If You’ve Got a New Car, It’s a Data Privacy Nightmare
gizmodo.comBad news: your car is a spy. Every major car brand failed a recent privacy and security test from Mozilla. You’re probably driving around in a "privacy nightmare" that may collect information as sensitive as your race, health status, and sexual activity.
Can I please just get a car, instead of a rolling computer / infotainment / privacy nightmare?
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Good thing my family owns a owner type jeep that dosent connect to the internet
As an environmentalist this really bothers me. I want a new electric car which is better for the planet. I no longer think I can. I would probably have to pick up an older model. What a joke. I’m too angry about the way the world is progressing, our privacy is eroded faster that we can take steps to mitigate.
I wish Tesla kept selling the “$35k Model 3” that was stripped down and had no cameras or autopilot. Essentially just an electric vehicle with no bells and whistles.
The best alternative would probably be, if feasible at all, a bike coupled with public transport. For our privacy as well as for the environment.
tbf public transport can be very bad for privacy, depending on the politics of your country… granted, with facial and other recognition nowhere is safe
I love my bike so much. Hopefully there is a future where I can just sell the stupid car without drawbacks.
… are RC cars and surveillance machines. For all places you go, who probably never agreed to it.
I’m still wondering how they’d be able to collect race, genetic, sexual, etc. information, some of those things don’t seem at all possible, but they’re somehow listed anyway, which is doubly scary
No actual idea, but I think there’s a considerable amount of cars that are filled with cams and mics “for your convenience”.
Including the (afaik) mandatory SOS button, that has a mic and a cellular connection.
Yeah, that’s reasonable to explain many things for well equipped cars, but the genetic information??
Yeah, that’s a good question. Maybe the steering wheel absorbs and tests the driver’s sweat? Lol this sounds overboard, and almost certainly it is, but I can’t think of anything that would warrant that part
Haha, yep, it would also be unreasonably expensive, but who knows?
Maybe they get that by correlating your profile with data of some entity that does have it, because it was collected and shared by a health company you might used services from. No amount of tinfoil hats will protect us
We need tinfoil gloves!
This indeed, it is quite easy to scan video feeds of the interior camera and determine these characteristics, as well as link them to social media scraping to find your preferences. Scary AF
Sounds like there’d be a business in making dumb cars. Because holy fuck
Wow, this is wildly unacceptable. Why in the hell would a car company need the user’s immigration status? Or genetic information? Or fucking sexual activity?! I hope somebody sues these asshole companies.
Im really curious as to how a nissan gathers details about sexual activity. I mean teslas have interior cameras that use image recognition to confirm that your eyes are on the road for safety, The data verifiably never leaves the car and is never saved but “Collecting data on facial expressions” seems like kind of a weird and dishonest spin on that.
“Volkswagen’s cars reportedly know if you’re fastening your seatbelt” Is that just the occupancy sensor and seat belt sensor letting you know you forgot to fasten your seatbelt? or that one of your passengers is unbuckled? I wouldn’t consider that an invasion of privacy.
Collecting the data is not whats important when theres safety implications. Its what’s done with the data thats important and potentially privacy invading. Nissan does have the term about selling your data in writing, thats probably more of a legal blanket statement to cover them in the future for some super weird edge case.
Generally speaking privacy invasions are more aligned with free services
Sorry but how… how do you verify this?
Is all of the Tesla car software suite open source? Are the schematics of the car, at least about all the cabling and technical components publicly available? Or was it just the Tesla PR department saying that they of course don’t do that because they value your privacy so, so much?
Tesla cares are big, remote controllable black boxes, that can receive software updates at any moment without you even knowing.
Teslas have a WiFi and cellular modem. You can’t tell what exactly its sending or receiving because encryption, but uploading video to Tesla’s servers means a much larger data set than just telemetry. It is very easy to see if something like that is coming across.
https://www.tesla.com/ownersmanual/modely/en_us/GUID-EDAD116F-3C73-40FA-A861-68112FF7961F.html
No need to exfiltrate the whole video stream: extract features and call them ‘telemetry’.
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I had no idea that tesla employees had seen interior camera shots. Do you have an article?
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It’s also opt-in by the car owner. Even Firefox will suck up your private data if you opt-in yet this community seems fine with that.
about the tesla interior camera. no it does not. at least not in a very useful way. it tries to maybe detect that you probably are not distracted. one way to make it give up is wearing sunglasses.
I wear sunglasses to drive all the time. If I look down at the touchscreen to use the nav it beeps at me and tells me to keep my eyes on the road. It will even detect if you have a phone in your hand. Where do you see that it doesn’t monitor in any useful way? Would you prefer that people not be reminded of distracted driving?
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???
https://www.reuters.com/technology/tesla-workers-shared-sensitive-images-recorded-by-customer-cars-2023-04-06/
From the article you linked:
So (1) it is opt-in specifically, and (2) that article is taking about the external cameras.
Sorry I don’t see any indication that this was from the interior camera, only the exterior cameras recording public spaces (dashcam)
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No, the issue is not cars, the issue is governments allowing, or actively pushing these companies to mass surveillance on a wide scale. This goes beyond the car. Children born today will never experience Privacy.
Wow, that’s completely fucked. Normally I would be surprised, but deaddove.gif