All Cars Sold in the EU Now Require a Camera Aimed at Your Face. It’s Still Not Clear Where That Data Goes
cross-posted from: https://piefed.world/c/tech/p/1247209/all-cars-sold-in-the-eu-now-require-a-camera-aimed-at-your-face-its-still-not-clear-wher
Starting July 7, 2026, every new car sold in the European Union must include a driver monitoring camera aimed at your face. Glance at your phone, your kids in the back seat, or the radio for too long, and the car will flash a warning light and sound an alert.
Automakers have known this was coming for years. What they, and EU regulators, have never spelled out is what happens to that footage after the alert goes off.
While the intention behind the new system is difficult to dispute, its implementation has raised several concerns. Early real-world testing suggests the distraction warnings can be overly sensitive and potentially distracting.
259 replies
Im sorry, but this is just silly.
If a camera rocords your face, it can be used to identity you. Thus it falls under GDPR regulations as PII. That requires that the footage is kept no longer than needed for its purpose and that what happens to the data is spelled out exactly. My car already comes with a privacy policy that you can read.
So the answer is: Anything that can be used to identify you will deleted - or rather it will never get stored.
And the reason this regulation doesn’t spell out what happens to the data is that it doesn’t need to because GDPR covers ALL data already.
The EU is guilty of many things, but this is solely about increasing driver awareness and preventing deaths and injury - and it’s working, with each generation of requirements, less people die.
What sucks is you know the US is going to put it in their cars "to simplify production" and we dont have GDPR to protect us, so you know that data is going somewhere.
Yes I would not want to live in the US.
Would think that limiting engine power would be better way to go. We don't really need 400hp+ cars that go from 0-100 in 3 sec. If I had such a car when I just started driving,I probably wouldn't be writing this.....
Also enforce carmode on mobiles - black out mobile screen when car is moving.
Finally, alle the beeps and blinking warning -toooo many already. I got warning fatigue, I just ignore the message and get irritated
The data destination should be mandatory disclosure, not a mystery.
You guys are hilarious with your "I'd just keep/buy an old car." The EU is also making it illegal to repair older vehicles and forcing people to replace "outdated" models with more environmentally friendly ones. China did the same thing with a buyback and destroy of all their outdated vehicles. Their aren't going to be any old vehicles. The only way to address this is to demand privacy rights and protection NOW.
The only option to avoid this is to agree to the "Crotch Cam" as a secondary feature, when purchasing. No salesman will visit your home. /s
So, a couple of things...
For a real time warning system, there's no need to actually record anything. Monitoring the video feed with no record capability should be fine.
Second, this sounds super easy to defeat with a printed photo card and a couple of Googley Eyes. 👀
"Super Easy to Defeat" is the now. They don't care about that.
They just need you to accept it, and move along.
In a few years time, it will not be "super easy to defeat" but will be standard practice and accepted law.
By that stage it will likely be too late to do anything. They will have tied it in with chat control and all of our data.
Can you imagine the freedom that will be discovered 50 years from now in a trend, when people decide to ditch their personal devices and live like they used to 70, 80 years ago (maybe even 60).
thats probably what they want , people have access to less info, so they cant protest, or demostrate in large numbers. also silencing dissidents is part of this too.
Clarkson was a step ahead of us this time.
Soon enough, If you defeat or try to defeat the government surveillance system, it will probably be against the law
At least tesls are easily fooled.
I'm pretty sure I've seen some systems with stereoscopic cameras or Kinect-like laser grids
Until an accident occurs, and you are denied insurance coverage for breaking the TOS.
That's fine, people are under the mistaken impression that there are bad drivers that would deliberately cheat this, and good drivers like them that pay 100% attention to the road, the reality is there is that 99% of drivers are good drivers ok of the time and distracted drivers some of the time, if the 1% genuinely terrible drivers actively bypass this, it's still a major improvement for the those of us that share the road with the other 99%.
How many more years before me never owning a car and never driving is enough to put me on a list?
I won't own anything made after 2015... That's when LTE chips started becoming standard in cars...
I told my wife, my next car will have a carbuerator.
A carburetor is a step too far, you invite misery, do you hate yourself? Take care, lol.
But yep would love to see more folks keeping old cars running, I won't be taking the plunge into "~mortgage and routinely operate my own bubble of dystopian hellscape", think I'ma pretty much lifetime "pass" on that flavor of nastiness.
I want my next car to be an ev... but with manual window winders
Get an old car that doesn't run and an EV conversion kit.
Spend $40,000 to end up with a $5000 car.
You drama queens need to learn about black electrical tape.
Then Slate has an EV for you!
Eh better then throttle body fuel injection. I drive carb, direct injection and throttle body. Never had much issues with carbs other then my fucking rototiller.
Carbs waste 30% more fuel.
No they don't. I get better fuel economy on some of my carbed vehicles, it's just another aspect of fuel use not some sort of downgrade.
Some of the happiest moments of my childhood were getting a holly six-pack dialed in perfectly on my old Javelin... And balancing a six-pack is tricky as hell.. ;-)
I'm a FIRM believer in fix-first... Too many people treat cars as disposable... and I maintain that keeping a 60 year old classic on the road is better for the environment than any new car... We (the world, not just the US) produce nothing but crap these days...cars have a life-expency of about 5 years, 10 at the outside (if you're a non-BMW built Toyota that is)
My 2014 is 12 years old and still runs like it's brand new... I'll get another 15 years out of it easily... And when the engine dies, I'll replace it.
