Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

What does this button do? – My new car has a mysterious and undocumented switch

blog.koenvh.nl

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

361–370 of 525 posts

Re: What does this button do? – My new car has a mysterious and undocumented switch

#361

Post by fsckboy »

sebstefan wrote: post #301
afh1 wrote: post #25

The scary part is not the GPS installed by the fleet company that previously owned the car, which in all likelihood was just forgotten there, but the GPS and eSIM that comes with most (all?) new cars and that in most (all?) new cars cannot be disabled. Apart from privacy concerns of your data being used or sold by the car vendor, government outreach is also a concern. There was a bill announced in the US for all new…

There should not be an expectation of privacy from the authorities when operating a motor vehicles on public roads on which you need a license to drive

>There SHOULD NOT be an expectation of privacy from the authorities when operating a motor vehicles on public roads on which you need a license to drive

let's say somebody else said "There SHOULD be an expectation of privacy from the authorities when operating a motor vehicles on public roads on which you need a license to drive"

Is there some reason I should side with you over them, or just your opinion? If the courts decided that there was an expectation of privacy on public roads, would you agitate to change the law so there wasn't?

Re: What does this button do? – My new car has a mysterious and undocumented switch

#362

Post by Forgeties79 »

brookst wrote: post #348
Forgeties79 wrote: post #344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does it matter? We can split hairs over whether or not they are actually doing the thing they give themselves the rights to do, but that feels unproductive and disingenuous.

Yes it matters. Or at least it matters whether the claims you make are true, and there is a difference between “had a right to” and “did”. Have I told you about my neighbor who uses a leaf blower nonstop from 7am until 8pm? Well, he doesn’t actually, be he has a right to, and it’s splitting hairs whether he actually does or not.

Ok, give me remote access to your computer. I’ll send a contract saying I can sell what I find, but I haven’t done it so it’s cool and it shouldn’t be cause for alarm.

Re: What does this button do? – My new car has a mysterious and undocumented switch

#363

Post by _heimdall »

alchemist1e9 wrote: post #341
_heimdall wrote: post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a huge reason why I won't buy more modern vehicles. Safety features and fuel economy are night and day when comparing a 5 year old car and a 30 year old one, but between the privacy issues and inability to diagnose or fix a new car I just can't do it. I bought an 80s model truck that sat in a garage for over a decade and has 50k original miles on it. I'm still chasing down a couple gremlins in the system, but…

Isn’t the gas mileage really really bad though?

We don't drive very much honestly, and the cost of maintenance has tended to even out.

Our truck probably gets around 16 or 18 around town, up to 20 if the conditions are right. Not great compared to a modern truck with a 4 cylinder turbo, but I really don't think I go through more than a tank of gas in a month (albeit a larger 20 gallon tank)

Re: What does this button do? – My new car has a mysterious and undocumented switch

#364

Post by _heimdall »

alchemist1e9 wrote: post #346
uoaei wrote: post #345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everyone chooses their own balance of bills. Personally (I'm not who you're replying to) I'm happy to pay more in rent and utilities if it means I can ride my bicycle most places instead of, say, being a 10-minute drive from the nearest crosswalk. In the end, my emissions are probably much lower than someone who can't imagine leaving their house without their car keys even though I drive an ICE.

Makes sense. The other issue that is mentioned would be the safety features. Air bags and side impact systems are massive jumps forward in safety. Most people aren’t concerned enough with privacy to trade those for it.

Safety is definitely a tricky tradeoff for me. If I couldn't work on the vehicle myself either way I'd have something newer, the combo of privacy and maintenance tip the scales for me (definitely an outlier though).

Re: What does this button do? – My new car has a mysterious and undocumented switch

#365

Post by TomK32 »

vkazanov wrote: post #119
madaxe_again wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not so. My mother bought a house in France in 1988. The previous owners had a mountain of stuff in the barn that they would come collect “soon”. 25 years passed. My mother started variously selling and disposing of their slowly rotting crap that they evidently were never going to collect, as she wanted to fix the structural issues with the barn, and their stuff was in the way, as it literally filled the entire ground…

Both times my, ehm, good friend bought a house in uk the docs included a very thorough list of things that had to stay, as well as things that HAD to go. Does England count as Europe?

Quite shockingly Old Blighty hasn't been French for quite some time.

