Hello people, my family recently bought a Renault 5 e-tech. The car itself is great, but there are some aspects that creep me out, especially the driver-facing camera. We didn’t actually know that such a camera existed before we bought the car, it was only mentioned as the car was given to us.
The cameras official purpose is to see, if you are tired and paying attention to the road, by some “AI magic”, I suppose. You can also let it scan your face, so that you automatically get logged into your profile.
I personally think, that that is kinda creepy, especially as there is no visual indication if the camera is currently recording and no official way to disable the camera hardware-wise. When it is being coverd, the car immediately complains about it.
When talking to friends or family about it, I got one of two reactions: equal concern, or “nice feature actually”, “what about the camera on your laptop?”, “you are way too paranoid”, “I have noting to hide; it is only me driving being recorded”.
I have also seen such cameras in other cars, BYD for example.
What do you think, is this creepy or am I too paranoid? Does anyone know where the actual data is processed, on device or on some cloud server? Do you have any experience with such cameras? I couldn’t really find any information about it on the internet.
Cars collect data about you to sell them to insurance companies. There was a study by the mozilla foundation about this and they said that there is basicly no modern car that does not do that.
The only thing you can do to avoid them is buy an old car.
Many models can disable data sharing in options. Kia is one example.
Many models require the owner to fit a SIM card if they want OTA.
The amount of paranoid misinformation in this thread is annoying.
Y’all don’t want a nanny state? Then stop driving drunk, stoned, texting or otherwise distracted and killing over 30,000 people a year like children. We need this shit because we give morons licences to drive, and we refuse to force telcos to disable data IO on phones while driving.
There was an article about removing the modem (or other essential piece of that data path) from a specific model of car (prius I think?), hoping to see more of those.
Find the antenna, wrap in foil. It’s not rocket appliances, Ricky.
Yeah I want an entire ass web database with how to do that for every car. Spin up the hw hacker community on that shit.
I haven’t found a centralized place for it though. Just some piecemeal info. Moz has a good centralized db for what info different cars collect. But nobody seem to have one for how to disable it, per make and model.
or use electrical tape on the cameras…
It’s a lot more than just video. It’s all your audio while you’re in the car. Your driving habits, your location, your devices, who is in the car with you so on and so forth.
There’s a ton of data that can be gathered and associated without having to have a camera.
If you ever talk in your car and it’s a modern car. Congratulations! That’s being recorded cataloged and sold off to the highest bidder.
Oh yes, because you are so critical there are committees in China listening to your every conversation, or aliens, or those lizard democrats.
… What?
Are you drinking your grandma’s bath water again?
I hope they like me talking to myself in funny voices and belting out songs at the top of my lungs, because that’s all the audio they’ll get out of me.
I read out my world domination manifesto when I go out for a loaf of bread. Because I know a group of people in a room in China know how important I am.
One doesn’t have to be internationally important to not want their audio recorded in their own private space.
Additional data about your driving behavior is also collected, completely unrelated to cameras. In fact, this data is the majority.
Maybe people who drive like cunts endangering the public need to be watched.
I don’t think invasive data collection via black boxes is the way to go. I’d say better driver education, speed traps, and better education on civil servants (such as traffic cops) might be a better solution.
and if they realise that and disable the car until you remove it?
🔥
Reread this post.