The only thing that kills cars permanently is rust..rust is the only true killer.
Ah, an ancient wizard, then - carry on lol.
If I'd grown up around people who understood and enjoyed cars, my life (read: curiosity) would probably have simply gone that direction.
Instead I learned a lotta other things well, and so I've come around to this badly and through some longer paths, lol. I envy what I assume to be your built-in, muscle-memory secrets.
And hell yeah, I drive and enjoy a 2006. Had it for some years, went very deliberately from a 2018 Mazda I really liked to this, consider it an improvement (no one else in my life does 😅).
Only "outsource" the stuff I know I can't find time to learn and do, the thing is fundamentally easy to work on and understand. Delicious!
Glad my 2018 car only had 3G which I had removed at the dealership due to it causing battery drain so I’m good!
Yeah... 2015 was about where cellular connected cars started being ubiquitous... And of course car manufactures were too cheap to put two computers in the car (one for infotainment, the other for engine management) so the modem has direct access to the ECU, which means throttle control, brakes, steering(?!), everything.
You're on Lemmy. They already have you down on a list somewhere as a tankie
I'm 42, living in the united states, never had a drivers liscense.
If they tried this over here, people would die. Because they'd force me to be behind the wheel of an automobile.
And thus, people would die.
The US does have this law. It's just not enacted yet because there's so much they're demanding in the law and automakers say it's not possible. But it doesn't force someone who doesn't drive to drive.
Every new car. So congrats on further destroying the new car market, good job.
Time to stock up on old cars?
Sweet my problem has just become a massive opportunity!
The primary purpose of AI systems is mass surveillance.
Yes.
No way in hell I'm buying a car with that BS. I'll ride a bike first.
No way in hell I could buy a new car. They cost more than my house.
Mine was $300 (a '76 Rabbit) and a couple of weeks later I got rear-ended and his insurance company totaled my car and gave me a $700 check. The car wasn't any worse than before I got hit and I drove it another three years, so -$400 for three years of car.
Sounds like more ways for insurance companies to a) charge you more based on behaviors they arbitrarily determine are “bad”, and b) take your payments for years/decades then never pay out because they say something you did on video makes any accident your fault based on some term buried in the 500 page contract you obviously didn’t read all of.
They already do “a” by taking vehicle blackbox info uploaded by dealers or via telemetry and increasing your rate via their risk analysis. Note, your rates never go down for good driving. Only up.
I just want to rant about how dystopian car "insurance" is.
Set aside all the justifications / propaganda you've heard about car insurance, and think about how it actually works. You're legally obligated to pay a corporation for the right to use your vehicle on public roads. What do you get out of it? For the vast majority of people nothing. Even if you get in an accident they'll do their absolute damnedest not to pay you or to pay you a pittance that you could've covered with a fraction of the cumulative fee. That's basically the text-book definition of a scam. Even if you do have "good" insurance (doubt) they'll have higher prices due to all the scammy insurance companies. It's a legally obligate scam -- insurance has effectively turned every public road into a toll road.
Frankly, I feel this way about all forms of insurance, so I doubt anyone will take me seriously (It's not hard to save and invest money, with that the entire notion of insurance kinda falls apart). Still legally obligatory insurance is a particularly disgusting form of oligarchical capture.
Should read up on the history of medical insurance, e.g. blue cross blue shield. The idea was that expensive payouts can happen early on during someone's coverage, before they have a chance to build up savings. No one wants that to happen to them, so if everybody is in the pool of people who will pay for coverage, that risk is mitigated by being spread over a large group who only need to pay in a little at any time.
Rich people or institutions who can afford to self-insure don't need insurance.
This original insurance was non-profit. The capitalist insurances are the ones realizing they can choose to only cover people who aren't likely to need payouts, and profit off of the difference between pay ins and pay outs. I also agree this is a morally dubious system.
This particular example makes me uncomfortable because it implies there's some circumstance where someone who couldn't pay the monthly insurance bill would be turned away when they need serious medical attention. Like, I understand the logic of insurance being better than dying here, but it doesn't really change the underlying logic of the situation being 'oh they can't pay we'll just let them die'.
The government should just cover that with standard taxes. It shouldn't even be government insurance where everyone is paying in an equal amount to make it 'fair'. If we have to take more money from rich people than poor people to prevent deaths, just do it. The working class betters everyone. We should be treated well.
The scam in this case where you can't wait / go without / buy cheaper is more rich people trying to find an excuse to not acknowledge how much the rest of society does for them.
That makes sense today; insurance was invented in a different time, by community members self-organizing.
I used to think like you do. "How does this benefit me?"
But as a pedestrian who was hit by an uninsured driver, I can firmly tell you that you have no idea what you are talking about. Driving is not a constitutional right. It's a privilege that the state gives to you. It's extremely dangerous for those around you, so limiting the ability to drive very dangerous vehicles to people who are financially responsible isn't the worst idea. You might even say, "but you can just sue the person who hit you if they don't have insurance." The response is to think about the kind of person who can't afford $100/mo and how much you might be able to squeeze out of them in a lawsuit over $20,000 in repair bills.
It's not a $20k repair bill I'm worried about, it's the potential of $100k+ in medical liability that I'm really buying insurance for.
In my area there's plenty of expensive cars driving around too, I somehow doubt the minimum $25k insurance would cover even half the cost of a totaled car + everything involved.