Re: What does this button do? – My new car has a mysterious and undocumented switch

#366

Post by cyberbolt23 »

gcanyon wrote: post #310

Steven Wright: "I have this switch in my house that doesn't seem to do anything. It's in a hallway, so every time I pass it, I flip it: up, down, up, down...up...down. A few months after I got the house, a guy from Indonesia called me on the phone and said...'stop it'"

??

Re: What does this button do? – My new car has a mysterious and undocumented switch

#367

Post by [deleted] »

markdown wrote: post #126
gruez wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can turn off your phone or go into airplane mode. Can you do that with your car? Even if most people don't use that option on a daily basis, doesn't mean it's fine.

So you put it in airplane mode while in a car and then disable airplane mode when you get to your destination? What's the point of that?

[deleted]

Re: What does this button do? – My new car has a mysterious and undocumented switch

#368

Post by Spooky23 »

6SixTy wrote: post #91
Etheryte wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Electric cars are essentially black boxes. When you take it apart, you have largely no idea what any of the chips do, even if you chase down what they're connected to. Is this the infotainment system or is it the infotainment system and a data gathering system that sends all my data off seas? There's no way to know. Old cars don't have that problem. Here's an engine, here's a gearbox, add a radio if you'd like, but b…

Problem with gathering data off cars is that it's really not that effective vs your phone. A car realistically just sits around doing nothing 80% of the time, while a phone is with you 24/7, likely powered 24/7, and already has telemetry mechanisms built in. An old car with someone using a phone probably still collects the same data as you assert. And an EV without smarts is legitimately just a golf cart.

Not necessarily. Cars are a great proxy for human behavior.

Long term, cars will be leased based on driving behavior, and more critically, will be taxed based in driving distance and style.

Re: What does this button do? – My new car has a mysterious and undocumented switch

#369

Post by myself248 »

brookst wrote: post #348
Forgeties79 wrote: post #344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does it matter? We can split hairs over whether or not they are actually doing the thing they give themselves the rights to do, but that feels unproductive and disingenuous.

Yes it matters. Or at least it matters whether the claims you make are true, and there is a difference between “had a right to” and “did”. Have I told you about my neighbor who uses a leaf blower nonstop from 7am until 8pm? Well, he doesn’t actually, be he has a right to, and it’s splitting hairs whether he actually does or not.

On the other hand, do we have any means of finding out whether they did? It's one thing if you can say "No, they definitely don't, here's what's actually sent and here's how it's used and here's the contracts limiting what's gathered". Otherwise we're all just speculating.

But in the absence of solid proof, I think the history of the last several decades of surveillance shows that it's completely reasonable to assume the absolute worst. Snowden showed that the scope of government data collection was far beyond even the wildest assume-the-worst theories floated in tech media prior to the revelations, and Doubleclick (wearing its Google façade) makes the NSA look lazy.

The reason these assumptions are reasonable, is that there's incentive for them to be true. Someone's willing to pay for that data. Maybe not very much, but if it costs almost nothing to collect, then it works out.

The way some manager sees it, Nissan would be "leaving money on the table" if they didn't spy on their customers to the absolute maximum permitted by their EULA. This gets brought up in every internal meeting about telemetry features, I can assure you. (I've been in those meetings for a number of automakers, though not Nissan specifically, the whole industry is on board. It turns the stomach. My voice was not heard.)

Re: What does this button do? – My new car has a mysterious and undocumented switch

#370

Post by Mordisquitos »

dghlsakjg wrote: post #353
Forgeties79 wrote: post #344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does it matter? We can split hairs over whether or not they are actually doing the thing they give themselves the rights to do, but that feels unproductive and disingenuous.

Yes. It comes down to intention. The charitable read is that they are notifying you of the possibility that the car’s data collection may unintentionally include sexual activity. E.g. your car was recorded as having a rocking motion while parked. The other read is that they are intentionally collecting sexual activity data for nefarious purposes. The first is the lawyer drafting the release being overcautious. The se…

> The first is the lawyer drafting the release being overcautious. The second is a corporation being evil.

How was the hypothetical overcautious lawyer able to independently come up with such a specific scenario, which would require intimate technical knowledge?

I believe your are missing a third option, which is a synthesis of both. This is that the engineers reported that their sensor data could be used to collect sexual activity. However, in response to that, the corporation preferred to cover themselves legally rather than making any technical effort to address the risk on their customers' privacy.

The lawyer is not being overcautious, but simply displaying the corporation's priorities. The corporation is not being evil, it is just being psychopathic.

Post reply on HN