- cross-posted to:
- privacy@lemmy.ml
“I dont want a chinese car because it would just spy on me”
We need to scrap the entire US government and start over.
It’s 1984 and no one cares
Looks like I’ll need to start stockpiling old camrys and corollas in addition to hard drives, routers, motherboards, ram, dumb TVs, flip phones/whatever else they’re taking away this year.
I can’t wait to have to buy active countermeasures for this shit. /s
You’d think more libertarian types would be more in favor of walkable cities, biking, and such.
So… ICE will know both your location and face every time you get in your car? Yeah, I’m sure this won’t result in a genocide. /s
Bought a 2000 Honda Civic precisely because I don’t want to be spied upon.
Spank my ass cause everything else already does, so it makes my effort almost completely moot.
The day the vehicle I paid for doesn’t work because a goddamn sensor thinks I’m not fit to drive is the day I break my foot off in someone’s ass.
Fuck this dystopian shit show we’re creating for ourselves.
Vote better.
Chinese EVs it is, nonIronically safer and more trustworthy than American products
How about limiting the insanely bright headlights first?
as someone who has dealt with over 20 years of pulling victims, alive and dead, from crashes caused by drunks (am firefighter not terrible driver…) I can say this won’t help shit. Just give more data (profit) to corporations and be used in rights violating ways.
It’s never actually about safety
Yup, same old “think of the children” excuse. It’s a carrot on a string so you don’t look at the stick.
Nothing is perfect, but the GSR2 for example has undoubtedly saved many lives. The problem isn’t with the technology, but that you don’t have any real privacy laws in the US.
Like the EU is any better. Last I checked, France is passing the same kind of bullshit over and over, too.
There actually is a problem with the technology in this case. It sounds like what they’re proposing is eye tracking, which is not reliable with some eye shapes, eye makeup, dry eye, etc. and any markers they use to try to detect drunkenness would also trip for people with legitimate eye problems. Anecdotally, I once drove a Tesla and it locked me out of cruise control because the tracker thought I was falling asleep. Imagine if the car refused to start at all!
Oh privacy died in the United States decades ago.
Nobody cares because we’re all fat, happy and comfortable.
Once rights are taken, violence is the only way to get them back. History is a wonderful teacher.
Why do you think this will not help?
because drunks find a way to make trouble. they’ll get around the tech glitches in the imperfect deployments. they’ll be alert enough to trick it. etc. they’ll drink while driving and the system won’t see that and the impairment won’t be recognized till its too late. (i’m focused on system concerns because I am also a software engineer and know the realities of large scale tech like this.)
to counter the tech I think the punishments for impaired driving (including cell phone use) should be harsh and without kindness, if you cause another person harm. Federally. With no return of your privileges once convicted.
While I am very much anti-government, if I am not going to be allowed to “follow up” with someone who drank and ran over a family member, etc… then we might as well push the lawmakers to do their jobs with the laws we already have. Not make new ones that are clearly there to profit tech and not save lives.
With no return of your privileges once convicted.
All that does is create the problem of driving unlicensed, so now you imprison nonviolent offenders (assuming they aren’t convicted of vehicular homicide type of charges).
I understand the sentiment, but the law of unintended consequences rears its ugly head here very quickly.
what’s nonviolent about having harmed someone while choosing to drive impaired?
also i 100% agree public transportation should be improved too.
but it’s disgusting how many times I see folks who have multiple accidents causing harm to others and are still allowed to drive.
It is readily proven that punishment does not work as a deterrent mechanism against criminal behavior, including drunk driving. Most crime is done on impulse, with no consideration of future consequences, regardless of how impactful those consequences may be.
The solution is proper public transit and urban design going back to focusing on pedestrian-centric instead of being car-centric. But that’s a much larger societal issue and unfortunately people don’t like the effort that it requires so they incessantly search for a quick fix “solution” that just puts a bandaid over the problem instead of solving it.
The law is doing its job, the law wasn’t created to help people, but to serve the interests of the ruling class. Naive to think these new policies aren’t the law doing what it was always intended to do.
while this is a set of fair points, my thoughts were not on punishment as a deterrent; it was on punishment to simply remove them from the road permanently.
i agree safety tech is good. seat belts to drowsy eye tech … all good. what I don’t see is the tech for drink driving specifically being tenable in a for profit nightmare world we live in. Subscription for the interlocking lapse? car is offline. Etc.
If they could make it offline, serviceable and calibrated as simply as an oil change, and buy once tech… cool.
