Volkswagen representatives demanded a $150 fee before using GPS to locate the vehicle and child.
A family is suing VW after the company refused to help them locate their carjacked vehicle with their toddler son inside unless the parents or police paid a $150 subscription fee.
Everything started if February of this year when Taylor Shepherd, after pulling into her driveway in her 2021 VW Atlas, was carjacked by two masked men. Worse yet, her two-year-old son was in the backseat when it happened. She tried stopping them but they literally ran over her with the Atlas; breaking her pelvis and putting her six month pregnancy at risk. “They ran over the entire left side of my body. There were tire tracks all over the left side of my stomach,” Shepherd told Fox32.
Shepherd called 911 thinking that she would be able to get GPS info through VW’s vehicle control and tracking Car-Net app. The app turned out to be useless though unless you paid, which is a wild thing to ask in an emergency like this. However that’s exactly what VW did when Lake County Sheriff’s contacted the company for the GPS Data.
read more: https://jalopnik.com/parents-of-baby-in-carjacked-vehicle-are-suing-vw-for-r-1851025357
Welcome to the 21st century!
Where the gps in your car isn’t yours and the car isn’t either
2000: I bought myself a car!
2023: I bought an limited licen$e to drive a car!I’m very over this subscription/licensing culture corpos are forcing us into.
I think there’s a gap in the market for a Microsoft office alternative you can just buy. And the next Windows is rumoured to be subscription based too.
2025 might finally be the year of linux
2025 might finally be the year of linux
The year of the Linux desktop is right now, if you want it to be. For me it was 2007 - and watching the evolution of Windows since then has been a continuous validation of my choice.
If you want to use Linux, use it! It’s ready, and IMO has been for some time.
(And just to be clear - choosing otherwise is OK too! I don’t intend my enthusiasm as zealotry. Folks making an educated decision to stay is totally valid.)
I just don’t have the time to learn something new at the moment, I’m working full time and studying ontop of that, not to mention I’m almost 30 and to old haha
But in all seriousness the next pc i build will probably be linux
Installing it on a virtual machine can be a good way to try it out to begin with. No need to restart whenever you’d like to use it, and you’ve still got access to everything you normally use.
I remember using VirtualBox years ago to do this.
Don’t overestimate the learning curve, your mainline distros like Ubuntu aren’t really much different anymore for most of your average consumer use cases.
There’s a good enough one that is free. I don’t see anything that the Microsoft office suite does any better than the free options.
Reminder: corporate claims of “licensed, not sold” are LIES. If you buy something, you own it regardless of what they say. Stop taking legal advice from the enemy!
A whole new meaning for “driving license”
The real problem here is the fact that the car has GPS and the owners can’t even control it. Welcome to the 21st century!
They dropped off the kid in a park further down and then left the truck a few miles after. Kid was OK.
I’m going to play devil’s advocate here: how is the guy on the phone supposed to know it really is the police on the other side and not just some guy trying to scam his way into a freebie?
You could say that companies should err on the side of caution, but then every potential customer could pull the same, and then how do you weed out the real ones from the fake ones?
You could argue the service should be free anyway, but then we’d be arguing a different point.
I’m going to play devil’s advocate here: how is the guy on the phone supposed to know it really is the police on the other side and not just some guy trying to scam his way into a freebie?
At the individual level this is actually pretty simple. I work in IT and when I used to do security training the way we’d validate is with a known contact.
In this situation you get the contacting officers name and department, disconnect the call, call the non-emergency listed number for that department and ask for that officer by name.
There’s a lot of other failure point potential in this scenario but validating the person calling is actually law enforcement shouldn’t be one of them.
That is good life advice.
I hammered into my elderly parents that if they ever get a call/text from their “bank”, “tax department”, “insurance”, or literally anything - ask for a case number and hang up. Then call the number listed on the official website.
Now they’re telling everyone they know about it. Good on them.
In a normal business that is not a mega corporation you would just do it. You can just activate it for a limited period if you really feel suspicious, after two or three tries you will quickly spot the people trying to abuse the system.
Even if people could abuse the system for free aubsceiptions, I don’t agree with the fact that preventing people from getting free subscription is a higher priority than helping a mother getting her 2 years old back.
Ask for name and department of calling officer. Disconnect call. Call department’s non-emergency number, ask to be connected to said officer.
Boom, verified. Standard operating procedure for any sane company that might get a request like this.
Meanwhile you’re on the hook personally for what they do with the car in those 3 days.
Do u guys not understand simple liability laws in the USA???
Like err… finding it via GPS?
It’s not like they don’t know who owns the car. They should be able to check afterwards if it was a real emergency, and if it was faked, send the bill and maybe report them for impersonating a police officer.
Lol wut? There’s no way a manufacturer knows who owns the car unless it was registered
I was thinking that if they can remotely unlock features based on a subscription I assume there’s an account involved at some point.
Won’t someone think of the billion-dollar megacorps‽ They may lose a few bucks saving kidnapped children on the off-chance some fakers pretend to be cops! GASP!
You’re acting as if this is some sort of widespread form of criminal activity and that it’s not already a crime to impersonate a cop or to commit wire fraud while committing a kidnapping. Because who gives a shit about any of that when a few bucks could be made?
how is the guy on the phone supposed to know it really is the police on the other side and not just some guy trying to scam his way into a freebie?
