMS camera feed… is it?
There's no actual rule yet, they're still working on it. [1]
tldr; Impairment detection methods are currently too inaccurate to use (both false positive and false negative).
And then if anything is ever accurate enough they'll have to create testable standards that car manufacturers can easily implement.
And NHTSA is concerned with security and privacy issues as well. They'll keep updating congress on progress once a year.
My take is it's very possible the rule may never get made.
[1] https://www.nhtsa.gov/sites/nhtsa.gov/files/2026-03/Report-t...
Just because it's a camera based system doesn't mean it will be surveillance.
Except in mid to high end luxury cars, automakers will probably design the sensor to be completely self-contained and merely provide a "driver present, attentive" or "driver distracted" or "no driver." In high end cars they'll use it to switch driver profiles, like what Lucid already does.
Both you and that author need to go look at the massive amount of data that has been getting collected in cars, including location data, for close to two decades in any vehicle that even had the option for telematics and GPS navigation.
Also the issue is not so much the camera system, but the "OS" the car is running. A ton of vehicles now have Google's Android OS running on them and that is also a privacy dumpster fire in and of itsel.
Also, a nationwide network of license plate reading cameras is far more of a privacy threat, too.
> The solution must be legislation that limits all of: data collected by cars and cameras, data shared among third parties, and placement of cameras without informed, specific, continuing public consent.
Americans will give away any and all material and immaterial rights to validate their illusion of comfort and security. This will not happen barring a complete audit/revamp of the state
Yet even those who aim to remake the state change their tune when they become the state.
Becoming the state means getting power. Very few people are strong enough to not be corrupted by this power, and to argue against themselves, or their function, or the powerful people around them having so much of this power or more of it.
Normal people give it up because they are permanently under assault by misinformation, misdirection, lack of education, artificial threats, all meant to guide them towards a conclusion that was already predetermined for them.
It is scary to think how cheap this tech is getting, so semi-expensive things like fridges and TVs will start to come with built-in mobile connections and be always online even if you don't connect them.
With mesh networks it is even scarier, I wouldn't be surprised that at some point even if you don't connect a device like a smart lamp, it might still be sending data about its usage using your neighbors hub.
There was a very nice presentation at CCC in 2024. "We know where your car is parked."
https://media.ccc.de/v/38c3-wir-wissen-wo-dein-auto-steht-vo...
Positional data about 800.000 E-cars from Volkswagen.
> It's not enough even to have private cars. The solution must be legislation
Regarding the importance of legislation versus "just don't buy those", I think this piece [0] seems relevant. To summarize the argument:
1. Consumer choices are never enough to really change things. It's a false promise, one the people making the decisions are happy to let you believe.
2. If you do believe that "voting with your wallet" works, then when things inevitably fail to change it leads you to blame others for "not doing their part" and being insufficiently picky or not denying their own desires.
3. Ultimately this means: (A) No policy change; (B) You spend a lot of time denying yourself nice things; (C) It creates division between people who have the same goals; (D) Your experience is frustrating bickering and purity-tests.
4. Instead you should pursue real politics. While you can't do it alone with a computer, it offers: (A) Real results; (B) No self-sabotage when you truly need a product; (C) You gain allies; (D) You experience comradery and excitement.
[0] https://pluralistic.net/2026/05/21/purity-culture/#stop-fuck...
The best argument against "voting with your wallet" I heard was following: billionaires have much bigger wallets. They will outvote the rest of us every single time voting with wallet is used as political strategy.
Well, billionaires do have bigger wallets. The common person as a collection has bigger wallets than the billionaires. Remember, too, that the billionaires are not a 100% alignment on everything.
> With cars, networked computers are encroaching on privacy from two sides: the computers inside the car sharing sensor data and the computers outside the car sharing camera data from known points on the road.
There are cameras inside the car as well.
Slate is just some renderings though, right? Is there anything actually real about it more than just marketing?
Happen to be on their email list. They are taking orders soon and announcing pricing on 6/24. Initial delivery expected toward the end of the year.
A recent episode of the MindScape podcast seems very relevant here:
Andrew Guthrie Ferguson on How Your Data Will Be Used Against You https://open.spotify.com/episode/4FOwAWkB0Bu00EpxmE97qB?si=V...
There was a HN user recently on a related post explaining to everyone that they don't need privacy because they personally aren't harmed and a murderer was caught by one of these cameras.
It turns out protesters don't need privacy, either, because of various reasons. Same for women seeking adequate healthcare, I'm sure. Or LGBT people attempting to exist.
Sorry, I am strawmanning a little. Actually, we'll simply have regulations on use. Regulation which will certainly be followed this time by a government with complete disregard for Constitutional rights. Certainly they will never be misused by the police currently stalking their ex-partners with existing surveillance systems despite existing stalking legislation.
I wish the legislation you talked about existed already. I am dismayed by the overwhelming number of people that love being surveilled. Without them, we would have it already.
Sadly, often once some new degree of connection becomes possible, its absence is very quickly seen as unconscionable. But that instinct is corrosive to human flourishing and freedom in the long term.
Once it's possible to monitor your children via networked phone or wristwatch and know at all times where they are, for example, if you do not spy on your own children then other parents who do will look at you askance, seeing you as neglectful. Some will call the authories to complain. Those same complainers will also wonder why so many children are no longer becoming effective, independent adults, with no introspection.
The same philisophical problem emerges independent of surveillance with most, if not all, new technology. Once everyone is genetically engineering children, bringing children into the world naturally will set them up for failure and serfdom (a la Gattaca).