Removing them from the road is a complicated issue with the stated issues of public transit access being limited. Limiting someone permanently from driving in some places might as well be a death sentence depending on their finances, which is also a big issue with punishment as a deterrent. The point of punishment is inherently to coerce people’s actions by way of threatening them with socially harmful consequences enforced by the state to deter them from acting in specific ways as dictated by law. Revoking their license and removing them from the road is the threat that is supposed to deter people from drunk driving. Yet, removing an offender does nothing to prevent more drunk driving from happening, thus not solving the issue at hand, as drunk driving is an impulse decision made in the moment (usually being a result of how convenient and accessible alternative means of traveling to the intended destination are) and not an action that is made out of habit or direct choice, though there are exceptions to this but those are also much larger issues usually, like mental health and such.
That’s all a much larger discussion, though, and let’s not digress.
The issue at hand is with privacy and data collection with cameras that are recording in modern cars with onboard computers connected to cellular networks via SIM cards. I would not put it past modern, capitalist driven companies to not utilize this for those ends under the guise of it being for “public safety”.
They can claim it is offline but so long as the vehicle computer that it is recording to is connected, which most modern ones are, then it is a privacy vulnerability risk that I absolutely believe modern companies will abuse; the most probable excuse being “analytics data collection for improving the device operations”. There are ways around it, like disabling the modem, but that puts unnecessary burden on the consumer which may void warranties and the like.
Last year I drove my parent’s car which is equipped with one of these cameras that determine if the driver is distracted or dozing. And I can say for certain that it works. I honestly wish that my car had this sort of a system.
I view this tech like a padlock. Sure some people will do whatever they can to get around it, but it keeps honest people honest. If it can reduce deaths on the road from drunk and tired drivers even by a little bit then isn’t that worth it?
I’m not sure what you mean by not being able to follow up… Driving drunk and killing someone is already punished harshly, and you can even follow up civilly; it’s called a wrongful death suit.
Last year I drove my parent’s car which is equipped with one of these cameras that determine if the driver is distracted or dozing. And I can say for certain that it works.
I rented two different modern (2015-2016) Mercedes SUVs. They both had systems that detected tired/inattentive driving. I was neither but after several hours on the road both vehicles would alert that it was time to take a break with a nice little coffee icon. I was conversing with a passenger, driving fine, not wandering between lanes/etc… The first time I kind of doubted myself but subsequent notifications both the passenger and myself were agreeing that we had no idea what it was upset about.
The newer car had another sensor that would get upset if your grip on the steering wheel got too light. That was kind of neat to see how much leeway it’d give you before it got antsy.
Probably because you were driving for a few hours. That makes sense. You may not feel it but driving is an active task that takes more effort than just sitting in a chair.
I would much rather have this system have false positives rather than not have it at all.
It doesn’t work on everyone. These systems have trouble with certain eye shapes, eye makeup, etc.
Honest people don’t need the government to spy on them to not drive drunk though?
What about their proposed solution requires any of this data to leave the vehicle?
The law says nothing about keeping the data in the vehicle, so it will 100% be sent outside the vehicle. Most modern cars already transmit your data so why would they change anything?
You are right. Because the law says nothing about the requirements. They haven’t decided on them yet. Come back when they propose something.
https://www.gadgetreview.com/federal-surveillance-tech-becomes-mandatory-in-new-cars-by-2027
Can we post the original sources and not middle men?
This is fucked. But aren’t “passenger vehicles” actually quite rare? I think most (environmental and safety) regulation is on passenger vehicles, which is why auto manufacturers try and sell so many trucks and SUVs since they don’t count as “passenger vehicles”. I could be wrong and this mandate is going to target all consumer vehicles.
Fuck all cars and our American car brained culture. But also fuck this legislation.
They will really do anything before investing in public transit
Automobile-centric infrastructure was such a colossal societal fuck-up.
Bad for personal health, physical safety, household finances, and the environment. Automobiles are not a symbol of freedom, they are a symbol of dependence.
While I agree about automobile centric structure, when rural living automobiles are absolutely the ticket to freedom. It’s a shame more populace areas get designed around maintaining dependence on cars.
I think the point is choice. Even those living in suburban and urban areas have a difficult time opting out of car-dependence.
If you choose to live rural, I would say that automobiles are part and parcel to that decision. It’s just the nature of low population density.
Except for the thousands of years that humanity was able to exist in low population density towns and villages completely fine without the need for personal vehicles.
That statement just isn’t true in the slightest. It’s only part of rural living because that’s how it has been designed in roughly the last century of human society.
There is no materially restrictive reason it has to be this way. It is entirely a problem that is artificially created.
Except for the thousands of years that humanity was able to exist in low population density towns and villages completely fine without the need for personal vehicles.
Should we go back to the horse and buggy?

Love the quote, not the context. It’s a legitimate question. We got ride of horses in rural areas due to cars. In North America and Canada in particular the distances are so vast that rural public transportation is not really feasible
It’s only a ticket to freedom because rural living is structured like ass. It’s a bandaid on a bigger, festering issue of poor city planning.
