Pro-surveillance people were not born one fine day. They were conditioned for a decade making them believe sharing everything about their life is normal.
Spot on. I've continued to be astonished at how publicly many people choose to live, especially considering all the inevitable negative results which have been well documented for decades and continue to increase.
Some are conditioned, but I think there will always be a subset of people that just feel like they are the “right people” that everyone else should emulate. The system feels like it’s there to protect them, strong authority makes them feel safe, and they have a strong instinct to conform.
They’ve never been on the wrong end of a political witch hunt, colonized, or felt like they were being attacked for wrongthink, so they don’t understand why everyone else can’t just be “good, law-abiding citizens” like them. Seems utterly alien to me, but I’ve known more than a few.
I've never met anyone who's 'pro surveillance'. I've met ad tech executives and Googlers, though. Have you spoken to them about the world that's been built?
I've met "pro surveillance" people before. There's a surprising number of "normies" in favour of it.
I remember being shocked, about 10 years ago, when I mentioned social network spying and my sister in law remarked she thought there should be more of it to keep people inline.
I've also met people who think all internet access should be through government sanctioned id and monitoring, which I also find shocking.
I haven't been able to pin this down to a single political view point, these people come from across the spectrum.
I'm not a big fan of the "silence is violence" view. Are we really going to blame looming surveillance dystopia on people who are working 60 hour weeks to heal the sick, address world hunger, or care for young children because they didn't become privacy activists?
Every time I mention working on privacy laws like GDPR on USA level I get heavily downvoted and attacked - so not only you've met people who are "pro surveillance", a lot of HNers that say otherwise will aggressively fight against legal frameworks that punish engineers and business leads that collect unnecessary data.
As soon as you'll put out a concrete proposal, you'll get massacred for being "anti business".
> One thing i don’t understand is how pro-surveillance advocates don’t understand that the moment they are not behind the terminal, they are the target.
I think it's three things; (a) They're just being paid not to care, (b) short-termism, and (c) are naively hoping they get to stay in the club on the other end of the surveillance. Hard to convince nearly anyone to give up short term profit for long term societal benefits.
Cynically I worry we are seeing the decline of democracy and our new overlords are seeing that too (many accelerating it). Surveillance is necessary for control. The AI, mass surveillance, and drone combination is getting pretty scary TBH.
uniformed services and some kinds of professionals already have agreed to terms on conduct and records. The people who agree to that say "of course" when it comes time to subscribe Everyone Else to the same constraints. That is my own thinking, it might cover some proportion of the cases there...
This is part of the reason why I don't want a new car: I don't want to be involved in this directly. A guy from work got a brand new Hyundai(I think), and the first thing that popped on the navigation was "Create an account with Hyundai now". Nah. Nah. Forget it. I have 3 issues:
1. I should not have to authenticate or have connectivity to a manufacturer unless I want to once I've paid for a physical good(cars being physical goods).
2. I don't want my personal data to be sold off to anyone - I've been in the tech industry for long enough to know that "I don't want my data to be shared with third parties" is worth as much as the power used to light up the pixels on the screen.
3. I don't trust anyone to have done everything carefully and by the books to prevent any potential leaks.
The unfortunate reality is we can expect more and more of our goods to spy on us over time, as there are both political and economic motivations to track and collect as much data as possible on everyone.
The best thing you can do is avoid products with trackers while they haven't taken over their entire market, learn to disable GPS, wireless, and cellular antennae once they do, and pray manufacturers take a while to insert dead-man switches as well.
Wouldn't disabling antennae on your car void the insurance? I would have assumed that was a basic thing insurance policies would have stipulated already over a decade ago.
> we can expect more and more of our goods to spy on us
strong disagree, this is complicit and defeatist nonsense given +100 years of active and successful consumer rights protection in lawful markets in the West.
Unfortunately it appears that the consumer protection advocates and more importantly the legislators and regulators are already decades behind the curve on these kinds of privacy intrusions and the other risks associated with incorporating more and more tech in everyday devices. I don't know how much of this is because of ignorance, how much is lack of resources, and how much is willing complicity or good old corruption, but the end result for the users of these devices is the same in each case.
If this tech was being used for traffic enforcement then I'm all for it. Unfortunately it seems like people will still be able to browse their phone behind the wheel and run over kids on bikes despite the surveillance
My car still uses 3G, so not much listening to it anymore.. although oddly enough, when I drive into the dealership, they automatically download vehicle statuses.
I was pleased to that you can use the navigation with a data collection opt-out.
I was less pleased to see that they sneaked a "safety and maintenance" clause into the terms. The information they gather for that gets shared with insurance companies, social networks and data brokers.
There's no hiding in modern car it seems. I was hoping for better from a French company operating under GDPR but no.