In response to someone in another thread who argued against personal privacy, who said "Why do people feel they can behave in a way that can be blackmailed", I responded with the following:
---
Yeah, how dare someone do or say anything that some random crazy asshole could use to threaten that person's personal or professional life or even put them in danger of physical harm. To hell with gay kids growing up in very traditional religious areas in much of the world.
That person who made a racist joke on Discord when they were 13 years old? That should be able to ruin them when they're 30!
Someone confiding to a friend over social media DMs that they're in an abusive relationship with someone violent? Well - she shouldn't be surprised when her partner beats her within an inch of her life when he finds out. If only she did what she was told, right?
And let's not forget the cringiest or most sexual thing you've ever said online - make sure that your every utterance in private would pass scrutiny by your employer's HR department!
Seriously...I don't understand people like you. What a small, listless, and unusually safe world you must live in.
You may as well have asked why can't everyone think and act like you as well as live in your particular region of the world with the same friends, family, romantic, and professional opportunities that you've been provided throughout your life.
---
"That person who made a racist joke on Discord when they were 13 years old? That should be able to ruin them when they're 30!"
Or society could move on and accept that people progress. Also I am not aware of any instances where 30 year olds were punished for a racist joke they made with 13.
The only instance I remotely know, is of a german politician, who made a deeply racist and neonazi pamphlet when he was 17 - and the result was some public outcry but nothing else.
Still privacy is important, simply because those who do surveillance are not trustworthy either.
In the 2010's, there was an instance of a late-teens/early-20's girl targeted by a group of too-online people for a racist chat log made when she was around 12 or 13 years old. The people went after her dad's business too because of his association with her.
Aside from getting her fired from her job, they also tried to destroy her dad's business.
I get that less-than-10 years isn't a ton of time, but it also represented nearly half her life. People tend to grow up a lot in their teens even if it's still common for there to be some immaturity leftover in their early 20's
I would like to read more, if possible.
Lynch mobs usually ain't fair or just or busy with factfinding, but I know there are also a lot of people hiding behind a mask and do not like to get exposed by confronting them with something out of a time when they were not so careful yet.
Personally I just avoid racists (or argue with them) and don't attack their stuff or even family and don't think this is the way, to get to a world without or even less racism.
The end state is something like China, where petty street level crime is essentially solved. You can leave your bike unlocked because if anyone stole it the police would find them and return it since they can track the thief on a network of cameras.
But like you say, many things which have been crimes were based on unethical laws. It's easy to two sides this issue, less crime would on a whole be a good thing but some level of committing crime and getting away with it is required for society to progress.
> You can leave your bike unlocked because if anyone stole it the police would find them and return it since they can track the thief on a network of cameras.
In the US it is actually even worse than that.
The government and large corporations (basically the same people owning it all) will spy on you 24x7 for anything that they dislike you doing.
But if your bike (car, etc) is stolen right in front of many cameras providing video evidence, police will not do anything about it.
I know first hand people who have crystal clear video evidence of theft, gave it to the police, and they just don't care to do anything about it.
> The end state is something like China, where petty street level crime is essentially solved.
That’s also true for many states that don’t have the same coverage of CCTV and total lack of privacy.
These are NOT two sides of the same coin.
> The end state is something like China, where petty street level crime is essentially solved.
Petty crime in China was also "essentially solved" before there were cameras anywhere.
> You can leave your bike unlocked because if anyone stole it the police would find them and return it since they can track the thief on a network of cameras.
Leaving my bike unlocked in Shanghai 10+ years ago, it was stolen about once every one or two months. That's better than the US, but it's not exactly economical.
The modern solution is that you don't own a bike. You use the rental bikes instead. They're not as good as the bike you'd own, but if they get stolen it's not your problem. (And they have trackers installed, so it's not much of a problem for the rental company either.)
Using a very lightweight lock for the frame and ideally having a saddle and wheels that can't come off without tools would change things economically, especially if the bike is cheap but good enough.
The issue is having to rely on luck and the fact that humans are risk and loss aversive even when the risk is worth it.
"Leaving my bike unlocked in Shanghai 10+ years ago, it was stolen about once every one or two months." Seriously? How many times until you started locking it up?
> The end state is something like China, where petty street level crime is essentially solved.
PRC netizens, and who knows what percentage of them are real but presumably more than 0, will defend this when I talk with them about it. How the surveillance makes them feel safe, how they wouldn't feel safe without it.
Hm, maybe, I'd prefer the person looking over me while I slept to be someone I know, but I guess everyone knows brother Xi. Regardless, the implication seems to be that we need the requisite police state to go with it, when Taiwan and Japan both have basically total CCTV coverage as well, yet are liberal democracies. Both countries are also comparably safe to the PRC. So there certainly seems to be some middle ground. I don't know about Japan, but I've not heard of issues of private companies exploiting the CCTV for profiteering purposes, or like, cops using it to stalk people, or the government using it to engage in civic oppression (post constitutional reforms).
I think we just need sensible levels of surveillance with proper safe guards. I'm quite happy with a network of CCTV that can track down the driver who just bulldosed and killed a kid on the their bike. I'm not ok with Amazon building their own network of spying doorbell cameras to sell adverts.
> Japan both have basically total CCTV coverage as well,
Japan is nowhere near "total CCTV coverage"
China is an ethnically and culturally homogeneous society, with their ethnic minorities being about as different from the Han majority as the Czechs are different from the Slovaks. if China was to experience Western levels of diversity, inclusion, and cultural enrichment, then no amount of surveillance could possibly help prevent crimes, petty and otherwise. just look at the UK.
"then no amount of surveillance could possibly help prevent crimes, petty and otherwise. just look at the UK."