I didn't mention the medical liability, since a modern civilized society shouldn't need to have me worried about medical liability. I was lucky to have good insurance when I was a pedestrian hit by an uninsured driver. I wasn't on the hook for my $60,000 in medical bills, because I had insurance. In a good society, I shouldn't need private medical insurance to protect me if I get hit by an uninsured driver.
Now, if my new car gets totaled by a shitbox '88 Cutlass Cierra driven by a person who can barely even afford THAT car, then that's where requiring insurance comes into play.
Sorry that happened to you, that's genuinely terrible.
That said, I think you should be angry at the cost of medicine and medical care rather than being angry at all poor people because one acted terribly. We should do everything we can to prevent people from being hit by cars, but I don't think exploiting poor people for needing to get from one location to another is going to help lower incidence of pedestrian collisions. In my personal experience it's usually the wealthier cars who drive more recklessly, but there's certainly no mechanistic relation between being poor and being a bad driver. The poors aren't inherently less capable of driving. (Unless, you know of a way to get insurance for free...)
Just buy a new car. If your car repairs costs more than a year of my rent you need a cheaper car - or a better mechanic. I'm very sympathetic to people hit by cars - I think that's terrible. I'm not at all sympathetic to rich (or "middle class") people complaining about damage to their $100k+ vehicles. You can buy an used electric fleet van for ~$40k, and that's just about as fancy as you could practically need. Anything beyond that is a show of status (many things below that are still a show of status), and I'd rather not pay a second tax to an oligarch so people with more money than sense can show off how much money they can waste.
Maybe 16 wheelers should have insurance, but it's exploitation of the poor elsewhere.
Got it, so you think it is punishing to poor people to make them pay $60-$100/mo for the privilege of driving a dangerous vehicle that can cause many thousands of dollars in damage to both cars and people, but your response to high car repair bills is for poor people to "just buy a new car." I don't think you have thought your cunning plan all the way through. Notice how I never brought up medical bills, only car repair bills? That's because I agree that health insurance should be covered by the state, not private insurance. Health care is a basic human right. Driving a car is not. You talk about exploitation of poor people through making them have insurance, but you ignore that poor people can also be the victim of bad drivers. If a poor person with a $5000 car who badly needs that car to drive to work gets their car totaled by a driver without insurance, your solution is for them to "just buy a new car." Do you have any idea how dumb that sounds? Your main argument is that this poor person should not be expected to pay $100/mo for insurance, but you think it is totally fine to ask them to pay $5000 to get a new car that they need to get to work to pay off that car?
And if you think only the wealthier drivers drive more recklessly, you should drive in a really poor part of town. You know who doesn't give a shit whether they crash their cars? The people who drive really shitty cars. The statistics back that up, too. Wealthy areas have lower serious traffic accidents per capita than lower income areas. They also have far lower traffic fatalities per capita, but that can be down to the safety of their expensive cars. People in sports cars do tend to drive faster, but rich moms in expensive SUVs do not.
When poor people have a car accident it's already fix it themselves, tolerate it, or replace it the vast majority of the time. When they do replace it what do you think the odds are the cheap insurance companies pay out more than they paid in? 3-4k is a lot of money when you're broke, but I think the only real change would be one less pointless bill.
Poor people are capable of saving money. Poor people are capable of driving. I'm sure the statistics are very interesting, but I don't think any of the mechanisms you propose suggest an inherent inability to drive or an inherent inability to save money. It is the burdens placed upon them that make it difficult to get ahead, not some inherent lack of ability deprives them of your privileges. I cannot support systems that increase that burden for the sake of others' luxuries.
Clearly, you've had situations where you've found value in the insurance system, and good for you I suppose, but I cannot see a justification for forcing everyone into the system.
So your solution to exploiting poor people is to force the burden on the victim to just deal with it when someone else is at fault?
"I'm sorry the person who just totaled the most important part of your livelihood chose not to have insurance. Guess you just have to fix it yourself with all that free time and money you have, tolerate it, or buy a new one with all that money you have. Sucks you are poor!"
Great solution.
They already have to deal with it. My solution is not scamming them.
Idk, why you're so in love with a system that seems obviously oppressive to me, but whatever man I'm clearly not going to convince you.
Can you put tape over the camera?
Or disconnect it? What happens when it no longer functions? Will I need to fix this to get my car to run again?
I bet the system would sound an alarm if you did that.
I'm willing to bet there's an ignition interlock that would keep the car from starting if the camera is disabled.
That would be possible but unlikely. If the system fails then the driver can't use their car. What if they're an emergency? That wouldn't pass.
There's already legislation in the US to implement such a kill switch based on if the camera says the driver is drowsy or drunk. Considering the uniformity with which totalitarianism seems to be spreading, I assume something similar isn't out of the question.
Just wait until it gets integrated into that database ICE is using that can tell them who is a citizen and who isn't, just by looking. Then it will shut the car off if the driver looks drowsy, drunk, or the wrong shade of brown.
Alcohol detection interlocks in all cars would actually be useful. These cameras effectively do the same thing.
Have you ever had to use one? I've had to do it (lot attendant) and not only is it unsanitary if someone else has to drive your car, but it's fucking hard to get the breathalyzer to actually work properly to allow you to start the car and it will go off again while you're driving requiring you to actually breath into it again. It's not a passive thing, you have to have the lung capacity to do it. It can be set off by false positives too. This is the dumbest take.
No. I don't drink.
Sure, because 32 drunk driving deaths every day is apparently not a problem for Lemmy neckbeards.
