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What kind of data is my new car collecting?

theglobeandmail.com

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Re: What kind of data is my new car collecting?

#71
post #65
post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You would think so, but afaik there's almost no older smart-phones around (think 4-5 years-old) because they're expensive to repair, that is if you can repair them at all. That's why you don't see less-wealthy people commuting to their jobs in an early 2000s Mercedes S-Klass or in a VW Phaeton (even though they'd be able to purchase such vehicles at today's prices), but instead they use an older Honda or a Toyota or…

Smartphones aren't cars. Cars are much bigger, therefore easier to make [somewhat] modular. Furthermore, the recent hype with smartphones was smaller, thinner, and more glue.

To judge by what I've seen lately cars have started becoming full of tablets and tablet-like screens, those things will be expensive if not impossible to repair in 10-years' time.

Re: What kind of data is my new car collecting?

#72

> “There’s just massive amounts of data being collected, and if you want the service, you have to agree to it. And people do agree to it, and they have relatively little control over things,” Scassa says. I'm curious what this will do to the used car market in 10-15 years. Say the original owner consented to all this data tracking. They go to sell the car to buy a new one, and the 2nd owner does not agree to the trac…

Anecdotally, I can tell you my 6 year old Nissan Leaf asks me every time I start up the car if it can send data back to Nissan. The 2g radio doesn't actually have a network to connect to, so it's kind of a moot point.

I imagine it'll be like any useful service, once you turn off the data collection, it suddenly loses a bunch of useful features

Re: What kind of data is my new car collecting?

#73

Yeah, my last car purchase was an exercise in locating a vehicle without any "smart" technologies. Car manufacturers are the last corporate group I'd trust with anything they are not heavily regulated to provide, such as basic safety measures such as the seat belts they fought for years not to provide. I plan on this being a car I nurse forever, as it is going to be a generation of extremely intrusive data collection…

TVs, too.

Get your dumb 4K monitors here: http://www.atyme.net/product-category/tv-line-up/uhd4k/ Before they stop selling them without "smart" tech.

Re: What kind of data is my new car collecting?

#74

One thing that's interesting to me is, modern cars know (relatively accurately) whether you're speeding or not. They have GPS and a database of speed limits. Also depending on what's in the car, they may know who was driving it. How long before a speed safety campaign starts arguing that car manufacturers should be handing over information about people breaking the law in their cars to law enforcement...

Talk to automotive guys and you will learn that the most current map with this kind of information is in minimum 6 month old. But most of the time this information is 2 to 3 years behind.

This is true for all current map providers.

Re: What kind of data is my new car collecting?

#75

> “There’s just massive amounts of data being collected, and if you want the service, you have to agree to it. And people do agree to it, and they have relatively little control over things,” Scassa says. I'm curious what this will do to the used car market in 10-15 years. Say the original owner consented to all this data tracking. They go to sell the car to buy a new one, and the 2nd owner does not agree to the trac…

Swings and roundabouts in the EU: GDPR should clobber all the nonconsensual data collection, but there is also the "eCall" mandate that will require your car to phone in location to the emergency services in the event of a crash.

(What happens when an EU national drives one of the American surveillancemobiles? Sounds like a straightforward GDPR violation to me, although good luck getting that resolved)

Re: What kind of data is my new car collecting?

#76

Yeah, my last car purchase was an exercise in locating a vehicle without any "smart" technologies. Car manufacturers are the last corporate group I'd trust with anything they are not heavily regulated to provide, such as basic safety measures such as the seat belts they fought for years not to provide. I plan on this being a car I nurse forever, as it is going to be a generation of extremely intrusive data collection…

What car did you end up buying?

Re: What kind of data is my new car collecting?

#77
post #71
post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Smartphones aren't cars. Cars are much bigger, therefore easier to make [somewhat] modular. Furthermore, the recent hype with smartphones was smaller, thinner, and more glue.

To judge by what I've seen lately cars have started becoming full of tablets and tablet-like screens, those things will be expensive if not impossible to repair in 10-years' time.

The future is now.

Sourcing a CANBUS module for a 10+yo car is already a roll of the dice. Take all the modules that are required for the vehicle to operate, are matched to the VIN, can't be re-flashed, aren't available aftermarket and aren't made by the OEM anymore and anything that breaks where those sets intersect turns the vehicle into a brick. The list gets a little longer every day and won't get shorter until we get right to repair legislation with teeth.

You can drive a car without all the fancy electronic doodads. Everyone who drives a 20+yo car does it every day. You can't drive a vehicle that won't start because it doesn't see some quasi-essential (e.g. ABS) module talking on the bus.

Re: What kind of data is my new car collecting?

#78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

and you'll pay a very large premium for it, too, unfortunately, since the company has to close off another revenue stream.

At what point does data become so accessible as to be worthless?

IMO the better question is when data becomes too expensive to be worth it.

There are currently no serious financial downsides to scraping, hoarding, selling, or leaking customer data. There is huge financial upside to doing or risking all of those things.

Companies' data policies may be user-hostile, but they're economically rational.

Data becomes "worthless" when the average joe's phone number is worth $0.003 to marketers, but there's a $500 fine for leaking it, allowing access from an internal team for purposes not specified in a granular opt-in form, or for being found to possess it after its deletion was requested. Routine third party audits are mandatory if you want to interact with other serious players in your industry.

For all the ways that banking and healthcare are hellish, they've at least got the semblance of teeth on stuff like this.

We'll know it's working right when companies spend the same effort to avoid hosting your data that they spend on collecting it today.

Re: What kind of data is my new car collecting?

#79
post #75

> “There’s just massive amounts of data being collected, and if you want the service, you have to agree to it. And people do agree to it, and they have relatively little control over things,” Scassa says. I'm curious what this will do to the used car market in 10-15 years. Say the original owner consented to all this data tracking. They go to sell the car to buy a new one, and the 2nd owner does not agree to the trac…

Swings and roundabouts in the EU: GDPR should clobber all the nonconsensual data collection, but there is also the "eCall" mandate that will require your car to phone in location to the emergency services in the event of a crash. (What happens when an EU national drives one of the American surveillancemobiles? Sounds like a straightforward GDPR violation to me, although good luck getting that resolved)

Don't really see how eCall is related to the data collection?

A potential privacy issue yes, but much less so than the data collection.

Re: What kind of data is my new car collecting?

#80
post #29

One thing that's interesting to me is, modern cars know (relatively accurately) whether you're speeding or not. They have GPS and a database of speed limits. Also depending on what's in the car, they may know who was driving it. How long before a speed safety campaign starts arguing that car manufacturers should be handing over information about people breaking the law in their cars to law enforcement...

I also suspect that in the near future insurance companies will demand higher premiums from drivers who commute on more "dangerous" roads (i.e. roads on which statistically speaking more accidents happen). The companies already have easy-enough access to most of the drivers' GPS data, they certainly do know the GPS locations of most of today's accidents (via Waze-like services), I'm surprised why they haven't already…

In fact there are insurers right now, which give a discount of up to 20% if you share your data with them and if you "follow the rules" like not driving so fast, not doing so much acceleration, …

The problem is, if more and more people switching to those insurances it becomes very expansive for people who mind their privacy.

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