I don't understand your argument. Are you suggesting surveillance cameras are somehow less effective in diverse societies? Are you claiming UK has as effective a surveillance network as China?
>Are you claiming UK has as effective a surveillance network as China?
a more effective one.
>Are you suggesting surveillance cameras are somehow less effective in diverse societies?
I'm suggesting that certain cultures are less risk and conflict averse, to put it in the most politically correct way possible, and are less disincentivized from committing crimes by the possibility of brief imprisonment.
If it happened in the Land of Freedom, of course its going to happen everywhere. Legislation WILL be exploited, its just a question of when.
Hyundai received 61 cents per vehicle from Verisk. Honda received 26 cents. California's $12.75M fine against GM, the largest CCPA penalty ever, is less than the $20M GM made from selling the data.
It's also surprising how little money is being made. If I was buying a new car and there was an option where I could pay 61 cents for the privacy respecting version, it would be a no brainer.
Car business is ruthless, any profit margin is squeezed as much as possible. The reason the infotainment performance is bad in a lot of cars is cost-cutting on the chips used.
Procurement is expected to find ways % in cut costs continuously, every year, forever. Although data-gathering and selling is not part of procurement it is not surprising if car companies are exploring this.
The automotive OEMs are really bad at monetizing this data. How much they make is not how much could be made if the same data was in the hands of more capable entities.
I question how much they could really make though. It seems like my phone has better data on me and where I go - it is always with me and I use it for more things. Thus the car makers have data but it is a lower quality source for more things. The car makers also have less direct actions they can take - they can't show a video ad while I'm driving (unlike many phone apps) and when I'm not driving they can't do anything.
They do have better information about maintenance needs of my car. However they are limited to giving that to the dealer who already can guess most of that anyway.
So you as a privacy-desiring car buyer could offer 2 or 3 times more than 60cents to the car OEM. Or, even 10x more. The monetization of that data by the third party surely cannot be 10x their cost - that would be an enormous margin that seem unrealistic. But increasing the price of the car by $6 is almost a rounding error to the car price.
Plus, if you were allowed to opt-out, the rest of the opt-in data from other people become _slightly_ less useful.
Therefore, all the gov't needs to do is to mandate that car manufacturers offer the option at a reasonable price (where the 10x price is considered reasonable).
That's what really gets me. Wasting an hour of my time is worth a few cents of advertising to instagram. That's how little my time is really worth.
That's the advantage of externalised costs. It doesn't matter how high they are, you don't have to pay them!
You see this in all sorts of places, for example, stealing an EV charging cable. To a thief, a $500 charging station is just $10 worth of copper waiting to be melted down. They don't care about the $490 deficit they left behind because that’s the victim's problem. Social media platforms, and apparently now car manufacturers, look through the exact same lens.
Surely it costs more than that to run the internet connection as well. I know they choose to do that for other features and probably get good network deals, but the cost is tangible and I would be surprised if it worked out long term.
The hardest part is managing providers across multiple countries, if you want, for example, connectivity in Kazakhstan you either use a super expensive provider that supports a lot of countries, or you have to set up and manage separate contracts with providers in Kazakhstan.
However if you care only about a one or two markets and cars are often already built inside that market...
Cars in in such large numbers that it isn't a big deal to get a bulk deal with each provider seperatly. Though maybe Kazakhstan isn't worth covering at all, I'm not sure what their economy is like.
oh god yes... but I am carrying my self chosen surveillance device with me every single time I enter a car.
At least your self chosen surveillance device doesn't end up reporting rapid acceleration events to LexisNexis and then Progressive.
In theory it could. Usually there is accelerometers on them so they can definitively measure this. The tricky part would be determining if the phone belonged to the driver and which car is being driven.
You could properly infer if the phone owner is the driver by determining if they use the phone less than the other car's inhabitants or if they are the only phone detected driving at that speed and location. Or they use the phone more during traffic jams and less during more intense driving.
Then this leaves determining what car is involved. You could potentially see if the phone is connected to the car's entertainment system. That would tell you what car model it is perhaps even with a unique car id though the serial number. Some cars may have bluetooth/wi-fi and the phone could potentially passively scan the largest most consistent signal to get the car's model without ever connecting.
Cross referencing from other data sources (cameras) would give this information though may still be difficult/expensive/unlawful.
So in response to your comment its possible that the chosen surveillance device does actually report acceleration events to LexisNexis and then Progressive. Or this is is a case of overly being paranoid. Either case the possibility exists.
Your comparing apples and oranges, the sales figures are national, whilst the fines covered California alone.
There’s state litigation in Texas and Arkansas at least and a national lawsuit
https://iapp.org/news/a/california-authorities-announce-larg...
Sources?
Per-car prices (Hyundai 61 cents, Honda 26 cents): Source: Wyden-Markey Senate letter to FTC, July 2024. https://www.motor1.com/news/728428/automakers-sold-data-chea... https://therecord.media/markey-wyden-ask-ftc-to-probe-car-co...
GM $20M revenue / $12.75M California fine: Official CA AG press release, May 8, 2026. https://oag.ca.gov/news/press-releases/when-it-comes-data-pr...
Every corporation is trying to spy on you. Why wouldn't they? There is no real punishment, and large reward. As long as that is true, superficial regulations around tracking will always be circumvented or hollowed out. We need fundamental change in the way corporations interact with society, and in what is expected of them.
Those that can race tot he bottom and get away with it are usually the ones the have a better chance of survival. I don't like it one bit but that is a good summary of business nowadays.
My bank somehow isn't selling my transaction data to the highest bidder though.
Yes they do, and hedge funds buy it so they have consumer spending data before the rest of the market does.
