Texas sues GM for unlawfully collecting and selling drivers' private data [pdf] • Hacker News Board

Re: Texas sues GM for unlawfully collecting and selling drivers' private data [pdf]

#241

Post by 0xEF » Thu, Aug 15, 2024, 8:20 AM UTC

ericmay wrote: post #152

stainablesteel wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

its not just that i don't want electronics built into cars i don't want data coming from my car i don't need a phone to be built into my car i don't need navigation to be built into my car they need to stay in their lane we need anti-enshittification laws

The best way to combat this is walking and bike lanes. With no alternative to cars for most people you will see this kind of behavior continue. Trying to pit automakers against each other on this topic and others is the misdirection. They want to distract you from wanting alternatives so that you don’t even need to have a spying car in the first place.

I am with you, but the power that Big Auto and Big Oil wield in this realm makes it impossible to foster change unless consumers start collectively organizing. Good luck with that. I hate to say it, but that war feels already lost in the US. There is hope elsewhere, perhaps, but sadly, the US is shackled to their cars and trucks by the civil engineering that resulted in suburbia.

Re: Texas sues GM for unlawfully collecting and selling drivers' private data [pdf]

#242

Post by zo1 » Thu, Aug 15, 2024, 8:22 AM UTC

chefandy wrote: post #230

khc wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Jail for executives who approve or have knowledge of illegal activities sounds good to me. I suspect one possible outcome is many people wouldn't want to take the risk to become an executive, and the percentage of executives who wouldn't mind taking risks of going to jail will increase, which is not a desirable outcome.

A far more direct consequence of the current situation is that these executives just do whatever the hell they want to maximize their profits at everybody else's expense. Without punishment enough to make it unprofitable, dishonesty only has incentives, on both business and personal level. I just don't see that twice-removed latent effect having worse consequences for society than the base problem. Not by a long shot…

This is the kind of thing I expect and want investigative journalists to write about and quiz politicians about non-stop, all the time. Instead they interview them about vacuous things like "ice cream", non-committal questions about policies, "initiatives" like DEI and corporate governance, and stuff so far removed from any concrete instance (like yours) that they can answer in vague non-answers that sound like answers but answer nothing. And of course, never a follow-up, unless it's a politician they don't like, in which case the journalist gets visibly annoyed and angry (wtf?) and tries to call them out on "misinformation". The entire thing is a farce, whilst real-world people on the ground suffer.

Re: Texas sues GM for unlawfully collecting and selling drivers' private data [pdf]

#243

Post by ClumsyPilot » Thu, Aug 15, 2024, 8:22 AM UTC

pc86 wrote: post #106

kube-system wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also, the surveillance is bad because of the inherent breach of privacy.

I think these systems are bad and I think vehicle manufacturers piping data directly to insurance companies should be illegal whether you consent or not. That being said, "but privacy" has always struck me as a weird argument. There is no reasonable expectation of privacy when a vehicle with a particular license plate is at a particular intersection or on a particular public street. Some jurisdictions extend some pri…

If I personally attach a GPS tracker to your car or follow you everywhere with a camera, I will get charged and thrown in prison despite it all being in public. This behaviour will be considered stalking and threatening.

People on here argue about laws as if they are universal, but if you actually try to do the exact same thing as these companies do, you will find out the difference very quickly.

Re: Texas sues GM for unlawfully collecting and selling drivers' private data [pdf]

#244

Post by zo1 » Thu, Aug 15, 2024, 8:28 AM UTC

gustavus wrote: post #198

candiddevmike wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The owners of big companies include lots of pension plans, index funds, etc. Hurting those owners, who didn't have any say in the bad decisions, is probably not what we want. I mean... Shareholders are ultimately responsible for the company, they elect the board etc. If shareholders were impacted by this, maybe it would make more folks think twice about "passive investing"?

I love when people bring this up. I passively invest by which I mean I take a couple of bucks every couple of paychecks and throw them into an index fund or buy one or two shares of stock of a company. Not to mention my 401k. How about we hold the people making the decisions accountable all the way up and down the chain instead of letting the go with the whole "following orders" defence.

How about we don't let companies control their dividends. Excess profit that's not reasonably ear-marked for growth, should be mandated to be distributed as dividends. And that's probably just one item we can start doing to make the stock-market less of a gamble and hedge against inflation, and more of just "people owning portions of profit-making entities".

Re: Texas sues GM for unlawfully collecting and selling drivers' private data [pdf]

#245

Post by ClumsyPilot » Thu, Aug 15, 2024, 8:31 AM UTC

hansvm wrote: post #93

jordanb wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Firstly, the entire port of insurance is to spread risk. If the the market for insurance is "too efficient" at determining who is high-risk and who is not, then it is no longer fulfilling its social function. Secondly, you seem to be implying that only aggressive drivers are getting flagged by the data. But the computer doesn't know if you accelerate and brake hard because you're an aggressive driver, or if your circ…

> If the the market for insurance is "too efficient" at determining who is high-risk and who is not, then it is no longer fulfilling its social function. Then we need to break whatever that social function is away from the umbrella of "insurance." Mandatory car insurance is predicated on the fact that you can pay enough on average to cover your damages to others but might not be able to do so in the worst case. If we…

> If we're in a world where somebody's driving exceeds the external damage bounds they can afford _even on average_,

Does this have any meaning at all? I think you are too busy thinking about cars and not people.

If a pedestrian is hit and crippled for life, the damages are more than you can afford for majority of the population.