You can't win, with all the car companies pulling this crap it's like fighting a surveillance cartel.
The only thing to do is keep my old car for as long as possible.
Why rely on your car's built-in software for navigation? Smartphone navigation is going to be a lot better (in my experience) and Google, Apple privacy terms are greatly superior.
Huh? My 2019 vehicles have GPS that works completely without data uplink. Trouble is map updates (distributed on SD cards) are being discontinued in favor of cellular subscription services that don’t work in the desert.
I don't know if the above post had an edit, but it says "distributed on SD cards" now. My cheap ~5yo car is the same, I can only update the maps via USB. The navigation still works, but is a lot worse/more out of date than any smartphone app where I live. Although even google maps barely works around here.
Until last year I had a 2014 car that was like his. Not having map updates is fine. The tech companies have conditioned us to believe that if we don't have streaming maps with details updated every three minutes, we'll all get lost and die.
99.99999904% of roads don't change that much.
People used to navigate with decade-old paper maps stuffed in their glove boxes and nobody died because of it.
The few times when I found myself driving on I-11, which my car didn't know about, it was a novelty, not a crisis. I didn't drive off the road because the screen told me the road didn't exist. I used common sense and followed the signs.
I'd like to have a radio kill switch be required on all devices. The reason is that eventually, things that emit RF energy could be targeted by drones. That scares me.
I obtained my data via GDPR request from Audi. Despite having disabled telemetry and location services, remote access and so on on certain date, the car kept sending every destination address I wrote on the navigator to the motherbase. Other location tracking services did stop (i.e. no live positioning).
I'm still clarifying the purpose of this before making a complaint to the data authority.
I’ve been constantly telling everyone I know about this since the patriot act was signed and basically 100% of people don’t care in my experience
They just want to be able to connect their phone and have their music/video available and think that because they are “not doing anything wrong” they don’t “have anything to fear”
I’m glad this site exists so I can just send it to people directly
Well, just the fact that you don't pay for the monthly cellular subscription these cars use should tell you all you need to know about who's the product in this situation.
I recently sold my Lincoln Navigator and bought a used 2005 Honda Odyssey (single owner before me, 115K miles and well taken care of). Good luck trying to spy on me. It doesnt even have bluetooth let alone all the other smarttech crap. Good old CD player and Radio.
It was a tongue in cheek comment. No one can win the surveillance battle with today's tech. I have given up on that a while ago but I do try to protect whatever I can.
>No one can win the surveillance battle with today's tech.
It's remarkable to me how many brilliant people here refuse to acknowledge this, believing that a zillion hacks and work-arounds can keep them off the surveillance grid. That ship sailed a long, long time ago.
Cash is great for small purchases while out and about, and it feels good to not leave a digital purchase paper trail. Use cash before it gets outlawed!
The world IS getting mass surveillance. The havens for privacy are shrinking. We are becoming the ants in the ant farm.
One thing i don’t understand is how pro-surveillance advocates don’t understand that the moment they are not behind the terminal, they are the target.
"I have nothing to hide"
Pro-surveillance people were not born one fine day. They were conditioned for a decade making them believe sharing everything about their life is normal.
"What's on your mind?"
Spot on. I've continued to be astonished at how publicly many people choose to live, especially considering all the inevitable negative results which have been well documented for decades and continue to increase.
Except for those in power, of course.
Some are conditioned, but I think there will always be a subset of people that just feel like they are the “right people” that everyone else should emulate. The system feels like it’s there to protect them, strong authority makes them feel safe, and they have a strong instinct to conform. They’ve never been on the wrong end of a political witch hunt, colonized, or felt like they were being attacked for wrongthink, so they don’t understand why everyone else can’t just be “good, law-abiding citizens” like them. Seems utterly alien to me, but I’ve known more than a few.
I've never met anyone who's 'pro surveillance'. I've met ad tech executives and Googlers, though. Have you spoken to them about the world that's been built?
To me it feels like there's a flood of pro surveillance stories wherever I look.
https://www.nbcchicago.com/news/local/police-say-license-pla...
https://www.alxnow.com/2026/10/02/license-plate-reader-helpe...
https://www.bakersfield.com/news/bpd-credits-automated-licen...
https://www.kcrg.com/2026/09/17/how-license-plate-readers-he...
https://turnto10.com/news/local/license-plate-cameras-help-s...
https://www.krqe.com/news/albuquerque-metro/albuquerque-poli...
I've met "pro surveillance" people before. There's a surprising number of "normies" in favour of it.
I remember being shocked, about 10 years ago, when I mentioned social network spying and my sister in law remarked she thought there should be more of it to keep people inline.
I've also met people who think all internet access should be through government sanctioned id and monitoring, which I also find shocking.