Your bank is very likely doing just that. They even send you a notice about it every year.
You sure about that? Visa/Mastercars certainly are selling at least aggregated data if not more.
This is the long tail of monopoly and cartel power. We need a fundamental change in the _size_ of corporations. They're otherwise too big to regulate and changing expectations will achieve nothing.
The time to do this was 30 years ago. While today we need it more than ever, it is probably already too late: corporations will find those trying to do this and stop them.
Indeed. It started with intercepting letters and couriers, then storing phone calls, radio communications, operating labs to build DNA databases from blood samples, and now large-scale data collection for AI.
Archives tie Epstein and Maxwell individually to various companies in those areas, and a truckload of familiar family names show up along them. My assessment is that people like Thiel and Musk are not self-made, they are intelligence nepo children leveraging aristocratic/colonial offshore wealth of their families.
What is better than being rich and above the law due to your role in intelligence?
Don't forget Bill Gates. People generally don't know he's heir of one of the richest banking families in Washington state.
One thing is old money, another is telling everyone you are selfmade when in fact you are a nepo kid.
If you are old money you tend towards intelligence roles because they give you diplomatic passport and make you immune to the law. It is much better than owning 5 passports from some banana republic because in the end only military might of the colonial powers counts (e.g. the british crown).
So many of the silicon valley idols we cherish are in fact old money, parents were in intelligence, the child made a tech company, tech was national security relevant, they got funding and daddy handled their competitors through their government institution. Have a look at founders of YC for example. Or Mr. Thiel who officially came from nothing but miraculously has a university named after him and is super-deep into intelligence. Or Musk where unfortunately a lot of archives from South Africa are unavailable for research, but his wealth definitely does not come from repatriating colonial wealth from South Africa to the US.
In terms of realpolitik all is fine but if you start fabricating terrorist attacks to cover up a potential PR scandal for your shitty family you are way out of line. And at that point only the next large-scale attack helps you cover up the scandal. Several tangential names in the Epstein files fall victims to freak terrorist attacks - those are quite convenient because they get rid of idealist defectors and have a new thing to set the public agenda with.
It is how the world works and we have to accept it.
Hey major CEOs, if you think this is all so ok then please start publicly publishing your real-time driving/sensor data to your privacy policy pages as an example of what you collect.
Get ready to hear something along the lines of "Rules for thee but not for me"...
It is fascinating that we still haven’t have a law that forbid the car company from automatically share the data.
The car owner is buying a car, using computer to handle complicate hardware I understand, but at what point it make sense to share the data automatically without consent?
In Honda vehicles, you can turn it off but then it will show a permanent warning on your dash saying your spying settings are off and keeps bugging you as if you’re out of fuel.
I haven’t kept up with it but at least at one point the regulations gave both the automotive manufacturer and national governments rights to the data. What those entities do with the data is up to them. A lot of this was done under the auspices of international treaties. When those regulations were written the sensing capability was much less invasive. This has been in the works internationally since the 1990s.
Most governments don’t collect this data because they lack the technical capacity to do so. The legal frameworks were put in place long before the infrastructure.
> but at what point it make sense to share the data automatically without consent?
At the point a third party offers $$$ to car company, or a state entity leverages some state power to coerce car company.
I think GDPR should already covers this. What I’m unsure about is whether accepting one of the items in the menu on purchase of the car then allows it again because of “giving consent”.
Is there any PSAs about this I could share with those who are totally unaware or "don't think it's that bad"?
My wake up moment was at Walmart self-check out when there was an error and the monitor showed screen shots of me from every angle. "So that's what the back of my head looks like."
That's when you notice they have more cameras than casinos.
I know braking data is used to identify dangerous road sites / locations, and dangerous prior driving behavior of this car. The dangerous road site versus driver can be disentangled by statistics: if the road site / location results in similar braking behavior in other drivers, its more associated to the site, if the braking behavior is more correlated with the driver, its more attributable to this driver. However most people tend to have relatively regular commutes due to location of their home, their job, and their working hours, their shopping patterns etc. so it still entangled with other drivers, since they will tend to encounter the same subset of drivers, also having their own relatively steady probabilistic patterns.
For example, when a user suddenly brakes with large delta v, is it really due to this driver's aptitude to not predict the results of their driving decisions? Or is it because they frequently encounter the same reckless drivers?
It seems this could also be detected: for each braking event, consider a disc of sufficient radius and similarily downscore other drivers in this disc, use proper Bayesian inference of course, not naive linear score incrementing decrementing...
Simply downrating the driver of the braking vehicle risks taxing the less reckless chickens vis-a-vis the dare's in chicken or dare scenario's, naive calculations risk taxing specifically those parties that decrease the total kinetic energy in potentially dangerous situations, if the reckless drivers don't flinch even if it would have gotten them into trouble if a chicken had been a reckless dare.
The insurance company doesn’t care whether the risk is because of the driver or because of the road that the driver is on. They are on the hook for the risk either way.
This is why insurance companies also use your zip code to rate you. If you live near roads with more losses, you are more likely to incur losses. Doesn’t matter if you’re a great driver or not — someone might hit you.
Just here to remind you all about bicycles.
Climate and terrain allowing, bicycles reign supreme as a transport. Especially with all the new adaptive-, electric-, accessible- cycles out there, cars should be "rare but welcome strange guests" in many neighborhoods, downtowns, etc.
As you mentioned, electric bicycles flatten terrains (so do wide gear ranges), and jackets neutralize climate. There seriously isn't anywhere that is inappropriate to cycle. The only major limiting factor for people feeling comfortable biking everywhere is the threat of violence due to people driving cars.
