Mozilla: It’s Official: Cars Are the Worst Product Category We Have Ever Reviewed for Privacy

Posted Sep 6, 2023 19:02 UTC (Wed) by farnz (subscriber, #17727)
In reply to: Mozilla: It’s Official: Cars Are the Worst Product Category We Have Ever Reviewed for Privacy by dsommers
Parent article: Mozilla: It’s Official: Cars Are the Worst Product Category We Have Ever Reviewed for Privacy

The trouble with making it opt-in is twofold:

It's a life-saving feature. If you don't opt-in, then you get left to die when other people get rescued, which is bad publicity for the car maker and for the government.
Most people don't get their cars in a factory-fresh state - the dealership who sells it to you does a pre-delivery inspection, where they get to opt-in to things they think you'd like. This is something that they'd always opt-in to, since if it saves your life, you might come back and buy from them again, while if you die in a serious single-vehicle crash, you're not going to buy another car.

You could make it opt-out, however. Practically, because of point 2 above, if you make it opt-in, it'll become opt-out in the marketplace, anyway (unless it's opt-in once for life of vehicle).

Mozilla: It’s Official: Cars Are the Worst Product Category We Have Ever Reviewed for Privacy

Posted Sep 6, 2023 19:10 UTC (Wed) by dsommers (subscriber, #55274) [Link] (4 responses)

These are all solvable.

If this feature is disabled: Show a 5 second warning each time you start the car, with a possibility to get to the right settings screen.

When the car is new or being factory reset, present a screen when the car is started (or after a couple of days) and ask about this setting. Or if this feature is enabled (the previous owner enabled this), the car could see that the driving pattern is quite different (different hours during the day, different routes, speed, etc) and could then re-trigger the info screen about this feature.

Even today's cars with such tracking capabilities will sometimes ask you to approve new Privacy Policies or changes in some ToS.

In regards to "bad publicity"; I don't buy that. The car manufacturer can easily use this in their market response as "Unfortunately, in this incident the rescue team got information too late since the user of the car had explicitly disabled the automatic accident reporting. We recommend car drivers to let this feature be enabled to better assist if you happen to have an accident".

Mozilla: It’s Official: Cars Are the Worst Product Category We Have Ever Reviewed for Privacy

Posted Sep 6, 2023 19:24 UTC (Wed) by farnz (subscriber, #17727) [Link] (3 responses)

None of those are solutions, and several of them are bad UX, likely to result in excess deaths.

For the first, you do not want to train drivers to ignore warnings from the car, since they are usually safety-critical. Thus, you can't put a warning up when you start the car, because the car needs to reserve warnings at this point for "do not drive the car at all"; at best, you might get a 1 second window included in the manufacturer's splash screen as the car computers boot, but before the car is started and driveable, but with EVs that window is going away.

Anything you do when the car is new is something the dealer can cover in their PDI. If you trigger it after people have been driving for some days, you have a problem - either it's a trigger for something I know is in place, and it's irritation (see previous point about not training me to ignore warnings from the car), or it's too late, because I've already been driving with the car in this case.

And this is not a "tracking capability". This is something that, per regulations, is only to deploy when the car has been in a sufficiently bad accident - typically one in which an airbag would have deployed (bearing in mind that some airbags can be turned off for child seat safety reasons).

The bad publicity is why this is coming in, and why car manufacturers brought suitable systems to market even without regulatory mandate - the grieving family of someone who died in the crash (thus can't confirm that they turned it off) saying "my son wouldn't have turned it off - the car manufacturer is lying" is a very emotive scene, and is going to override anything the manufacturer can say about the system being configurable.

Mozilla: It’s Official: Cars Are the Worst Product Category We Have Ever Reviewed for Privacy

Posted Sep 6, 2023 21:13 UTC (Wed) by brunowolff (guest, #71160) [Link] (2 responses)

Unfortunately it probably is enabling tracking. Most likely the cell modem will be on when the car is on and will be pinging cell towers even if it is not trying to make a call. Cell tower pings are logged and telcoms sell that information to data brokers.

Mozilla: It’s Official: Cars Are the Worst Product Category We Have Ever Reviewed for Privacy

Posted Sep 7, 2023 9:27 UTC (Thu) by farnz (subscriber, #17727) [Link] (1 responses)

Less likely to be happening in the EU than in the rest of the world, because such a sale of data is unlikely to meet any of the 6 tests for a lawful basis under GDPR.

Mozilla: It’s Official: Cars Are the Worst Product Category We Have Ever Reviewed for Privacy

Posted Nov 15, 2023 0:30 UTC (Wed) by Rudd-O (guest, #61155) [Link]

The sale of the data isn't the problem. The problem is the tracking. We all knew how that went during corona times — governments around the globe just gave themselves permission to use that data, because it was already being collected.

Mozilla: It’s Official: Cars Are the Worst Product Category We Have Ever Reviewed for Privacy

Posted Sep 29, 2023 1:46 UTC (Fri) by ghane (guest, #1805) [Link]

> This is something that they'd always opt-in to, since if it saves your life, you might come back
> and buy from them again, while if you die in a serious single-vehicle crash, you're not going to buy another car.

Citation needed :-)