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.
> 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
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.
> 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.
> 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 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.
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.
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.
Everyone saying everything other than "Consumers are going to need to be willing to spend more money for things, and people with less money are going to be hit the hardest as they benefit the most from the data economy."
Data has value is flatly true statement. So at best we can have system where you can keep your data and pay more, or sell your data and pay less. The rub here though is that the people who have the means to keep their data, also have the most valuable data, and in our current system subsidize the cost of people with less valuable data, who happen to be the people who would want the most to sell their data.
All of that is to say, the solution is not cut and dry.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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”.
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.
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.
e-bikes are more climate friendly than human-powered bikes.
5 grams CO2 equivalent emissions per mile e-bike, 40 grams per mile for human eating exclusively bananas. Much, much worse for other dietary choices. Embodied carbon emissions in the bike itself are essentially equivalent.
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.
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.
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.
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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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?
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)
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.
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?
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".
> 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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
I think there are THREE sets of data collection:
- data your car collects about you
- roadside data collection by flock/etc
- data collection by other vehicles. other vehicles act like roving flock cameras. I think fedex vehicles collect data for example.
I also wonder about data your car collects that is not about you. Might not show up in the privacy policy.
> 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.
Unfortunately the legislation that exists requires surveillance tech be installed on new vehicles.
https://www.gadgetreview.com/federal-surveillance-tech-becom...
> 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
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...
> 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?
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.
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.
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...
GM didn't sell anywhere close to half of those cars in California
Sources?
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.
Everyone saying everything other than "Consumers are going to need to be willing to spend more money for things, and people with less money are going to be hit the hardest as they benefit the most from the data economy."
Data has value is flatly true statement. So at best we can have system where you can keep your data and pay more, or sell your data and pay less. The rub here though is that the people who have the means to keep their data, also have the most valuable data, and in our current system subsidize the cost of people with less valuable data, who happen to be the people who would want the most to sell their data.
All of that is to say, the solution is not cut and dry.
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.
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.
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”.
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.
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.
Just here to remind you all about bicycles.
Fun fact:
e-bikes are more climate friendly than human-powered bikes.
5 grams CO2 equivalent emissions per mile e-bike, 40 grams per mile for human eating exclusively bananas. Much, much worse for other dietary choices. Embodied carbon emissions in the bike itself are essentially equivalent.
The Carbon Footprint of Everything (2022)
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.
Motorcycles broadcast an equal amount of data as bicycles.
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.
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?
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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’ve always wondered if someone could start a company that removes all this stuff. It seems like it would be in high demand.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
It's probably a violation of DMCA section 1201 at this point.
Given how insane people are driving today, I sort of want a car to snitch on bad drivers.
We need viable, safe, comfortable alternatives to driving everywhere.
And a milquetoasted editorialized title again. Who does that?
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.
So you're telling me Mad Max is actually utopian?
The future ain't what it used to be.
I hate how all of networked computing is just a trillion-dollar mechanism to make me watch advertisements for shit I don't want.
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.
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)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uozmyRPVRHk
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.
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?
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.
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?
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.
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
Also leave your phone behind.
read this as "Cats are trying to spy on you" lol
Yet another reason to keep my 2012 Ford Focus...
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.