The camera would accurately detect drunk driving patterns, as well as sleepy drivers, dementia drivers, texting drivers, stoned drivers, drivers eating cereal and hot soup, applying makeup, all the stupid shit North American drivers do. If any of that affects your insurance, just don't fucking do that.
The false positive rate on camera-based detection is insanely high.
You don't have to drink to have used one. I don't drink. I have had to use one. This comment reads like "fuck any service worker who might have to drive your car." Fuck mechanics. Fuck tow truck drivers. Fuck EMS.
Fuck people who have health problems and can't actually use their lung capacity to blow into the breathalyzer to release the interlock. They'll never have an emergency and maybe have to drive anywhere.
That's why it's a dumb take. This isn't about drunk driving deaths. Your "assume guilt and fuck everyone else who's not guilty but will be put in danger over it" take is exactly what I said it was.
Unplug the alarm speakers.
This is where I'm at with shit like this. I'm just gonna keep disconnecting everything that annoys me. Including my brakes.
There's probably a fuse for the system. Unless it's integrated in the whole media system.
It's a safety system, so it's unlikely to handled by the media unit, which honestly just makes it harder.
The logical assumption would be that such a system would need to detect a face for the car to start.
If it is enabled for theft protection. But, that would need to be disabled for fleet or rental cars.
This entire thread is assumption.
It's supposedly meant to be a safety feature. It is unsafe for a car to have a driver who does not have a face. (insert Billy Idol earworm here).
Not necessarily a particular face. They just need a warm body to collect data from.
What if I'm ugly.
Or in clown costume.
Or going to a Kiss tribute concert
Etc.
https://insideevs.com/news/798901/tesla-owners-doll-heads-fsd/
Then the car won't start.
BTW 90% of cars on the market already have this function.
No! Sell your car! burn your house down! Drive a Model T and distill your own petroleum!
This is for cars where everything is being put on touchscreens so you have to take your eyes off of the road to control it?
A camera that faces both the driver and front windows by default, but only stores it where the owner wants it stored would be nice. Making it a default would change how cops interact with people.
If body cams being on didn't change how they interact with you. Nothing will.
The footage will only be used to harm you
The terrifying thing is, body cams probably did change how cops interact with people. They were that bad before. There's also been a few times when a cop their forgets to turn off their body cam or arrives late and got in some trouble.
If you actually owned the car and the software on the car, then you could set the feed to be stored offsite somewhere. Even if the cops knew it was being recorded, they wouldn't be able to get it deleted. Even if they deleted the local copy, they wouldn't be able to know how many backups there are.
And make insurance higher, just like why tye scan IDs when you buy cigs and booze.
Yes harm
We are talking about EU, not USA.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/feb/09/french-riot-officers-trial-accused-beating-gilets-jaunes-protesters
ACAB is ACAB the world around.
Oh I know! But the gilets jaunes were not in a car. I think so far I've only heard of US shooting persons in car for no fucking reason.
before long people are gonna want to buy nothing but used 70s and 80s carbuerated shitboxes just to avoid all this shit.
10 bucks says all this data is being fed back to insurance companies.
Please install this rootkit on your phone for $10 off your car insurance.
So if your teenager bangs their partner in the back seat do you sue your insurance or the automaker for recording child pornography?
Depending on the locals laws, the very act of transmitting such images over the internet qualifies as "distribution of CSAM".
Nope, fuck-no, not even close. Never going to fucking happen. I have dashcams inside (pointed out) but I keep the mic muted because I don't need any of my ramblings recorded publicly.... (I also have it set not to record speed.. for obvious reasons)
So your dash can recording which is completely offline his us that public?
I can't decipher this.
Was probably typing it out in 401 traffic.
This was on the news today on tv and they showed a camera filming the driver, watching his upper body.
I bought a car from 2023 without all this shit so I'm very happy. Newer electric cars also beep when you go over the speed limit, which would drive me nuts.
My car shortly beeps 3x every time I go over speed limit. So I'm punished when I try to maintain speed limit and going 2kmph over triggers the beep. So I just constantly go 10kmph over now and I get those 3 beeps just for the first time I cross over the speed limit.
The beep is tied to the road sign monitoring setting so I have to turn off both, not just beeping. So then I don't get signs displayed on my dash board which can be actually useful sometimes.
I think its horrible and should be illegal. It's a massive annoyance and could cause accidents since your attention is on that and not the traffic.
So tired of all the bullshit people never asked for.
May I suggest adaptive speed control.
I use it a lot. I set it 10kmph above the speed limit as well. It's not perfect in a lot of city conditions and it can behave unexpectedly as well in these condition. Unless I want to fiddle with a spacing distance all the time and avoid sudden breaking for no reason I have to use it sparingly depending on time of day and location. Outside of cities it tends to work quite well for the most part. Some sharper bends trigger breaks too soon for no reason as well even though I've set sensitivity to the lowest.
Also during heavy rain it just tends to ignore everything in front of me and starts accelerating to the max set speed.
Don't you know how roads work? Different speeds, situations, city traffic? Any of this rings a bell?
If anyone owns a current BMW and the speed limit beeping drives them nuts:
Hold the "set" button on you steering wheel for about 2s, the screen will inform you the Warnung has been temporarily turned off (until your next start)
Unless it can prove that it is running entirely locally with no outside connection, it can fuck off.
Even then.... I still don't want it.
The mandate says nothing about cameras specifically.
I thought it did as well but it only specifies this :
Don't get me wrong, manufacturers are going to have a fucking field day with all of the shit they'll try and get in under this banner of "safety" and they will almost certainly work their monetisation shenanigans in around this.