Lightening is another limit. I'm going to drive to work today because there is a 20% chance of thunderstorm when I'm planning to going home, and that is too much risk.
Motorcycles broadcast an equal amount of data as bicycles.
Are you sure? Motorcycles already have computers, it isn't a stretch to think they could broadcast data about you. Maybe they are a decade behind cars in doing this, but I doubt it is anything else.
Bicycles don't have enough power to spare to broadcast data. (but my ebike could and I wouldn't notice the difference)
Yes. Point out the modem.
https://www.bike-parts-honda.com/honda-motorcycle/500-MOTO/R...
Do passengers have any rights against their personal data being collected when riding (not driving) in someone else's vehicle?
I tried to look this up on my own but my results were always polluted with public transportation, or vehicle accident situations or just this gem "share your concerns with your driver, they can explain the data being collected".
You probably do, but it would cost you tens of million in lawyer costs that you won't get back.
Thankfully I have one with zero connectivity.
Problem solved.
Which model is it? There has been no zero connectivity cars produced in the last 10 years or so, except maybe some niche manufacturer?
I've got a couple older cars (2010, 2003), but the only new one I'm excited about - the only actually new car I've ever considered buying - is the Slate truck:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5_G4OfXTlvs
It has an LCD for the gauges and backup camera, but no modem and no surveillance tech. Bring your own phone/tablet if you want navigation or audio.
And a milquetoasted editorialized title again. Who does that?
I yanked the bridge between the rest of the car and the cellular board.
I am surprised this hack is almost never mentioned in "your car is spying on you" articles. Removing the cellular modem is about as important when it comes to privacy as degoogling or disconnecting your "smart" TV from the Internet.
To be fair, many of the newer cars make it more difficult/permanent because they barely built in and not connected via a bridge/wire.
what if it's saving all that data offline and it gets uploaded during maintenance when they connect diagnostics or something?
I was going to ask about this. Is there any documentation official or otherwise about how to take ones car offline?
It will be model and year specific. Mine happened to have a second board connected by a bridge.
Yeah, I have a Ford F150 lightning. I just pulled fuse 8. I periodically connect it so I can receive over the air updates. I hope it doesn’t store all of its data and then upload it all at once every time I put the fuse back in.
I can't imagine it's designed to not log unless it had a live network connection.
You should use ForScan and disable the telemetry completely
That’s great, I didn’t know you could use software to do that and guarantee disconnection. Thank you!
You do understand that cars are designed to be in situations where they don't have network access for some time? parking underground and stuff?
Well my thinking is maybe the telemetry module (which has no power) might be doing the logging itself.
I’ve always wondered if someone could start a company that removes all this stuff. It seems like it would be in high demand.
So why all this? Because our governments havr programs that reveal a less ideal picture of mankind under economic stress. There is no progress, there is no "reprogramming " of human nature with education. Its a illusion, kept alive by a costly piece of planet beeing eaten.
But i you regress under stress, technology becomes a trap. The very thing allowing us to stay sane and civilized, winds up with destructive potential like a bomb. So, the panopticon is a lesser evil, compared to everyone rushing for the replicators to get a bomb to throw at their fellow man.
Technological utopism is not a ideology, its a diagnosis.
So a panopticon is a good thing, but the center does not hold, government and companies abuse powers. A resistace culture is needed that replaces centralized panopticons with public open source panopticons and feeds power thirsty actors wrowrong information.
Has anyone proposed a solution that balances privacy and consumers’ desires for connectivity features?
EDIT: Sorry, I meant a legal requirement.
The real solution is to nuke the onboard modem if you must have a new or modern car. This can almost always be done with minimal side effects, because cars are expected to work even in areas without cell service.
Single solutions/solutionistic approaches will likely be incompatible with either goal; consumer needs are always changing and collection capabilities expanding. Data scope and retention also need not be counter to consumer wants, and in the very least requires a mechanism that allows consumers to 'dial in' their preferences rather than wholesale accepting/rejecting terms of usage (i.e. a gradient instead of a binary).
I've yet to encounter a service that has implemented this successfully.
Rivian has given a cool solution, apparently because of consumer demand, or idk why they did.
Rivian lets you disable all data collection: (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47967786)
I don't think consumers care about their cars being connected. Personally, I would just rather use my phone for whatever connected features you would want in a car.
Setting the climate control remotely is handy, and it needs its own modem to do that.
I think that that would have been Apple’s positioning for their car project, but that seems to have been axed.
Maybe they’ll bring it back someday, I hope they do, but it’s almost guaranteed that governments will rain down regulation on them for entering too many markets at once—and yes, for building operating systems to which Apple refuses to build a backdoor to the encryption.
Apple expends tremendous technical resources on privacy. It truly is a shame they killed Titan. (As a consumer. As a shareholder thank god.)
Locally we do a lot of stripping back and rebuilding, we (W.Australians) aren't that fond of being tracked on desert jollies: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AYfI3Qo9dNc
I propose requiring explicit opt in for each piece of data collected, and explicit opt in for each piece shared to a third party. Failure to opt in for a particular piece should only result in the degradation of features that can be reasonably explained as requiring the data.
Sadly I can imagine car manufacturers using dark patterns to make the options really annoying, just like they do with cookies.
You’ll get some shit like one big “agree to all” button and 200 small opt-out buttons that reset weekly.
Apple Maps gives you good mapping without tracking you, but I'm not sure how much of that is a technical solution like e2ee(your FindMy data is e2ee) or just you placing trust in Apple to not break their privacy policy.
