- cross-posted to:
- privacy@lemmy.ml
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Why are govts like this suddenly? All in a arms race against privacy?
Its been like this my entire life. When I was in high school in the 90s one of my teachers said the greatest battle your generation will fight will be for privacy. Little did they know there would be no fight. The general public doesn’t seem interested in caring about things and voting with their wallet. Now we’ve reached this point where the game is up and companies have realized the masses will buy their products because people perceive that they “need” them and can’t do without which gives them free reign to do whatever they want.
voting with their wallet I’m onboard with your argument but I really don’t think voting with your wallet works in cases like this. When there are so few players in a system and they’re all colluding to make things worse, there is no vote.
I am deeply frustrated that people aren’t getting more involved. I link them to groups, I show them the consumer rights wiki, I talk to people about getting involved politically at the local level… So few people care. Things are going to have to get much worse before they take action, best thing we can do is have the framework in place for when they finally wake up.
There are valid concerns about crazy surveillance bills, but this specific one is overreaction.
Basically the 2021 infrastructure bill asks NHTSA to come with a standard to detect impaired driving (it doesn’t say how it should be implemented, the camera watching us is author’s imagination how it would be implemented) and if there is no technology available then they should publish a yearly report describing current state of things.
Because of the yearly report requirement I’ve been reading similar article saying that this will happen in 2026. That’s how I learned about first.
You can find the reports here: https://www.nhtsa.gov/reports-to-congress
I think those overreacting articles are doing disservice because they distract us from actually dangerous things like for example bills like the one trying to incorporate age verification into OS requiring for example Microsoft verifying our identity before we can use their OS.
Not many people realized that bill like this already sneaked and was signed into law in California for example. It mandates this starting 2027.
Because the people vote for such governments.
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Because late stage capitalism, lobbyists pushed legislators to allow data collection so that it can be sold to insurance companies who also lobbied so that they can charge more for premiums.
Every company makes more profit.
We don’t live in a democracy anymore.
Guillotine insurance companies. They’re just scummy middle-men that seek profit at the cost of everyone else
They’re scared of the likes of Luigi and paper Mario. More and more people are getting fed up
The commodification of life itself.
Once you understand that we are just livestock to those in charge, a lot of their behavior starts to make more sense.
Control, why else?
Well in part it’s just being perceived that way. The car will decide if you’re drunk somehow becomes government surveillance. The App Store will ask for proof of age: government surveillance. And so on.
I’m not saying that this is a false interpretation but certainly it’s leaned on extremely hard in the way people report on and talk about these things. Hence why you get the sense that everyone everywhere is suddenly completely about government surveillance.
I think we could have a whole conversation about drunk driving and the efficacy and fairness of this kind of measure without even cracking the lid on government surveillance. But no one wants that. Nope, if it isn’t a direct descent straight into Fascism, it doesn’t get clicked on.
It’s almost like dozens of major companies are going on a blitz of heavy public surveillance projects that are very publicly selling that data directly to the government… So when yet another of those companies already doing those things Congress up with a new surveillance method, people can do the math
Not suddenly. It’s been going on at least as far back as 2001. Probably more. It’s generally not the gov’t either as the gov’t is mostly driven by moneyed private interests like large corporations. They always push in different ways to get more power to make profit. Get rid of a regulation, make new regulation, get a subsidy, limit rights to resist some abuse, etc. Sometimes it’s just more obvious that others in general, or it’s in an are we personally pay attention to, and we’re like WTAF.
Well now see, now I’m at a cross roads. On the one hand, fuck privacy violations.
On the other hand, fuck drunk drivers.
I guess in the end, my logic is that this will barely be used to detect drunk drivers, and FULLY used to track you in real time.
So lets all fuck over their technology by making nothing but right turns for 8 hours. Just a massive small circle. For 8 hours, every day.
Then it will be assumed their tracking is broken, and they’ll waste time figuring out whats broken.
If we all do this, every day, in electric vehicles powered by solar chargers, then we’ll save the world!
Punishing drunk drivers wont solve the problem. So even if that was the case the better option would be to deal with the problem at the source. Which they already would have if they cared enough. Since they havent i think its fair to assume this is not the main objective of this.