I haven't been able to pin this down to a single political view point, these people come from across the spectrum.
protect-the-children and catch-the-criminal is a lot more tangible to most people than the concept of privacy in public or digital spaces
they may not be asking for it.. but once you make it a yes/no question and the public has to decide, they will support it blindly
I've met at least 1 pro flock camera person. On the grounds that they helps police fight crime.
Oh, I sure have. It’s not all ignorance, unfortunately.
everyone who posses knowledge of the level of surveillance they are subjected to and does nothing about it is implicitly pro surveillance
I'm not a big fan of the "silence is violence" view. Are we really going to blame looming surveillance dystopia on people who are working 60 hour weeks to heal the sick, address world hunger, or care for young children because they didn't become privacy activists?
Every time I mention working on privacy laws like GDPR on USA level I get heavily downvoted and attacked - so not only you've met people who are "pro surveillance", a lot of HNers that say otherwise will aggressively fight against legal frameworks that punish engineers and business leads that collect unnecessary data.
As soon as you'll put out a concrete proposal, you'll get massacred for being "anti business".
Any opinion online about anything that involves large corporations is almost entirely astroturfing.
> One thing i don’t understand is how pro-surveillance advocates don’t understand that the moment they are not behind the terminal, they are the target.
I think it's three things; (a) They're just being paid not to care, (b) short-termism, and (c) are naively hoping they get to stay in the club on the other end of the surveillance. Hard to convince nearly anyone to give up short term profit for long term societal benefits.
Cynically I worry we are seeing the decline of democracy and our new overlords are seeing that too (many accelerating it). Surveillance is necessary for control. The AI, mass surveillance, and drone combination is getting pretty scary TBH.
uniformed services and some kinds of professionals already have agreed to terms on conduct and records. The people who agree to that say "of course" when it comes time to subscribe Everyone Else to the same constraints. That is my own thinking, it might cover some proportion of the cases there...
This is part of the reason why I don't want a new car: I don't want to be involved in this directly. A guy from work got a brand new Hyundai(I think), and the first thing that popped on the navigation was "Create an account with Hyundai now". Nah. Nah. Forget it. I have 3 issues:
1. I should not have to authenticate or have connectivity to a manufacturer unless I want to once I've paid for a physical good(cars being physical goods).
2. I don't want my personal data to be sold off to anyone - I've been in the tech industry for long enough to know that "I don't want my data to be shared with third parties" is worth as much as the power used to light up the pixels on the screen.
3. I don't trust anyone to have done everything carefully and by the books to prevent any potential leaks.
Is there a market for taking newer models and stripping them of their connectivity?
The unfortunate reality is we can expect more and more of our goods to spy on us over time, as there are both political and economic motivations to track and collect as much data as possible on everyone.
The best thing you can do is avoid products with trackers while they haven't taken over their entire market, learn to disable GPS, wireless, and cellular antennae once they do, and pray manufacturers take a while to insert dead-man switches as well.
Wouldn't disabling antennae on your car void the insurance? I would have assumed that was a basic thing insurance policies would have stipulated already over a decade ago.
Won’t your lack of data raise flags?
> we can expect more and more of our goods to spy on us
strong disagree, this is complicit and defeatist nonsense given +100 years of active and successful consumer rights protection in lawful markets in the West.
Unfortunately it appears that the consumer protection advocates and more importantly the legislators and regulators are already decades behind the curve on these kinds of privacy intrusions and the other risks associated with incorporating more and more tech in everyday devices. I don't know how much of this is because of ignorance, how much is lack of resources, and how much is willing complicity or good old corruption, but the end result for the users of these devices is the same in each case.
The Patriot Act was passed 25 years ago...
If this tech was being used for traffic enforcement then I'm all for it. Unfortunately it seems like people will still be able to browse their phone behind the wheel and run over kids on bikes despite the surveillance
Discussed 2 days ago at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49926628
It has been demonstrated repeatedly that modern cars can be remotely hijacked and controlled as well. We really do live in a dystopia.
That would be quite shocking. Links?
Old article: https://www.wired.com/2015/07/hackers-remotely-kill-jeep-hig...
Fast forward to today: getting access to the canbus (e.g. via headlights) allow you to steal the car: https://www.theregister.com/security/2023/04/06/how-thieves-...
Given the integration of these modules, is it that weird that you could send signals the other way?
>Cybersecurity experts hack and take remote control of SUV (2015)
https://youtu.be/DoP71LeQt3o?si=eSWRTaBYmzAOPWEz
My car still uses 3G, so not much listening to it anymore.. although oddly enough, when I drive into the dealership, they automatically download vehicle statuses.
On a BMW a lot of stuff is synced on the key, and the rest of the information can be pulled over ODB2.
I'm the same in my car but luckily for us they can grab the data over the OBD2 port when they do the servicing. :(
is anyone aware of a public db where you can check how much info a car shares with the manufacturer,insurance etc based on make, model, year?