I have a Kia that's networked (since disabled). I did a GDPR data request and after a couple of weeks they sent me numerous CSV files and I was a little amused at some of the data fields.
Here's some examples I thought aren't for my benefit.
- How long I let the car warmup before driving after every start, - max speed, - acceleration rates, - Lateral acceleration around corners tagged with GPS data, - every GPS datapoint, - destinations and exactly when I set off and arrived
> How long I let the car warmup before driving after every start
Tangentially related: I wish I could pull data on a used car to check whether the previous owner waited to floor the car until the car is on temperature.
Yeah agreed, the data itself I don't have an issue with at all and this kind of info is stored on the vehicle. 1) We should have easy access to it. 2) Why is it instantly uploaded to some cloud, what I haven't done is tried to review how the data is used.
read this as Cats are trying to spy on you and got confused when I saw that woman's face. It made think if tiny cameras embedded in cat's collars.
When will we ge able to trust our data and where it goes? Even if you opt out, are they really opting you out? You can't verify, impossible.
For those wondering, you can still buy all the major components for a simple pre-computerised car from the aftermarket, and classic cars are definitely going to continue rising in value.
Classic cars are raising in value. Be very careful saying they are worth it. For the average driver, particularly if they're not doing their own maintenance, it eventually comes to the point where keeping that cost of car on the road is going to cost more than just buying a new one. So long as it's only basic maintenance and maybe a simple engine will be built, it's not a big deal. However, as the body starts rusting out and other things start failing, it quickly becomes a much more expensive repair than you realize.
Electric car fans keep talking about how you don't have engine and transmission maintenance, which is true. However, those are also self-contained parts that have a lot of spare parts available and plenty of expertise in maintaining and so you can actually rebuild them as needed and it's not too expensive. There's also a lot of automation in rebuilding those parts. However, if it starts seeing all the body parts failing and the frame rusting out, which will happen eventually, it's much more expensive because there's a lot more labor and parts are often less available.
Don't get me wrong. Most people give up on their cars long before they reach the point that new is cheaper.
until they are outlawed. we are nowhere near done thinking of the children.
They won't be. The newer classics still have a lot of poor people driving them and so they don't date. The older ones so few exists (and most are only used in parades or Sunday drives) and so it isn't worth the bother - it wouldn't make a difference and would make the few people who have them mad.
Unless we see a great push in good public transit such that most people choose not to drive. However that won't happen: Republicans hate transit, and Democrats like transit for non-transportation reasons.
> There are no rules limiting what the car companies can do with that information.
More and more we are becoming subjects to be controlled and exploited by whoever has the means to do it, with the state as an accomplice and an interested party. Piece by piece, our agency is being taken away and we are too complacent and learnedly helpless to do anything about it.
What I actually want is a no-tech, half-price, electric car with a long range.
No-tech car is a contradiction in terms. Even horse carriages are "tech".
I would pay for a car lobotomy service.
Given how insane people are driving today, I sort of want a car to snitch on bad drivers.
So you're telling me Mad Max is actually utopian?
I was just thinking about this, how they have so many road driving data? there has to be some companies who are collecting and selling this data.
I hate how all of networked computing is just a trillion-dollar mechanism to make me watch advertisements for shit I don't want.
I notice a different, amazing angle that doesn't really stand out in current comments.
This is a BBC article. UK public broadcasting, paid with taxpayer money and aggressively collected - one of the first things I got when moving to a new home in the UK was letters from tv licensing.
Yet it's all "In the United States". "Federal Law and state law". The US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration that, this Maryland researcher for Mozilla there. There are two references to the UK and Europe (lumped together) that vaguely say, "It's a little better for certain classes of data" and "you can request your data". Which effectively means, "GDPR exists and the UK has its version".
I get the following banner:
> This website is produced by BBC Global News Ltd, a commercial company that is part of BBC Studios, owned by the BBC (and just the BBC). No money from the licence fee was used to create this website.
Thank you. I was missing that info because I do not get that banner, currently surfing that site from the EU without any login.
Visiting the same URL on the .co.uk version gives me a multi-article scroller with different layout and links (including a "What is BBC Future?"), but no trace of that banner. Guessing that you're in the UK from your comment history, my best guess is that they decide whether to serve that banner via geofencing.
Basically why my car is so old it doesn't even have a CAN bus.
Roslin: I heard you're one of those people. You're actually afraid of computers.
Adama: No, there are many computers on this ship. But they're not networked.
Roslin: A computerized network would simply make it faster and easier for the teachers to be able to teach-
Adama: Let me explain something to you. Many good men and women lost their lives aboard this ship because someone wanted a faster computer to make life easier. I'm sorry that I'm inconveniencing you or the teachers, but I will not allow a networked computerized system to be placed on this ship while I'm in command. Is that clear?
Roslin: Yes, sir.
Adama: Thank you. 'Scuse me.
The man (character) was a rightful, respected, hard-ass. But made good points with evidence to explain the _why_; a true leader.
Battlestar Galactica. Just finished watching the remake. Spoiler for a 25yr old series: they network them anyway.
They had to calculate jump fast to join the fleet and the only way was to break the taboo - connecting the computers.
Cylons seized the opportunity and despite of the software firewall they managed to periodically disturb this network. In the end all computers were disconnected. IIRC Gaeta later had to wipe drives and install operating systems again, from these fancy octagonal "cds".
Found the clip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6CkDyc1TLrQ
But they used Floppy disks and data chip thingies for transferring data. If the Cylons were any good they’d have eventually created a self perpetuating virus. Even humans have pulled that off (Stuxnet and Iranian nuclear centrifuges)
And everybody circulating virus for PCs and other systems in the 80s and 90s.