There’s a difference between monitoring driving and monitoring drivers. I would be less concerned about tech that identifies when I’m running stop signs, drifting into other lanes, or quickly braking without a nearby obstacle to warrant it. This sounds like it’s monitoring the human driver, at all times. Given the bullshit this admin is up to I wouldn’t put it passed the software or hardware makers to “calibrate” it by race so black and brown people are 3x more likely to trip the sensors.
That’s the thing. You can’t just conditionally spy on people only when they’re doing evil acts. You’re either surveiling innocent people or you’re not.
Or… leave the tech sitting at home reporting a pre-recorded route over and over.
How are you going to leave the tech at home when the tech is the car?
i got the idea from this movie about this bus that had to speed around a city, keeping its speed over 50. and if its speed dropped, it would explode. i think it was called The Bus That Couldn’t Slow Down.
I never understood with that one why they didn’t just put it up on blocks; it was reading the speedometer, not even GPS.
Guess it wouldn’t have made for as good a movie.
They only found out about it once the bus was in motion. It’s pretty hard to get that set up on a moving bus.
This is just “protect the children” in a different form. Could it be used to stop drunk drivers? Sure, maybe. Is that the motivation? Hell no.
Let’s spoof the data and say we did it
Now with better cropping!
It wasn’t my fault! I just uploaded the first picture I found on google. It was already not cropped!
I am never buying a car built after 2016
Why 2016 specifically?
2018 makes more sense, that’s when backup cameras were mandatory so since they were putting in a screen manufacturers made every car have an ‘infotainment’ center and with all of that processing power comes logging and other privacy invading features.
Hm. Well I certainly agree that privacy invasive stuff is absolutely unwelcome but I’m also a pretty big fan of backup cameras. I bought a 2023 and while it does have the “infotainment” and backup can, outside of that it’s all quite dum and everything outside of like bluetooth paring and general infotainment stuff is all physical buttons.
So really my point is while it is unusual, even brand new vehicles can manage to avoid the privacy nightmare.
Really I don’t go past 2008 myself. That was a cliff car manufactures went off after the sub prime mortgage fun fun time.
Naaaaah, my 2016 RAV4 Hybrid is balling. Back up camera, 360 sensors, remote start, heated seats, medium screen with buttons and knobs instead of touch, push start, stick shift, and the best part: no wifi on-board (through my phone only). Cars peaked right here.
Oh, your going to fix that yourself? Or pay someone to do it?
honestly i haven’t been able to fix anything myself since my 1989 three horsepower crapstack. not enough room in the engine compartment. I’ve got a good mechanic tho, so it’s not too much of a problem.
I like fixing my own crap and used to fix laptops and the like in my old job. I am fairly comfortable working on anything 2008 and before, basicly as long as the car is not using fucking canbus or serialized parts. Had enough canbus in my life from the damned German cash recyclers.
I have a 2016 outback. No android auto… But I’m in the same boat. Backup camera. Sensors self driving no wifi no forced updates. Etc.
I don’t need anything more.
Praying for our cars to survive at least another 15 years, bud 🙏
Yeah agreed. One of the great things about the outback is there’s a DIY group around it. So there’s a lot of YouTube videos out there on car maintenance and upgrades etc So that kind of where I’m at with it these days too
I daily a 1985, how boned do you think I am?
It depends on the make but that’s when I feel cars tipped the scale to becoming appliances
Reminder that this requires all vehicles be SOLD with the tech. It says nothing about what happens to it after purchase.
Just pull the fuse for the onstar radio. It can log all it wants locally.
They prevented that from working years ago. Now it’s usually on a critical circuit that you can’t just disable.
Where there’s a will, there’s a way.
Every technical hurdle they put up, is defeatable.
Every time they make the wall higher, we make the ladder longer.
There will come a time where there will be a privacy-conscious choice and that might require flashing the infotainment system.
We’re getting closer to one of Cory Doctrows stories. I can’t find a direct link, but its on this page under the name “Plausible Deniability”
To be perfectly blunt, no not every hurdle is defeatable. To even consider that to be true is fucking retarded. There is a point where your option is to deal with it or use something else.