It might seem like that wording prohibits data collection, but it doesn't cover all the bases a team of well paid lawyers would be able to come up with. Or they could just do what they normally do and just ignore the "no data collection" part and pay the
cost of doing business taxfine and rake in multiples of that fine in profits.My point is , it doesn't specify cameras, so theoretically a company could come up with a non-face-scanning way of doing this and use that instead.
will they ?....fuck no...but they could if they wanted to.
Which is arguably worse.
edit : A note to say that I'm not arguing against the safety aspects of this , they might be fully valid, i'm arguing that it'll be abused for profit in any way the companies think will give them a positive ROI.
My car has this... Hilariously the sleepy alert only kicks in when I decide to go slower than normal. The "keep hands on wheel" alert kicks off very frequently... Because roads are straight enough for no "input" to be detected
I've been in a car that lightly shook the steering wheel and pedals when you approached the speed limit.
That was super disconcerting because I didn't know it existed until my steering wheel started moving on it's own.
My bet is all these devices in new cars will be all from one company. It will be up to automakers to put the cameras in the dash but the guts will all be the exact same. They will plug in the computer and all other sensors available. If the car doesn't have that sensor they can shut it off making these scalable to the "trim level" of the car.
What if you tape the camera ?
Just need a really tiny picture of your face to trick the camera.
I'm speculating wildly, but if the regulations for road sign cameras are anything to go by, the EU will require the car to wail at you every few seconds because it thinks the speed limit on the highway is 40 km/h because it picked up a sign on the offramp you just passed.
I bet before long someone will have a design for a little device to place over the camera with an image that looks like the interior of a car with a random person's face visible. Doesn't even need to be a screen, just a backlit photo.
Then some features will likely not work
Time to get to work on emulating a driver sitting in the car doing nothing to fool the computer.
Like?
I remember saying video on youtube, a guy said his Toyota doesn't recognize his face in sunglasses and shows persistent warning message on the screen. I don't remember details, but possible that adaptive cc won't work, or you can't use infotainment due to the persistent message.
Brakes
:(
Like the ignition. Apparently Meta is subsidising the storage and assessment infrastructure for clip analysis
This is garbage.
The camera works in real time and doesn't store anything.
The car
The car won't start.
My utv detects the seatbelt. If you don't click in the seatbelt, it limits speed to like 10mph and limits the hp. Sometimes I'm tooling in the yard or getting it unstuck and I need full HP but also need to get in and out of the vehicle. Someone made a cute little bypass that took 5 minutes to install. Works like a charm. Now, when I'm driving on a road, I buckle up, but when I'm plowing the snowy driveway I don't.
How do I learn to be a FOSS developer so I can start working on firmware/software replacements for vehicles?
Couldn't you just sit on top of the buckled seat belt?
Shutup, nerd.
Edit: Truth is, I thought of that and tried it. I cant remember why, but for some reason it was uncomfortable. Or maybe I wanted the flexibility to buckle easily when I felt it was warranted. Something like that.
I have a John Deere skidsteer. To even start the machine you need to crawl over the loader bucket, turn around with your back to the machine, kind of fall back into the cab to sit down inside the tight cab, feet on both hydraulic peddles, buckle the shoulder/lap belt, close the front glass door to access the ignition, toggle a safety switch, then turn the ignition key to start it. A fighter cockpit has more room.
If for any reason, if you need/want to dismount from the machine you must reverse each step to shut down the machine to get out. If you do one thing out of order it immediately kills the engine and stops the machine. Imagine needing to do all that multiple times a day or even hour.
A single seatbelt to buckle ain't no thang.
***And yes, the machine is for sale........
Jumping straight to vehicles might be much. But you can definitely start hacking away at small iot devices or routers. They usually have poor/no security and are a great way to get your feet wet.
There are whole youtube channels dedicated to reverse engineering small consumer devices.
Right on. Thanks. I never expected to jump straight to vehicles, nor do I think one man is out there making the FOSS operating systems, so I guess I'm just wondering where I should start to be able to contribute to the effort in the near future.
The U.S. as well
Fuck this shit 100%
Score one more point for fucking bikes, Jesus...
Now about all those CCTVs
I get so tired of bikes being brought up every time a car is mentioned. They're not at all an option for me or anyone who lives near me, and millions of others.
I'm sorry to hear that and I don't mean to rub it in, but your local infrastructure isn't my problem. I do hope it improves, though.
Just for balance there are plenty of things about my region I hate, like our shitty voting laws and piss poor democratic representation, but you wouldn't catch me complaining to people who enjoy more direct democracy.
Are you also tired of being told that you are the one person responsible for choosing to live in a location that necessitates driving a car, or do you reckon it might be good to be told that a bit more, then?
I'm asking first, because I wouldn't want to tire you any more, just because the world hastily on its way to hell in a hand basket, what with climate change, and all the disastrous knock-on effects that follow from it.
I hope you have a pleasant commute.
I’m not who you replied to, but this is a stupid take.
My area doesn't have public transit to speak of, its semi-rural small town, and everything is in another town, so I’m forced to drive. Everywhere around here is like this. I explicitly do not have the option to move to a more urban area because I live in a very low cost of living area, which means very depressed wages, and I genuinely cant afford to move, much less live somewhere with walkable infrastructure or decent public transit, without better wages first. Because no, getting rid of everything and starting over isn’t an option, nor should it have to be.