Cop only number or internal group to transfer to? Fax number to send a warrant with contact info so VW can call back and investigate if need be? Get the police department number, google to confirm they’re legit, and call back? Thats just off the top of my head.
If VW doesn’t have an option like that its poor design. If the guy didn’t know, poor training. One or both are gonna be resolved now that the spotlight is on them.
If only there was some system in place where police could verify their authority somehow.
Erring on the side of caution is to say no to the random that calls you asking for GPS coordinates
You don’t have to go that far. The rep could just be soft-blocked to enable the feature unless a card was processed first.
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As a programmer, I will very mildly defend VW here. Not at all defending the payment structure (that’s shit and has no excuse other than rent seeking), but the person who had to tell the police they needed to pay likely didn’t have an override button. Something like this just isn’t an edge case that you often think of in development, so not having the option of getting that data out for free is reasonable if this is the first incident.
Overriding or adjusting payment isn’t an edge case. The article says the reason they refused was company policy. They had the option and said no.
No one thought that theft deterrence might be a use case for a fucking remotely-accessible car GPS?
Management doesn’t have an override button (which tracks their actions) to activate someone’s unit without payment?
I call 1000% bullshit.
I don’t think they’re saying that no one thought of it, but he’s right as a programmer those edge cases are always pushed out, kicking the can down the road. That doesn’t mean VW isn’t liable - it’s their fault still - they should have been able to help. But we can understand how it happened.
They probably called some guy on the 24/7 help line making minimum wage who will get fired if he ever gave out a free service and probably gets dinged if a call gets escalated. Those processes probably don’t exist. They sure as hell will now.
Then a fat settlement / fine will do well to reshape VW’s Priorities.
Since VW has no sense of social obligation it’ll need to be enough to sting. Say half of the net earnings of 2022.
That won’t happen, of course, but then the edge case of unlocking GPS in an emergency won’t be fixed either.
That’s a huge, glaring edge case to ignore for a company as large as VAG. Shouldn’t be acceptable.
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Silicon Valley brainworms
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So I’m a bit torn on this one… your taxes pay for firefighters and police. However you have to have insurance in emergencies should your house burn down and you want to rebuild, or should something (like your car) get stolen. In all cases, you’re paying to support the infrastructure that provides you a safety net.
Without getting into the social economics of what in this world should actually be free, not paying for this seems to fall outside of that as the person refused to pay for the safety net until it was needed. That’s like trying to go to an insurance company after an accident to get coverage for that accident.
I feel like this is a brainworm capitalist take. The capability was there, were their profits actually more important than locating a kidnapped child?
It’s not like this was going to drain a risk pool of equity and put other people’s coverage at risk; literally ping the fucking car and find out where it is. The capabilities are already there. Save the baby.
Why is this even a question?
the service is not primarily for emergencies though. This is like cell phones. Phones not on contract are still required to be able to dial 911
Yeah this is exactly like the time Verizon refused to connect the firefighters in the middle of a wildfire because they had “used too many minutes” or something stupid like that. Megacorps need to be held accountable for emergency situations that don’t fit their neat little T&Cs.
liberal answer
It’s not like their GPS capabilities are disabled. They use it to track you and sell the data. If the life is someone was not in danger I would agree with you, but a life was at risk.
Emergency response and recovery has always been a problem of the commonwealth, not of individuals. Private insurance is and has always been a scam.
The cost of lives lost became conspicuous during the prison boom of the 1980s in which the Reagan—George H. W. Bush tough on crime policies literally more than decimated neighborhood populations. When police busted someone for possession, or loitering or contempt of cop (or was gunned down in spite) it wasn’t just an alleged thug removed from society, but also typically an employee, a parent, a renter, a consumer who bought food and paid bills. (The You’re Wrong About pod, amusingly on Dan Quayle vs. Murphy Brown gets into the 80s era conservative policies of broken window policing and harsh sentences for nonviolent petty crime)
So whenever someone’s life is demolished by a natural disaster, an untreated health problem, a vehicle collision, a rampage killing, police on a bender, whatever, it hits like a bomb in the community. Almost everyone has others who depend on them, as family, as a friend, as a customer or laborer. And when something makes them disappear, collateral crises manifest like shrapnel.
“I hate companies that freely use my private data, especially the ones that share it with the police!”
VW refuses to use your data unless you comply to the requirements allowing them to lawfully use your data
“Fuck you VW!”
Edit: Turns out it’s a third party they deal with that made the mistake, they might not even have a way to bypass the payment!
What kind of a braindead comment is this? The only reason they refused is because they wanted to get paid even though it was an emergency.
Right? This wasn’t “No don’t take my data but also find my car” it was “Please for the love of god find my car my child is in there” followed with “Right for a modest fee of $150 ma’am we sure can”.
Has nothing to do with privacy. Maybe they ask a boilerplate “We have to ask but you do give us consent right” followed by a “What the fuck do you think fucking yes!”, but not asking for money. That’s not the time.
It was the victims asking. VW doesn’t need a fee to process a liability waiver, and VW was fine with the police paying the fee to gain access.
