An investigation by consumer advocacy group Choice found most of Australia’s popular car brands collect and share “driver data”, ranging from braking patterns to video footage.
Kia and Hyundai collect voice recognition data from inside their cars and sell it to an artificial intelligence software training company.
Privacy and consumer rights advocates are pushing for law reform to limit data collection to what is “fair and reasonable”.
I’m driving around in a 10+ year old car. It doesn’t have any of these ‘back to base’ features. I’m really at a loss as to what these features bring you as a customer? Why would I want to buy a car that is connected to the Internet?
I’ve never had this feature, so I honestly don’t know what I’m missing.
I start my car before I leave the office so it’s nice and cool when I get to it. Or in winter, warm. EV charged via solar do don’t be scared about emissions.
Also it has GPS so you can see where your car is and what is doing - handy if it ever gets stolen I tell you what.
The smartest thing in any of my vehicles is an aftermarket Android Auto unit so I can’t speak from personal experience, but there are various things such cars can do where the connectivity could be useful. Three I can think of are notifications/video of things happening around the vehicle at the time of occurrence (a la Tesla Sentry mode), being able to remotely start the vehicle to give the air con a head start on a hot day, and over the air updates for bug fixes or possible new software features without having to go near a mechanic.
Part of the problem here is that the things that can invade privacy do have genuine use cases, it’s just that you can coopt them to also gain information. For example even the seemingly hard to justify internal cameras could have a genuine safety use by watching the driver for fatigue symptoms. If effective this would save lives over a car model lifespan, so you’re balancing obvious privacy issues against the idea that such inconvenience is worthwhile if it saves a life (a sentiment more typically seen in speed limit debates, but applicable here too).
Yeah, I have an aftermarket stereo that does Android/Apple as well. That’s been smart enough for me.
things happening around the vehicle at the time of occurrence (a la Tesla Sentry mode)
This sounds useful, but I imagine it’d be 90% “someone walked past your car” - more annoying than anything. An aftermarket dashcam would record all that as well, and give you the same info when you returned to the vehicle. Which sounds more useful to me.
I don’t believe I’d ever want the other two, personally. Maybe I’m old fashioned, but ‘Let’s make your car so complicated that we need to send it software updates’ is not a selling point to me.
This just a milquetoast rehashing of https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/privacynotincluded/categories/cars/
Still, improving consumer awareness may force some of the bastards to realise that privacy is a marketable feature.
I wish they would list how to physically stop the recordings etc. Eg, microphones are located here and here, cameras are there and there. Tape them up, and they can’t record anything.
And I’ve got lots of tin foil for the GPS trackers and other doo-dads 😁
TBH, I’m more concerned about what Android Auto is sending back …
For anyone using that, I’ve been trying out Magic Earth as an alternative to Google Maps, and it’s done a pretty good job so far in Sydney…
I use Magic Earth as well. Closed source, but a better privacy policy than Google and it is easier to use than OsmAnd.
What’s the concern RE: Android Auto? I really love the feature where it re-routes you mid-drive because it detects heavy traffic up ahead. I can’t exactly complain that Google knows how fast I’m (not) going if I want the benefits of that intel for myself. That’s the Steve Jobs argument (‘Give us traffic data, but don’t collect location data from iPhone users’).
It’s probably not so much Android Auto, more just Android/Google.
The talk about recording video and audio, well a phone does that too. And isn’t “Hey Google” always listening?
… and Tesla ‘most concerning’
Why am I not surprised.
Tesla collects short images and videos from cameras inside and outside their cars. Tesla workers have been caught sharing among themselves highly invasive camera recordings of Tesla customers in the nude, as well as images of crashes and road-rage incidents.
The videos and images Tesla collects may be shared with third parties, Mr Blakkarly said.
Wow, worse than I thought. I figured it’d be external video for the purposes of self-driving AI training - which is bad enough for privacy - but why the fuck do they have internal cameras?
Elon must see you everywhere.