And I didn't choose to be here in the first place, either. When you are born into a very low cost of living area, you often get stuck there or can only move somewhere even further behind, because wages are so depressed you can’t save enough to get into a better area. The only way you get out is if you can land a good job before moving, which is insanely difficult, since remote work usually scales to the local wages, and who can afford to travel for in-person interviews?
Just move is easy to say when you can bring home more than you pay in bills, or have enough in savings to cover a few months until you find work or whatever, and its really easy to say when you already live in an expensive area. But its not actually a practical option for many of us.
So idk about that other person, but yes, I’m fucking tired of being told to just move if I don't like how things are. Condescending out-of-touch bullshit, is what it is.
Lots of people arrive to the US with the clothes on their backs, not even speaking the language and manage to not only survive but thrive
If you want excuses you will always find them
I have had 2 uber drivers in the US who were recent immigrants.. Less than 2 years... Had plans to stay 3 more and return back to their countries to open businesses..
Lol yeah, like I wanna live like a refugee in my native country. And I’m wrong somehow for not being OK with that?
Get fucked with that shit, friend. I’m not willing to gamble what little I have on possibility, better infrastructure or not. Its not like that would change the regime I’m under or anything.
Only buying pre 2018 cars from now on, I will have a Toyota collection that will run forever
I'm in the US where this is coming soon enough. My car is a 2012 which seems like kind of a sweet spot, but it's not going to last forever especially with our winters and road salt and pot holes.
I didn't plan to buy a new car any time soon but have been thinking about my eventual next choice. All this BS has me wondering whether it's better to get something soon without the next level of surveillance, or wait a few years and see how bad it is in practice and how it can be disabled.
That 2012 I mentioned is fun to drive, has low mileage for its age, and is fuel efficient, plus I have renewed my love of working on my own vehicles after not doing so for a decade or two. I'm currently doing work on the brakes. Maybe I'll just have to try to make it live forever, and not give any more money to the whole damn industry as long as possible. That's the most economically and environmentally friendly option, after all.
Just a heads up: I have a 2026 GM. The infotainment doesn't work right and the key fob often isn't detected. Their solution is to blame my phone (even though it works with every other car and every other Bluetooth device; and a factory reset of my Pixel 9 only solved some of the infotainment problems and shouldn't have had to happen at all anyway). My father-in-law also has a 2026 Chevy and there are infotainment problems for him. Different models.
Tldr: avoid the 2026 GM vehicles.
Avoid all GM vehicles, they are directly responsible for the pathetic state of US public infrastructure and they have literally been caught valuing profits over their customers’ lives.
DONE, lol.
I kinda want to get something with a manual transmission again, so it will very likely be a japanese brand.
I have a car from 2023, and I think thats the last year before they started adding shit to the vara, like beeping when going over speed limit and filming the driver.
So if I were you, I would look at cars from that year now, and you hit the sweet spot of getting a 3 year old car for almost half the new price.
You won't be able to disable stuff, it will get worse and worse every year as drivers gets used to it.
Invest in some fluid film or other lanolin based undercoating, that way you can stop the road salt damage from getting any worse.
I did already get myself some Surface Shield which is exactly that kind of lanolin based protectant, after also reading about some of the more hardcore stuff like POR-15 that I'd worry could trap water or hide damage.
I've used it a bit on my car near where I have some wheels removed to work on the brakes, and tried it on some garden tools.
Impressions are very good and I totally plan to cover the underside of my car with this stuff when finishing up work on it. Just not the exhaust I imagine.
Surface shield is just as good or better. You know your stuff, good for you! I do at least one application before winter, and on my car with a little rust I do once more in the late spring as well. The stuff doesn't seem to harm rubber, so I go crazy and spray it all over with my little 5 gal air compressor and a woolwax gun. Beware, it makes future underside work much dirtier, but I much prefer that to battling rusty bolts.
It's not wether it's easily fooled or not. The thing is, I am not sure most of us agree with this regulation. So is this democratic after all?
And if it is, then people are dumb, stupid.
Politicians are fine with this because the cameras will just point at their chauffeurs.
For anyone thinking they can just cover it or something...
Those cameras are for detecting distracted and tired drivers. They run special AI models that track eye movent and other queues. Covering them will obviously be detected by so will be putting a picture in front of it.
When it detects it's disabled a warning light will light on the dashboard. For now it's not specifically forbidden to cover it but the warning light may mean issues when passing technical revisions. In case of an accident insurance may also treat it as a proof that you were at fault. For now it's all just speculation as the rules are new but most likely it will go this way.
A rasberry Pi with a small screen placed in front of the camera at the right distance playing a constant (lengthy) loop of you looking just fine while driving will become a necessity.
I doubt anyone will go that far. You have 3 realistic options:
This isn’t the 90s… we use lidar and other sensors in parallel to IR cameras. The old loop gag only works in Hollywood
I'd rather have the option for a factory installed dashcam or at least a mount for me to install one.
And those cars age out. Eventually your old used cars have this.
And by then, there'll be a bypass.
Or by then the surveillance system will break.
I bought a secondhand Ascent and since it relies on 3G it bitched about there being no network, then gave up. Radio and CD player both work fine though. That's all I need.
As long as you can get or make the parts it will last as long as you need. I have a feeling part fabrication is going to be a good business going forward.
And politicians in germany are wondering why the car industry is collapsing. Ain't nobody can afford those european cars if there are a gajillion unnecessary regulations making cars obnoxiously expensive. And slapping massive tarrifs on Chinese cars which are a lot cheaper kills the remaining incentive to buy a new car, especially when nowadays it is necessary to reduce the amount of ICE cars and accelerate adoption of EVs. Dumb fckn politicians.