This is true in many cases, but for very rural living (eg people living on farms) there’s not much you can do about car-centric design
Except this is entirely false of a claim. Human society worked for thousands of years before the car. European countries prove it is possible as well with their rural public transit services. It is absolutely not a necessity. There is no reason to design our cities and towns around personal vehicles being the primary method of transportation.
I agree with you wholeheartedly that car centric urban design is a bad thing. Truly, I do. But in very rural places in North America, you either need a car or a horse and buggy, or something, and the car seems like an obvious upgrade. Just because they can do public transit in rural areas in Europe does not mean we can do it here. Because the size comparisons aren’t even close. European countries with good rural transportation are dealing with significantly less landmass than North American rural communities are.
To put things in perspective, Denmark is 42,947km2, and Canada is 9,984,670 km2. That means that you could fit almost 232 and a half Denmarks in Canada. Despite this about half of the population of Canada in the Quebec City-Windsor corridor, which is only 1,150 km-long, and about 90% of Canadians live within 100 miles of the US border. That means that the vast majority of Canada is totally rural, and there are often vast distances between towns and First Nations. It is simply not economically feasible to build rail lines to connect all these places, let along sending out regular train services to these places.
To really hammer the point home, consider Nunavut, a territory in Canada. It is 2,093,190 km2. For perspective, Ukraine (the second-largest country in Europe after Russia) is 603,549km2. That means you could almost put three and a half Ukraine’s in Nunavut (and again, Ukraine is the second-largest country in Europe!). And Nunavut is extremely rural, with a population of 36,858 (and Ukraine has 32283000 people, meaning that Nunavut has 875.87 times fewer people than Ukraine). The largest population centre in Nunavut is Iqaluit, which has only 7,429 people.
So putting aside, for a second, the extreme logistical challenges with creating railways in Nunavut (due to terrain, ice, etc), how can we possibly build public transit to connect the entire territory? When we are dealing with places this vast, and this rural, we simply not economically feasible to build rural public transit. Even reality wealthy countries like Canada cannot afford to fund megaprojects like that. And again, this is just Nunavut, 1 of 13 provinces / territories. When you look at the entirety of Canada, it is simply not realistic to have rural public transit servicing the entire country. I’m sure it’s possible in small countries like Denmark, but not here.
But that doesn’t change the fact that, within cities at least, we should of course do our best to get rid of car centric design.
Only because we have made society this way. There is ZERO material necessities that stipulate that it must be this way. None, absolutely nadda.
Other countries have done it. The size argument is bullshit, China is able to do it and has equivalent landmass. No excuses. The entire point of trains was to traverse these vast expanses. Trains are what drove the Westward expansion of American society. So arguing that trains can’t handle those distances is absurd.
Also, public transit is more than just trains, it’s also walkability and bus services. Cars can exist in society without them being the primary method of transportation.
“Economically feasible” is a bullshit excuse because we create the economy. If the economy can’t meet the needs of people then the economy is what needs to change, not force people to go without BASIC SERVICES. Money is not a materially limiting factor.
Humanity existed without cars (or a horse and buggy since someone made that flippant response) for hundreds of years and we absolutely can restructure our societies to go back to being pedestrian centric in both urban AND rural locations. It is entirely possible and there is no legitimate excuse not to. Economically feasible as stated is not a legitimate excuse.
Except there is absolutely no reason it has to be like that in rural areas. Period. At all. Even a little. Look at China (or if you still believe the NED puts out legitimate stories, Denmark or Sweden or Norway) which has public transit to nearly all rural areas at least a couple times a week, and inter-village public transit in pretty much all villages that have more than a dozen people.
Busses are more efficient than independent vehicle ownership in all settings. All of them.
More efficient, sure, but their argument was about freedom, which is just a different dimension. In an extreme example, private jets provide more freedom than public transportation does, even though it’s obvious which one is worse for the environment, more expensive, more intrusive, etc.
Except that’s not freedom.
It is not freedom to have a, and this really isn’t an exaggeration, more than 10,000x personal cost for transportation. It’s freedom for the rich, but the rich aren’t a part of society and cannot be generalized into society.
It is not freedom to have to personally rely on the US to do the right thing.
It is not freedom to take on the massive legal and financial risk that is driving a death machine.
It is only freedom in the most infantile, ‘Anarkiddie’ sense of the word freedom. The ‘Hurr durr we’d all be more free if we had less laws’ kind of idiocracy most humans abandon by the age of 15 when they learn about the concept of government.
Your point is good up until you start naively slandering Anarchism out of nowhere. Way to absolutely undermine yourself there.
That’s what marxists do here. Note how he can’t even say anything about it beyond his random slander.
Wanna bet he thinks anarchists need left unity too?
What anarchist supports car ownership bullshit in America?
Yup, drunkards in a tram are annoying but they almost never kill people and cause tens of thousands in damage.
almost never
thank you for that almost. jackasses like me see words like always and never as challenges and this is not one i want to take