I wonder if there was a floppy disk virus for CP/M in the 70s.
The typically cited first microcomputer virus in the wild was for the Apple II in 1982.
Same. Want to update the firmware in the computer? Sure but you'll need to unscrew the driver's seat, unscrew the desktop PC sized ECU, unscrew its four pencil-thick battery connections, unplug its 27 connectors, unscrew the 50 screws in three slightly different sizes holding the top cover on, remove the heatsinks, unscrew the eight screws holding the motherboard in, and desolder both the 144-pin 68HCxxx chips that do all the thinking.
Refitting is the reverse of removal.
Yes, I have actually already done this.
Surely there's a parallel EPROM somewhere in there you can bake with a UV light and program.
I never understood this. They're networked? So what? Don't connect it to other ships, or the Baltarnet or whatever they call it. Is the idea that if a Cylon gets on the ship, they can access the CIC from the thermostat in the bathroom? Did I miss something? Did I watch it wrong?
> Is the idea that if a Cylon gets on the ship, they can access the CIC from the thermostat in the bathroom?
Yeah, it was intended to limit lateral movement from compromised systems.
There is an "offline" or "incognito" mode available for most cars, but that means losing features like live traffic.
Plenty of cheap, safe, reliable, and easy to repair vehicles on Facebook marketplace and craigslist without this bullshit.
Personal inventory:
Suzuki DL-650 V-Strom 650 $3500 1999 SW1 $1500 1998 SL2 $1500 1998 SL2 $1500 2005 Sienna $1000 (!). This one does have a crash "black box" but no phone home bullshit.
I'd take any of them across the country tomorrow.
Saturn is such a good underdog car brand. Take care of them there aren't too many on the road anymore.
I want to someday get my family car from my childhood if I can find one. 1994 Pontiac Grand Prix
trying? its like saying israel is trying to bomb iran. cars ARE spying on you.
I know, especially, unemployed cats.
> Some of it may even raise your insurance costs.
> [...]
> The information they harvest can include [...] whether you buckle your seatbelt, drive too fast or brake too hard.
In a way this is good -- I want bad drivers to be incentivized to change their behavior.
Just need to legislate away all the other, actually creepy stuff. Just.
Trying?
Yeah. Trying.
Now that we've got trillion-dollar computing machines that, at best, output indeterminate results, we've entered the realm where it is clear that even the very best computers are only capable of trying to do things. Sometimes they succeed, and sometimes they fail -- but they still try anyway.
Therefore, in journalist logic: It's reasonable to expect that lesser computers have been this way all along.
Mine isn't doing too great of a job. It has a sketchy face cam that detects who the driver is and greets you and changes some settings. But half of the time it can't identify me.
It was totally predictable, unfortunately.
At least in the EU it’s quite illegal and even if a car maker slips something in, GDPR is always there so one can request a copy and have it deleted. Wish the regulation was even stricter though.
At the same time, EU mandates that new cars must have a system able to call help if it detects a crash with the driver not responding... And I suspect most manufacturers will argue that telemetry data are not PIIs until taken to court, so since they have to put a cellular connection anyway, why not use it?
When Cariad had a data leak, they were really quick to point out that no payment information had been leaked. That really shows how little they understand about PII. Screw the payment information, I'll just cancelled that card and get any abused funds refunded by my bank, that's not neither my problem nor my concern.
For some strange reason most companies do not understand the inherent danger of having e.g. location data and behavioural patterns leaked. That's much much worse than you stupid debit card number.
There is:
a) Zero trust in the car manufacturers to really respect GDPR
b) Zero repercussions for actually stealing my PII. Okay, maybe VW will pay a minuscule fine, but they won't
The GDPR is a joke. It does not prevent the real problem (data collection). Tech companies can in principle be fined for misusing your data, but most companies won't get caught or will simply pay the fine.
GDPR is useful because it defines what must be protected (or avoided). It’s straightforward to do the right thing as a company.
To make it stricter or pack a bigger punch, there needs to be stronger mandate for such legislation. And we live in interesting times… wars, previously democratic allies disintegrating, useless right wing or russia-aligned governments and MEPs, etc…
So yeah, could be better but all you and I can do is talk to our MEPs, help inform people outside tech, vote this way and hope enough people share the concerns
How does this work with Europeans who are not based in GDPR regions? As far as I know, they still count, are these systems collecting data about them illegally?
One thing I learned when I was homeless and 'stealth' camping is that if a place isn't accessible by car, and you haven't parked a car somewhere that would indicate to someone that a person had left a car and went somewhere, you are basically completely off the map and ~no one will discover you exist. Came in quite handy when finding locations to sleep without being bothered.
What would this mean? Like would you be driving to a library and leaving a car there, then hiking into the woods nearby to camp?
As someone who may occasionally need to stealth camp on road trips I’m curious what you learned, or if it would even be useful
read this as "Cats are trying to spy on you" lol
Yet another reason to keep my 2012 Ford Focus...
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It's a bummer that the rest of us have no choice but to live in the world created by the tyranny of the docile.
At least you get that benefit. Most cars spy on you and can’t drive themselves!
The ones that can drive themselves spy on you extra good.
Tesla workers shared sensitive images recorded by customer cars
(https://www.reuters.com/technology/tesla-workers-shared-sens...)
I do wonder about the tradeoff between convenience and the various negative externalities.
Example: trains are better for the environment than planes. I need to get from Copenhagen to London for a wedding next month. The train schedule is roughly 20 hours long, starts at 6am, several transfers, and something in the range of 250USD. On Skyscanner there's flights from Copenhagen to London essentially every 20 minutes, it takes an hour, and it costs 50USD. No wonder the ferry to London ended! No wonder everyone chooses the flight!