Can they see my girlfriend giving me a blowjob?
Yes. They can detect it and may even sell/share that data.
This Mozilla report is from 2023, I assume things have gotten only worse since.
Yeah, can they see this guy's girlfriend giving us blowjobs? And who is paying for the gas? I mean, it's this guy's car presumably, unless his partner is just VERY accommodating. Either way though, I'm the guest in this scenario and shouldn't be expected to cover that.
Get the fuck out of my car, now!
You know what, this has gotten pretty hostile and weird, I think Julie and I would both feel better if you left the car.
Betcha it will be stream on the most popular porn site.
Same sort of thing coming to the US because of course.
I just bought an EV that was made before 2020. I'm going to learn all about rebuilding EV batteries.
You know you can just tape it?
They can easily set it up to prevent operation if they don't see your face.
But they probably can't prevent you from wearing sun glasses, a beard, a covid mask, and ear muffs.
Yeah IKR.
I have glasses and sometimes wear a facemask, and my driver awareness system does NOT like it at all. You can cancel the alert/notification, but for safety reasons, the car will not operate in hands-free mode unless it can clearly identify that there is a driver in the car watching the road.
Me either.
Just run a constant Garry's Mod stream blocking the camera
Yes, and then the car will slow to a stop.
Time to buy a Daimler-Benz W123 240D (OM616) with 53 kW (72 hp) and a 4-spd manual. Yep, that's all I need.
My 2021 car has this. it has no cellular data connection or significant internal storage and the camera just has what I assume is a very basic neural net that looks for signs of distraction. like the eye tracker modules some phones and laptops have. These are low-res greyscale IR cameras usually.
I'm OK with it, and it's helped me out a few times, though I know some cars are more aggressive and beep at you just for looking at your own mirrors.
Some cars however have full time cabin recording that you dont have much control over, and some do have full time data connections that could theoretically send some kind of snapshots on events, but they arent going to do full time video streaming or uploading large video files.
I dont like being constantly monitored. I dont want to normalize the lack of privacy.
my phones are pin or pattern only
I do a pass code, but yeah, no finger prints or shudders facial scans
Am i the only one using the simple slide up to unlock?
Honestly, I would guess you're one of a very small minority, yeah. Because phones get lost, stolen, or confiscated by fascist "law enforcement" pretty commonly. Or someone you know picks it up while you're gone.
Most people like a degree of privacy. Even my grandma has a pin on her phone.
Yeah I've noticed that most people are rather baffled when i say i have no passcode or anything on my phone.
I just find that the risk of any of the affirmationd things happening is low enough that it doesn't outweigh the annoyance that comes from entering passcodes tens of times a day.
But I'm not in the USA so risk profiles are slightly different.
313 million people have Meta accounts.
I would suggest to start practicing to say goodbye to privacy, bank accounts, etc etc etc etc etc, when your phone is stolen.
Bank account does have a passcode, mandatory. Steam as well. Privacy is kinda irrelevant, what's a random thief going to do with my messages or grocery list?
Good thing i have a phone that's not really marketable and thus not really tempting anyone to steal it.
But how likely is it that a phone gets stolen? Of course that might depend on a location, but locally that's an anomaly. So it's the old point of security feature itself becoming a bigger nuisance than the threat of whatever it's trying to protect me from.
Some simple patterns code can be very quick to do, and not much different from a slide up, while still keeping most people out.
Iphone SE's didnt have face unlock but still use the IR camera to scan your face every second.
Just because you don't use it doesn't mean it's not being used on you (apologies for breaking it to you)
Apologies for not using Apple products
Oh nah no need to apologise, their products haven't been good for decades. Merely making a point about how tech can be entirely hidden from the user
I just learned about internetless TVs that build mesh networks until one TV is found that can access the internet... that sounds like infiltrating a WiFi network and should be illegal.
Wait until you hear about the facial recognition and expression reading cameras built into the fast food 'order here' screens
If it really was a low res camera that didn't phone home, save data, and was difficult to hack into, for me personally the benefits would outweigh the (limited) privacy malus.
Everyone thinks they're a good driver, but collisions still happen, and no one deserves to be killed by someone in a car.
If it was a closed circuit that had no way of sending info to anyone anywhere that would be one thing, but data is the new gold and, I dont trust governments or private businesses enough to give them access to a camera on me whenever I am driving.
Me neither. It's a big if.
Then stay off public roads. Traffic lights, stop signs are just THE MAN telling us what to do.
What a false equivalence...
Yeah they definitely aren't going to record you and share with coworkers for their entertainment. https://www.reuters.com/technology/tesla-workers-shared-sensitive-images-recorded-by-customer-cars-2023-04-06/
yet another reason why I dont like Teslas, or honestly any vehicles with onboard video recording and cellular connections.
how has it helped you?
The only thing I can think of is that it detected you were sleepy when you knew that and had already chosen to continue driving
There are definitely times where ive thought I'm alert enough to drive, and then something happened where I realized that no, I was not.
Easy enough to switch drivers or pull over and nap.
What happens when you wear sunglasses?
Believe it or not, straight to jail.
a large metal blade unfolds from the headrest and severs your head is the safe assumption.
What's the make and model of the car?
That you know of. Pretty easy to hide those things amongst all the rest of the electronics.
What? an actual fact?
Nononono.....every driver will now be monitored by a committee in China.