Many accidents are random chance, caused by factors that cannot be controlled (weather, random technical failure, etc) and lethal accidents do not tend to repeat.

Re: Texas sues GM for unlawfully collecting and selling drivers' private data [pdf]

#246

Post by philwelch » Thu, Aug 15, 2024, 8:33 AM UTC

digging wrote: post #113

stctw wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Banning books I don't see how comments saying that are accepted here. Everyone knows that no books are being banned anywhere in the country. You can go to a bookstore or web site and buy whatever books you want. They can be bought in public or delivered to your home. Publishers can publish whatever they want. The First Amendment protects authors, publishers, and readers. Meanwhile, in the UK, if you share a message…

Forcibly removing books (about very specific topics related to oppressed cultural minorities) from public school libraries is not the same thing as enacting a national ban on printing or trading those books, no. But it's a lot closer to a total ban than it is to not banning books. (And I stand by "forcibly," if you've seen any of the adults screaming at school board hearings or issuing threats over these books)

What’s really funny is that these books are usually so obscene that just reading from them at a school board meeting is a good way to get “forcibly” removed. A few stories:

> A speaker at a Florida school board meeting was removed for using vulgar language after reading aloud from a highly sexualized book available at the high school’s public library.

https://www.foxnews.com/politics/florida-school-board-remove...

> Law enforcement escorted a man out of a local school board meeting in North Texas after he read from a book banned by the district earlier this summer. The clash comes as public school districts across Texas—including several in the Houston area—move to exclude titles deemed "obscene" in increasing numbers.

https://www.chron.com/news/houston-texas/article/texas-schoo...

> A Georgia school board member cut off a mother reading sexually explicit content from a book available to high school students in the district, saying the passage was "inappropriate" for any children to potentially hear.

https://www.foxnews.com/us/parent-reading-sexual-content-sch...

I frankly find it impossible to believe that anyone actually believes that literally any book should be allowed in a public school library. We can disagree about where to draw the line but I don’t think anybody wants copies of The Turner Diaries in a public school library.

It’s particularly hard to take these complaints seriously when they come from the same people who hold congressional hearings to attack a private business for selling certain books to grown adults: https://www.npr.org/2021/09/09/1035559330/democrats-slam-ama...

Re: Texas sues GM for unlawfully collecting and selling drivers' private data [pdf]

#247

Post by zo1 » Thu, Aug 15, 2024, 8:34 AM UTC

isr wrote: post #184

subsubzero wrote: post #41

Fun fact, as a owner of a GMC auto I got a innocent looking email about the discontinuation of the Onstar Smart driver service which was the service in question that violated many US laws and sent data to insurance companies without customers authorization. I hope this hits GM really hard as this type of behavior will never cease until massive amounts of money is extracted from the perpetrators(GM etc).

How about this. For criminal behaviour which crosses a certain $ threshold (as in, what size of fine is levied by the courts/fed authorities), the entire remuneration given to anyone who served on the board of directors is considered forfeit, and used to pay the fine. That means seizing secondary properties from current or ex directors, and other assets. Once that pool is exhausted, then you ding the shareholders (vi…

I'm a full-on free market freedom person, but even I'd agree with this kind of stuff at this point.

One thing we really need to be careful to avoid whilst going down this proposed route, is to not mimic the failure mode of socialist/communist entities. I.e. Whereby performance is mandated (produce X amount of grain), along with constraints and other mandates that make the first or all mandates impossible to achieve at the same time, thereby guaranteeing failure and/or reporting shenanigans.

E.g. in our current world context. Mandating increases in hiring as a percentage, but then also giving a mandate that we can only add female/non-white employees; all while existing in a male/white dominated pool of applicants. We have to give reasonable and understandable growth / performance mandates, and not pie in the sky stuff that takes generations to fix but we want it done by next quarter.

Re: Texas sues GM for unlawfully collecting and selling drivers' private data [pdf]

#248

Post by PROMISE_237 » Thu, Aug 15, 2024, 9:06 AM UTC

subsubzero wrote: post #41

Fun fact, as a owner of a GMC auto I got a innocent looking email about the discontinuation of the Onstar Smart driver service which was the service in question that violated many US laws and sent data to insurance companies without customers authorization. I hope this hits GM really hard as this type of behavior will never cease until massive amounts of money is extracted from the perpetrators(GM etc).

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Re: Texas sues GM for unlawfully collecting and selling drivers' private data [pdf]

#249

Post by PROMISE_237 » Thu, Aug 15, 2024, 9:07 AM UTC

dontlikeyoueith wrote: post #150

EvanAnderson wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You want to hurt the company and it's owners... The owners of big companies include lots of pension plans, index funds, etc. Hurting those owners, who didn't have any say in the bad decisions, is probably not what we want. Jail for executives who approve or have knowledge of illegal activities sounds good to me.

> Jail for executives who approve or have knowledge of illegal activities sounds good to me. But then who would write the campaign contribution checks on which our government depends to survive?

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Re: Texas sues GM for unlawfully collecting and selling drivers' private data [pdf]

#250

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Aug 15, 2024, 9:12 AM UTC

fmajid wrote: post #19

Paxton is a crook, but in this case he's fighting the good fight. Texas collected a $1.4B settlement from Meta for its facial-recognition scanning, and in this case the monetary damages to the victims are far worse in terms of higher insurance premiums. https://boingboing.net/2024/07/31/meta-to-pay-1-4bn-for-unau... He should then go after the insurance companies who used this data next, and force them to disgorge th…

[deleted]