Modifications can be made illegal, hardware can be made unobtainable legally outside of vendor contracts, real time motion data to insurance can be mandated, etc.
Even if you go out of your way to bypass everything you can The simple fact is, at some point you WILL be pulled over or get into an accident. And at that point if the powers that be decide what you did breaks a law then your still fucked. Or that you broke your insurance contract with your modifications.
Just because you can do something doesnt mean you can get away with it if caught. And everyone’s caught at some point. You either end up in jail or uninsurable and monetarily fucked.
You should read the short story.
That’s the whole point of the story.
But yes, it will always be possible to remove this sludge. You may have to fight for your rights to do so. That fighting might involve setting things on fire.
I work peripheral to data science. I am starting to think the defense is never to be a hole in the data. AI is incredible at filling in missing data.
What you want to do is poison the data about you. AI is absolutely terrible at weeding out bad or especially intentionally misleading data. You can even protect others if you do it right.
Funny, that is the opposite take that Cory has had recently. His argument has basically morphed to the opinion that, while individual action is cool, this stuff pretty much can only be defeated by collective action. You can’t shop (or hack) your way out of living in the surveillance state. If everyone else is being surveiled, you get pulled in by association.
I don’t quite agree, and think we will always have to exercise some individual choice to protect ourselves. I am not sure that disabling a radio is enough though, if every other car on the road is covered in cameras and streaming data constantly.
You can do both? Push for collective action and defeat the devices that are being put in front of you.
Thanks for sharing this, the fiction is astoundingly horrifying yet vital in timeliness.
My bolt euv doesn’t transmit after I pulled the fuse.
Happy for you, but onstar shares the infotainment circuit on my vehicle. The only way to disable it is to dismantle the dash, remove the whole infotainment unit, and remove the circuit board for onstar. Which likely has some warranty implications, as well.
Hope to get to it soon, but what a hassle.
If there’s enough demand, I imagine that there will be shops that will do it without individuals having to research it.
If the manufacturer designs it so that I have to disassemble the entire engine just to replace the spark plugs, I’m still going to be irritated even if I can just pay some people a ton of money to replace them for me.
Removing “safety features” from a car is illegal, btw
Unjust laws are not to be followed.
Onstar is safety for the government, not for the driver.
And when they call the infotanmint crap a “safety feature” and no one lynched a lawmaker over it we know that as a people we have given up.
It’ll be like every other car with driver assistance and every other advanced feature now, everything gets strapped to the same CANbus and unified powerttrain control module so disabling one part of the system causes the car to get stuck in limp mode, have constant nusiance alerts, and fail state inspections to get registered.
Good news is if you have an expensive enough car you’ll get an asshat mode.
I’m trying to figure out of this is just the distracted driving safety feature that’s been on every car I’ve bought in the last 6 years. If so it can be disabled and really isn’t that big of a deal when it’s enabled. Just sends you an alert when it detects you weaving within the lane a little too much. I can’t help but think this article might be a little sensationalistic.
These things aren’t going to just give you an alert. They’re going to disable the car if it thinks you’re impaired.
The car manufacturers even warned the government about false positives that they can’t prevent and Congress moved ahead anyway.
And when all the used cars are gone and I’m forced to buy one of these I’ll promptly be destroying the radio transmitters and everything related to this surveillance.
Straight to jail.
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Do not pass go. Do not collect 200 local currency units.
Is it actually illegal or is that a joke?
the “surveillance” seems to happen on the car locally. Kind of an expansion of current driver attention systems to include impairment detection.
“Local” surveillance happening on the same car computer that’s attached to a SIM card.
Yeah seems safe
It’s local right until the law enforcement gets into Bluetooth range with the right encryption keys to download all of the data for the past year.
Bold of you to assume any of this will be encrypted.
I remember when we discovered that militants in Afghanistan were monitoring Predator video feeds because apparently nobody had ever put in a requirement that the video stream be encrypted.