The same people who hate on this also like to drive drunk or while watching tiktok.
Kind of a good idea if (and that's a big fucking if) the videos just were properly protected. I mean how else could you prove cell phone use after a crash?
They don't have the know-how and interest to protect the videos though so fuck this.
Facerec-defeating tattoos are a thing, just throwing that out there
Does literally nothing for this though, they already know who you are.
Brexit caused many failures but if it gets me away from shit like this then it'll have been worth it.
As if the UK isn't implementing shit like this on its own, years before the EU does lol
Given Englands track record of spying on the public (London etc.), I would not be surprised.
now you know why Brexit passed a referendumb.
We probably started the ball rolling before fucking off
Possibly. It's very much lose-lose for us. Both the UK government and EU seem to want to remove any shred of privacy from all areas of life.
No car maker is gonna create a separate model for the UK market
They pretty much already do by making RHD cars.
Britain follows the same design rules as the EU, otherwise foreign manufacturers could undercut European cars in the British market. And if that happened, British made cars would be subject to the same tiny import quotas that non-EU cars have to comply with.
Distracted Driver detection is already really common in cars sold these days, and it's a good security feature.
If you're not comfortable with it, you can always opt to not operate heavy machinery - there are other ways to get around.
Yeah we are not pro loose cannon we are pro privacy and if they cannot secure or explain the technology then fuck them all.
Why would they send all the footage and not just clips on demand? Why would they constantly record or monitor all cars, rather than just ones of special interest? Why would they need a 1080p stream when for a use case like this a much lower resolution at a fraction of the bitrate will be more than sufficient?
My guy have you not heard of 4G and 5G?
AI training data, or because the government clandestinely told them to.
Good thing I live where cell service is extremely spotty and has no coverage.
So you think they are hiding an undetectable iPhone in your car for free?
Hiding? Modern vehicles straight up have cell modems and advertise it, look up Toyota Connected Services for example.
They aren't giving you an eSim for free.
for the amount of money they would profit just from selling that data to insurance companies is enough to cover a fucking esim.
also, i forgot that cars are free these days and not thousands of dollars.
Are you saying they have a secret program where they illegally take your data and sell it to insurance companies?
i am suggesting that doing so would be profitable.
i don't believe this would be illegal.
it's run by aliens and lizard people.
That's why they're taking the video.
So they are taking a video of you and in exchange giving you $10-50/month worth of data access?
Data doesn't cost that much.
Cell companies can give those out for free if they want to... What they offer to consumers is absolutely not the same as what they might offer to a car company at bulk rates. They could even have the car store data and wait for low usage times to upload, it would cost cell providers almost nothing
They might even leverage it to use up bandwidth so they don't have to sell to secondary carriers if they wanted to one day...
Are you saying they have a secret program where they illegally take your data and to pass this data around without your permission they have a secret bulk deal with telecoms peoviders
Not exactly secret or illegal, they are actively selling driving data to insurance companies already. Stuff like speeding, hard breaking, etc.
It's not widely advertised, but it's less secret and more "hidden in the fine print". It's right there in the open though
They don't call it illegal, but yes.
The actual mobile broadband hardware for your phone is like the size of a dime. Also, if you have a little "Shark Fin" on the top of your car, you might consider looking in there...
and who is going to pay for petabytes of data storage very week?
I think most of the privacy-violating and abuse-facilitating scenarios that we're all too plausibly imagining could be served by the transmission and storage of even a single photograph per drive.
All of the existing consumer-surveillance tech seems to be focused on 1) Finding ways to make your attention more valuable to advertisers and 2) Selling information on your movements and proclivities to interested governments.
Pictures from inside a car could fit right in with those priorities. They could tell car makers, advertisers, insurers, and governments a lot about who really drives the car the most, that person's demographics, taste in clothing, driving ability, distractability, fatigue levels, health issues, etc.
I should be clear: I'm absolutely speculating. But I don't know how anyone might look at the landscape that exists today, with surveillance in our phones, our televisions, our music players, and our cars, and think that such speculation is far-fetched or unrealistic.
They sell driving habits and other informatics to insurance companies at the very least, this is publicly known.
Many TVs these days form a mesh network using the TV of your neighbor, or his own neighbors until they find a device with WiFi access in order to call home.
No reason why cars can't do that now that they've been made into computers with wheels. A trend that I absolutely despise.
wtf????
Your comment literally melted my brain cells.
Have the car store its own data. You can fit 500GB on a micro SD card, think of the storage you could fit in an entire car.
Lower the framrate. 1080p at 60fps, but anything above 30 looks smooth, and you can go all the way down to 12-14 frames and still have pretty good video.
Run local event detection on the car, and only have it upload small segments of video when it detects certain events.
Allow a control device to request video that are stored on the car the next time the car checks in.
I think limiting the data collection in this way would allow full surveillance when desired, but not require a lot of overhead on the network.
Ultimately, the "limiting factor" for these kinds of systems is the human element. You can only hire so many people to review so much video in a given time period. AI is changing this, but even then, you can only hire so many people to review events flagged by AI in a given time period too.
All these fears and conjecture typically comes from paranoid Americans. In non shitholes, they have General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the EU AI Act. Essentially a HIPAA for personal data identification.
In Europe, the goal is to reduce:
Intoxicated driving
Distracted driving
Auto theft.
But Americans want to believe they are so important there is a committee of people in government watching their fascinating daily lives.
Homeland Security takes in petabytes of data every month and does nothing with it.