There are no specific opt outs. Either you allow everything or navigation doesn’t work etc.
I was looking at Renault electric cars recently.
I was pleased to that you can use the navigation with a data collection opt-out. I was less pleased to see that they sneaked a "safety and maintenance" clause into the terms. The information they gather for that gets shared with insurance companies, social networks and data brokers.
There's no hiding in modern car it seems. I was hoping for better from a French company operating under GDPR but no.
You can't win, with all the car companies pulling this crap it's like fighting a surveillance cartel.
The only thing to do is keep my old car for as long as possible.
Why rely on your car's built-in software for navigation? Smartphone navigation is going to be a lot better (in my experience) and Google, Apple privacy terms are greatly superior.
Navigation is one example. There are music/front/rear cameras/controls/others. Not all controls have physical buttons.
Huh? My 2019 vehicles have GPS that works completely without data uplink. Trouble is map updates (distributed on SD cards) are being discontinued in favor of cellular subscription services that don’t work in the desert.
> works completely ... Trouble is map updates
Do you hear yourself?
I don't know if the above post had an edit, but it says "distributed on SD cards" now. My cheap ~5yo car is the same, I can only update the maps via USB. The navigation still works, but is a lot worse/more out of date than any smartphone app where I live. Although even google maps barely works around here.
Until last year I had a 2014 car that was like his. Not having map updates is fine. The tech companies have conditioned us to believe that if we don't have streaming maps with details updated every three minutes, we'll all get lost and die.
99.99999904% of roads don't change that much.
People used to navigate with decade-old paper maps stuffed in their glove boxes and nobody died because of it.
The few times when I found myself driving on I-11, which my car didn't know about, it was a novelty, not a crisis. I didn't drive off the road because the screen told me the road didn't exist. I used common sense and followed the signs.
I'd like to have a radio kill switch be required on all devices. The reason is that eventually, things that emit RF energy could be targeted by drones. That scares me.
You envisage a world where drones are flying around shooting at cars and you're more scared about being targeted yourself than such a world?
Nice work but I wonder whether the methodology is sufficient (and, yes, I skimmed through the paper's Section 3.2).
I obtained my data via GDPR request from Audi. Despite having disabled telemetry and location services, remote access and so on on certain date, the car kept sending every destination address I wrote on the navigator to the motherbase. Other location tracking services did stop (i.e. no live positioning).
I'm still clarifying the purpose of this before making a complaint to the data authority.
It's another revenue stream for the car company. Data brokers love car telemetry and GPS data and the car companies know it. Both parties have struck up a rather cosy relationship: https://www.forbes.com/sites/adamtanner/2013/07/10/data-brok...
My car UI clarifies that it has offline routing and online traffic-aware routing. The latter sends destinations to the mothership.
This is why I buy cars older than 2015.
My 1997 Range Rover has no screens and only 195,000 miles on the clock. I'm good for another decade or so.
Perhaps you should choose an earlier cutoff date:
>Cybersecurity experts hack and take remote control of SUV (2015)
https://youtu.be/DoP71LeQt3o?si=eSWRTaBYmzAOPWEz
I’ve been constantly telling everyone I know about this since the patriot act was signed and basically 100% of people don’t care in my experience
They just want to be able to connect their phone and have their music/video available and think that because they are “not doing anything wrong” they don’t “have anything to fear”
I’m glad this site exists so I can just send it to people directly
Currently enjoying, and keeping alive, my 2001 Dodge Grand Caravan...
Well, just the fact that you don't pay for the monthly cellular subscription these cars use should tell you all you need to know about who's the product in this situation.
Even if you pay, that doesn't change anything.
Implying that payment will stop the tracking is a red herring.
Well if you do have control over paying for it then you could conceivably stop and cancel it. I don't think they want to take that chance.
I recently sold my Lincoln Navigator and bought a used 2005 Honda Odyssey (single owner before me, 115K miles and well taken care of). Good luck trying to spy on me. It doesnt even have bluetooth let alone all the other smarttech crap. Good old CD player and Radio.
Good luck trying to spy on me.
Unless your Navigator doesn't have tires, they're still spying on you.
The only way to mitigate that is to not use credit cards in the same place you drive. Especially malls, strip malls, and drive-through restaurants.
It was a tongue in cheek comment. No one can win the surveillance battle with today's tech. I have given up on that a while ago but I do try to protect whatever I can.
>No one can win the surveillance battle with today's tech.
It's remarkable to me how many brilliant people here refuse to acknowledge this, believing that a zillion hacks and work-arounds can keep them off the surveillance grid. That ship sailed a long, long time ago.
Cash is great for small purchases while out and about, and it feels good to not leave a digital purchase paper trail. Use cash before it gets outlawed!