Militants in Iraq and Afghanistan have intercepted live video feeds from unmanned U.S. Predator drones using $26 off the shelf software made by a Russian company, says a report in the Wall Street Journal.
IIRC that was because the Predator video feeds were intended to be viewed in-theatre by officers right there on the front, and military protocol around encryption keys would have made it so no one at the front would have been able to decrypt the feed.
Considering they were designed in the early 90s, i.e. before public-key cryptography took off with SSL, that explanation always seemed plausible to me.
SSH keys for remote access.
Local storage encryption would be pointless because the keys would be local as well.
It’ll be like the 70s in the US again. Rip out all the bullshit smog stuff and put on a new carb. Because a v8 mustang shouldn’t be making 130hp.
Drunk driving is one thing but it will also judge how tired you are? Driving tired is dangerous. Unfortunately a huge portion of our economy runs on people working too many hours at too many jobs. A huge invasion of privacy with all sorts of knockon effects.
For the people who think they will disable this. You won’t be able to without also disabling your car and voiding your warrenty.
A car warranty lasts like 2 years. I can’t afford a car less than 2 years old.
The sad part is that I did some math on my shitty car spending (I have a problem with buying old weird cars) and I found that I was actually way ahead of people with a car payment. Like we are talking about having 7 interesting shit boxes (3 or so on the road at any time) and repairs coming out less then the cost of financing. Shits gotten wild.
One of the few upsides to Hyundai 10 year warranty may not be perfect. But it pretty much makes sure the car at least goes vroom the entire time.
You won’t be able to without also disabling your car
Unlikely as that would mean any fault with the system would disable the car which would be a PR nightmare.
These systems can generally be disabled without more than an error light on the dash.
This sort of bullshit is why I am happy to ride a bike.
2027, year of Linux car, or bicycle.
A linux bicycle sounds like a cool project! I’ve been wanting to add a mini a pc to my bike, to track trips and display important navigational information, but to connect to my local home server rather than some black box service.
Dynamo lighting has gotten really efficient. It wouldn’t be cheap, but would be so cool to make a fully human-powered Linux bike. https://www.bikeradar.com/advice/buyers-guides/bike-dynamos
my ebike definitely doesn’t have a modem.
pretty sure it doesn’t have a modem.
fuck i’m gonna go have a paranoid freakout and wrap that fucker in wire mesh be back in a week
I worked on this a bit. Some of the tricks they had were changing the AC to blow colder air when drowsiness was detected, increasing the blower speed, increasing brightness on the dashboard, and turning the volume up or turning the radio on. They even had turning the radio on and selecting music to combat drowsiness. So I guess you’d get sleepy and then your car would automatically started blasting house music.
I worked on this a bit
Fuck you, get a different job.
There’s absolutely nothing in the specifications about contacting police or keeping black-box recordings. The only outside contact functionality was EMS contact when the vehicle had to pull over to the side of the road due to unconsciousness and detected other signs of a health emergency. Even that had loud audible warnings and a countdown timer before dialing.
If shitty governments take something that would save tens of thousands of lives globally every year and turn it into a surveillance system that’s the fault of those governments. The manufacturers entire focus has been on reducing fatalities and injuries among road users.
What much of it comes down to is trust.
Can we trust that these systems will legitimately be used to improve public safety and not as a backdoor by the government to exert greater control? The skepticism is not unfounded.
As is often the case, the EU has placed appropriate guardrails on driver monitoring systems, which the US and others would do well to follow;
Driver drowsiness and attention warning and advanced driver distraction warning systems shall be designed in such a way that those systems do not continuously record nor retain any data other than what is necessary in relation to the purposes for which they were collected or otherwise processed within the closed-loop system. Furthermore, those data shall not be accessible or made available to third parties at any time and shall be immediately deleted after processing. Those systems shall also be designed to avoid overlap and shall not prompt the driver separately and concurrently or in a confusing manner where one action triggers both systems.
The computer has determined that you require listening to some soothing music.
lol there’s going to be a lot of people hanging out in the bar parking lot for a few hours after last call
Good. Don’t like it? Fuck off public roads
Yikes! I think I just burnt myself on this take.
