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.
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.
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.
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.
They bring nothing. My wife doesn’t care even after I explained what it’s doing. I was going to cut the modem antenna to stop the communication but she’s dead set I’ll wreck the car doing that.