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Toyota: Car location data and videos of 2M customers exposed for ten years

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21–30 of 314 posts

Re: Toyota: Car location data and videos of 2M customers exposed for ten years

#21
post #8
post #2

Japanese auto completely missed the memo on software. Many of them won't make the ev transition. It's hard to imagine what Japanese economy is going to be like once their auto industry is gutted.

Toyota's hybrid tech is and has been the best and most reliable for a very long time. I think it's a shame that the EV regulations and incentives (at least in America) are not as friendly for traditional hybrids and plug-in hybrids. They have basically zero downsides compared to full ICE or full EV, and would still make a massive dent in emissions. PHEVs in particular - most people are going under 100 miles a day, so…

Toyota just has to extend the range of the various plug-in hybrid "Prime" models to 100+ miles on EV, which is totally doable. Right now it's already 25-40 miles. In the US in particular that's going to be a good compromise for a lot of people.

Re: Toyota: Car location data and videos of 2M customers exposed for ten years

#22
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Toyota's hybrid tech is and has been the best and most reliable for a very long time. I think it's a shame that the EV regulations and incentives (at least in America) are not as friendly for traditional hybrids and plug-in hybrids. They have basically zero downsides compared to full ICE or full EV, and would still make a massive dent in emissions. PHEVs in particular - most people are going under 100 miles a day, so…

> They have basically zero downsides They need oil changes. Some don't mind, but I do. It's a downside.

They often have no spare tire to fit the battery. Quite a few don't have battery thermal management, so the packs will degrade much more quickly. It seems like they have all the downsides.

Re: Toyota: Car location data and videos of 2M customers exposed for ten years

#23
Their privacy policy is wild and every customer is opted into the connect services by default.

Interior images, exterior images, facial geometry, voice recordings, location/driving data, "multimedia screen data",

https://www.toyota.com/privacyvts/

https://web.archive.org/web/20230512182022/https://www.toyot...

Re: Toyota: Car location data and videos of 2M customers exposed for ten years

#24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They have basically zero downsides They need oil changes. Some don't mind, but I do. It's a downside.

They often have no spare tire to fit the battery. Quite a few don't have battery thermal management, so the packs will degrade much more quickly. It seems like they have all the downsides.

New Toyota Corollas don't have spare tires. They're not an outlier. Are there available (new) EVs other than the Nissan Leaf that doesn't have active thermal management?

EVs do have downsides, but so do ICE and hybrid.

Re: Toyota: Car location data and videos of 2M customers exposed for ten years

#25
post #2

Japanese auto completely missed the memo on software. Many of them won't make the ev transition. It's hard to imagine what Japanese economy is going to be like once their auto industry is gutted.

I worked for Toyota Infotechnology Center in Sunnyvale in 2016/2017 on a robotics research project involving their HSR robot running ROS. The robot had odometry from the wheels, though it was a bit noisy due to the construction of the omnidirectional mechanism. They decided to ignore wheel odometry and use only an odometry module based on the planar lidar, essentially visual odometry. This worked fine in most circums…

> ... silicon valley coding rigor ...

That's not "silicon valley", that's "anywhere remotely modern" coding rigor. Sounds like they need to get with the times, especially with regards to developing systems with software stacks that are a couple orders of magnitude larger than in the recent past (like 15 years ago).

Re: Toyota: Car location data and videos of 2M customers exposed for ten years

#26

Why does Toyota even have this data?

I'm sorry, what? No one thinks about what data is being sent back to the manufacturer when buying a car. Now I need to know what my car know and what is being transmitted back. It would be nice if I could turn off this functionality.

Re: Toyota: Car location data and videos of 2M customers exposed for ten years

#27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They have basically zero downsides They need oil changes. Some don't mind, but I do. It's a downside.

They often have no spare tire to fit the battery. Quite a few don't have battery thermal management, so the packs will degrade much more quickly. It seems like they have all the downsides.

My Hybrid Corolla didn't come with a spare tire but it has space to install one (and I did). The battery is under the rear seating.

Re: Toyota: Car location data and videos of 2M customers exposed for ten years

#28

Why does Toyota even have this data?

I'm sorry, what? No one thinks about what data is being sent back to the manufacturer when buying a car. Now I need to know what my car know and what is being transmitted back. It would be nice if I could turn off this functionality.

When I set up my Corolla the app made me go through and enable/disable a bunch of things. I declined most of the connected technology at setup time without any issue.

Re: Toyota: Car location data and videos of 2M customers exposed for ten years

#30
post #19

I hope regulators fine the hell out of these companies. Enough to make them think twice about offering these upload everything to the cloud services no one really asks for.

It's a simple equation:

Revenue = (value of data per person) x (number of customers) - (probably of data loss) x (probability of fine) x (cost of fine).

If that number is greater than zero, they'll do it, if it's less than zero, they won't.

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