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

blog.koenvh.nl

121–130 of 525 posts

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

#121
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…

> Most people would have probably driven around for years with a foreign GPS tracker. So basically everyone with a smartphone? I'm not sure if it's really worse if the car has its own GPS and cell connectivity. How many people turn off their phone or leave it at home? And you can buy other people's location data, so...

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.

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

#122

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?

Not in this case, no - at least, it’s not the norm in the U.K., whereas it absolutely is in a lot of mainland Europe.

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

#123
post #99
post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> a kill switch The funny thing is that's what cars do to other people because we don't have enough monitoring. My e-bike is limited to 20 because "safety". Your car should be to.

[deleted]

The thing that dismays me about your comment is that you seem to have decided that government cannot be trusted to do the right thing, and so we should have fewer restrictions on everything, regardless of the danger of any particular thing, or what that particular thing is designed for. (If I've mischaracterized or misunderstood, my apologies; please correct me.)

Let's take some two hopefully-simple examples: speed limiters on cars, and guns.

I agree with you when it comes to speed limiters on cars. We shouldn't have them, and government should not be allowed to mandate them. Sure, some people drive too fast for conditions, and that's dangerous, and sometimes they hurt or kill other people by doing so. But we can combat this to some extent with education, licensing requirements, and the threat of penalties for when something bad happens. And I can think of several situations (emergency or otherwise) where someone might be justified in driving faster than a speed limiter might allow, and if the limiter was in place, that could also have bad consequences.

But then let's look at guns. They are designed to injure and kill; that is their main intended purpose. Most gun deaths, IIRC, are attributed to suicides and accidental discharges (the latter of which often involve children; I am definitely not a "think of the children!" type person, but I think in this case it might actually apply). Other gun deaths involve mass shootings, gang violence, and other criminal activity. The threat of home invasions is highly overblown, and the vast majority of the people who buy them to keep at home for protection will never need them (and will sometimes be involved in accidents or other unintended bad uses). People (in the US, primarily) who think that they need guns to protect them from a tyrannical government are delusional (if the government/military really did try to violently oppress them, the idea that they'd be able to successfully fight back is laughable). There are lots of different types of guns, from small-caliber, small-capacity weapons that don't do quite as much damage; up to semi-auto and auto "military style" weapons that can be used to kill large numbers of people in a fairly short amount of time.

I don't think I'll ever be convinced that we shouldn't have any restrictions on gun ownership, and I would probably not even be bothered by the idea of a complete ban on private gun ownership (obviously not constitutionally possible here in the US). But as a middle ground, I at least support strict licensing and background-check requirements for firearm ownership, and I think that certain classes of weapons should be restricted from private ownership.

I don't intend this to turn into a political discussion about gun control, but I just think it's weird to consider every possible kind of restriction on freedom in the same way, without critically examining what is being restricted, what it is designed to, what kind of harm a lack of restrictions will cause, and what are the negative/unintended consequences of putting those restrictions in place.

A few specific comments:

> I've realized with time that while drivers can be dangerous, they are relatively limited in how much harm they can create.

This just doesn't ring true to me. Car-related fatality statistics paint a very different picture to me.

> I honestly rather want everyone including me to have freedom to do stupid things instead of limiting freedom.

Maybe this is where the disconnect is, and where we might not be able to agree on anything. The problem with this kind of statement is that it doesn't acknowledge that personal freedoms can come at a cost to other people. If I screw something up in the exercise of my freedoms, it usually doesn't just hurt me: others get caught up in it too. My "freedoms" should include being able to live my life in peace, without other people destroying that peace, as long as I am not hurting anyone else. Unfortunately that can't be done without putting restrictions on what I and others can do in many situations.

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

#124

A lot of used cars have something like this. I'm honestly more surprised OP apparently bought the car either sight unseen or without questioning this before signing any paperwork.

I've got something similar on a car I bought that was previously leased. I didn't notice it while doing the test drive, but it was almost certainly there the whole time. One day, I'll try to remove it, but afaik, it doesn't do much other than sit there. Maybe it drains the battery a bit, but I think the OEM modem was probably worse... I removed that recently because I was doing work that got me halfway to removal anyway.

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

#125

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…

> In Europe, it’s also common for you to buy a place, and then when you move in, you find the vendor has taken all of the wiring and plumbing with them. This is the first time I hwar of this. At least in Norway the rule is that everything that is built in stays. So table, chairs, TV, washing machine, dryer etc goes, but built in appliances and built in place furniture stays.

Yeah, from what I understand this is not the norm in the Nordic states, but it is elsewhere.

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

#126
post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Most people would have probably driven around for years with a foreign GPS tracker. So basically everyone with a smartphone? I'm not sure if it's really worse if the car has its own GPS and cell connectivity. How many people turn off their phone or leave it at home? And you can buy other people's location data, so...

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?

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

#127
> Unlike the Peugeot, the Opel has gadgets - quite a few of them.

It is funny because that Opel IS a Peugeot.

Same group (Stellantis), and same mechanicals as the contemporary Peugeot 208 with only minor aesthetics and branding modifications.

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

#128
post #89
post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> a kill switch The funny thing is that's what cars do to other people because we don't have enough monitoring. My e-bike is limited to 20 because "safety". Your car should be to.

Your e-bike shouldn't be limited. You should get on that.

Electric motorized bicycles exist, they're just called motorcycles or mopeds. The whole point of an e-bike is the limiter, and size restrictions.

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

#129
post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even though the SIM was part of the car they bought, the SIM's contract is not in their name which means using the contract would be theft.

This can be difficult to grasp. I bought an aparment 3.5 years ago and it had an alarm installed. I called the security company to transfer ownership but that couldn’t be done without authorisation from the previous owner, which probably makes sense. The problem is, they were unreachable, and I was living on a house that I now owned, and which had cameras the previous owner could take pics from at any time . My patie…

I had a similar situation with an (active) alarm and monitoring system in the last house I purchased. One of the first things I did was clip the wires, remove everything and throw it in the trash with a few other things the previous owner had left behind. You are under no obligation to store or keep active property abandoned after a sale (at least here in the US).

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

#130
post #120

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…

That's a super dumb outcome for your poor mother. Abandoned property is just that.

In France it’s only counted as abandoned if it is more than 30 years. These guys rocked up at something like 29 years and 9 months, and because there had been a verbal agreement that they would one day collect, and my mother allowed it, she was deemed to have stolen property she was entrusted to store.

She was actually lucky to avoid criminal charges.

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