If you walk around Taiwan you'll see all sorts of failures of governance. 60 year old crumbling buildings with double stacked illegal builds on top, each floor worth 1 mil USD because there's just no supply here. Pedestrian hell because it takes coordination with 6 different agencies to get a green line fake sidewalk put on the road, let alone an actual infrastructure change. Rapidly escalating in-your-face wealth concentration as most new buildings are luxury condos that are immediately purchased, held, and kept empty by the ultra wealthy while their failsons cruise around Taipei in Lamborghinis, flagrantly violating traffic laws.
PRC propaganda against us is escalating and as soon as they learn to stop calling us separatists (and drop the Han Chauvinism angle that just centers Taiwanese identity around the island itself) and instead focus on how shit in the PRC Just Gets Done mostly to the benefit of the working class, you just gotta trade the right to protest and the right to privacy, I think that'll be the end of Taiwan sovereignty. I mean, wouldn't most people take that trade? A small increase in quality of life, an escalation in security and certainty, and all it means is you have to be a little more careful about what you say online?
I think about this a lot. I think this is the root of a lot of the problems that grew in our world - the absolutely understandable tendency in people to just want to get on in their lives, and how this makes them vulnerable to exploitation by people who are very willing to put in a bit of extra effort exploiting them.
Do you also think about your use of AI in posts? It's such a tradeoff. On the one hand - no one wants to read, on the other no one wants you to submit AI content.
What evidence do you have to support your accusation? Emdash usage? You have an emdash in your post, do you use LLMs?
Go look at my blog. Any LLM use there? I care about writing, I use LLMs to write code but never let it touch my prose, hence why I'm on a no ai webring.
I'm very annoyed by your drive-by accusation.
not the accuser but I have seen even AI to drop its usage of the emdash... thankfully! (Whats wrong with brackets?)
Very interesting perspective, thanks for sharing. No I am not a bot, I'm for reals.
My two cents with the EU tinted glasses. I completely agree with failures of governance that you mention. Especially the plane/train cost comparisons are infuriating. My personal view is though that the slippery slope of "security" -> "control" -> exploitation. I heard the phrase "absolute power corrupts absolutely" in history class and time and time again, authoritarian systems have exploited the masses more effectively. All it takes is one bad ruler to turn thing around and syphon more than is "acceptable". Not that the western world is looking that great right now in terms of class divide, but the laundry at least is open for everyone to see. Freedom > Security for me.
From someone who is working on this field, I do agree that we are collecting huge and unimaginable amount of personal customer data - and continuously transmit them to cloud via TCU which has persistent internet connection. But there is still some time for the (western/traditional) OEMs to catch up. They have so much data but have no idea what to do with it. Most of the times, it just stays there doing nothing and OEMs have no idea about it.
On the other hand, Chinese OEMs are very saavy in this area. They know what to do with your data (Mobile phones background helps a lot here) and they're doing everything they can to get an edge over all other OEMs. This is why the industry has been going towards "who has the best tech and apps" instead of "who gives safest chassis and better engines/gearboxes"
Machines don't spy. People and governments do. Alarmist articles like this make good click baity head lines. But from a technical point of view there isn't a whole lot of new information here.
Most people use smart phones. Those are generally GPS equipped and can also be triangulated between cell towers down to a few hundred meters. When using a WIFI, that gets a lot better. And they have a few other active radios as well (uwb, bluetooth, nfc, etc.).
And they have active microphones that respond to phrases like "Siri!", "Hey Google!", etc. And they probably have exploitable back doors that shady government agencies might be exploiting. At least popular spy fiction from a quarter century ago suggests that governments might be doing such things. You'd have to assume they are at this point and that there's some level of truth to these Hollywood spy fantasies.
Your car might be reporting its location and listening in on conversations as well but it's not adding a whole lot of new information. Most new cars actually come with induction phone chargers. Drivers put their phone right next to them to charge. Very convenient. And it connects to the car even! Shock horror. Most of the tracking and spying tech in the car is a bit redundant if you consider that. Nice to get a bit clearer audio from some extra microphones and slightly better precision of the user's location.
But the good news is that most car drivers don't car pool and sit in the traffic jam alone mostly not having meetings. They might be taking calls (on their phone). But otherwise, there isn't a lot to spy on that wasn't already well covered for those interested in doing the spying.
If you are worried about being spied on, have your meetings in a Faraday cage or in nature far away from any devices. And don't take your smart phones anywhere near those meetings. Also consider wearing a tin foil hat. And maybe don't hold your secret meetings in cars. You'll be fine. Otherwise, the bad news is that you are probably in reach of a vast network of cameras, active microphones, etc. regardless of what you do with your personal devices (including your car). You have been for the past few decades.
You are basically saying, "I'm spied on at school, therefore I'm paranoid if I don't want to be spied on at home in my bedroom."
Every bit of surveillance should be prevented, but we shouldn't throw it all away if we can't be perfect.
No, you are putting words in my mouth. I'm saying that you can be upset or paranoid about cars doing whatever. But you are ignoring the reality that this is already happening on your phone right now and it doesn't really materially change anything in the level of spying that was already possible.
Surveillance technology is very real and has been for decades. This article naively portrays this as some scandalous escalation when in reality it's a very incremental thing that delivers very new relevant capability to those doing the actual spying. A car is just a phone with wheels. You have probably have one in your pocket.
> Every bit of surveillance should be prevented
Good luck with that. I don't see a grand strategy to make that happen here. Just click bait headlines and people reacting to those.