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

Car Owners Should Control Data Collected by Cars

nytimes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

231–240 of 256 posts

Re: Car Owners Should Control Data Collected by Cars

#231

Post by DuskStar »

Animats wrote: post #99
bhauer wrote: post #10

What? > We know our smartphones, Nests and Alexas collect data, and we’ve come to accept an implicit contract: We trade personal information for convenience. With cars, we have no such expectation ... What carmakers are doing with the collected data isn’t clear. At least Tesla has demonstrated that their data collection is for training their full self-driving capability. That represents tremendous end-user value, in…

At least Tesla has demonstrated that their data collection is for training their full self-driving capability. That represents tremendous end-user value, in my opinion. Musk has claimed that. Whether it's doing any good remains to be seen. Large amounts of data from normal driving are probably good for training lane keeping, but not that useful for handling emergency situations. Teslas are still running into crossing…

> Large amounts of data from normal driving are probably good for training lane keeping, but not that useful for handling emergency situations.

The supposition I've seen is that they have models running locally to extract the most 'surprising' situations (for example, situations where the driver's inputs and the self-driving algorithm's differ substantially, or where other vehicles do not behave as expected) to send back to the mothership to train on. This would do a ton to improve their ability to deploy actual self driving in the future, and is far more than just 'normal driving' or 'lane keeping'.

Re: Car Owners Should Control Data Collected by Cars

#232

Post by scarejunba »

Barrin92 wrote: post #227
scarejunba wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, also if you see me in the corner of your vision and remember that I wore a red shirt, I’m going to need you to forget that. That’s my data. If you brushed past me on the metro, I’d like you to avoid collecting my DNA off my clothes or hair. I didn’t give you that consent. So don’t do it. If you’re driving up to a pedestrian crossing and you use posture, direction, eye contact, etc. to determine if someone is at…

This is a bad attempt to ridicule the issue. Obviously we're talking about data here that is processable by third parties. Nobody but you can get (reliable) data out of your brain, but pictures of you or information about you kept on recording can be used by third parties for everything ranging from policing to advertisement or anything else. In Germany for example Google Streetview is mostly not available, because a…

It's not processable by third parties? If you tweet that you met me at a conference and then someone else tweets that you saw me at the airport, etc. now people can't use that to infer my location and travel patterns? You're just drawing the line conveniently where you can violate my privacy while simultaneously claiming the higher ground.

I hope your friends treat you with the fear that they should considering you seem to believe that their private information is not "processable by third parties" and therefore probably treat it with no discretion whatsoever.

Re: Car Owners Should Control Data Collected by Cars

#233

Post by fgonzag »

js2 wrote: post #15

> Modern cars collect as much as 25 gigabytes of data per hour. Links to this McKinsey study as a source: https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/automotive-and-assembly/... Which says: > Today’s car has the computing power of 20 personal computers, features about 100 million lines of programming code, and processes up to 25 gigabytes of data an hour. McKinsey doesn't cite any sources. But more importantly, processing 25…

Also, no way in hell a car has even the computing power of one PC.

I used to do embedded systems for the industry on the software side (dashboards, door locks, keyfobs, etc). It's true that basically anything you consider a component has it's own integrated CPU, it's also an extremely weak CPU.

https://www.microchip.com/ParamChartSearch/chart.aspx?branch...

PIC-16s and similiar were the CPUs mostly used. We're talking 1MB of RAM, sub 50 MHz chips. There might be 100 of these, but that's still less computing power than a single mid-range CPU will give you these days. Sure, there are some more powerful CPUs in certain components, but none of them will even approach a desktop CPU.

Re: Car Owners Should Control Data Collected by Cars

#234

Post by cheerlessbog »

ghaff wrote: post #25
cheerlessbog wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not as creepy as giving a big corporation access to microphones around your house. It astounds me that much of America has done exactly that.

I assume you don't use a smartphone, for the sake of consistency. It's really hard for me to draw a distinction between home voice assistants that you can activate via a voice command and smartphones that you can activate via a voice command.

For voice assistants to be misused only takes malicious intent or incompetence on the server end since they hear and transmit (Perhaps with activation phrase) by design.

For my smartphone to be similarly vulnerable I would need the server side plus malicious or incompetent intervention on the client end to enable voice activation (I have voice activation disabled).

Plus my smartphone hardware is not as capable of picking up voices around the house plus I am not actively positioning it in several rooms to do so.

Re: Car Owners Should Control Data Collected by Cars

#235

Post by cheerlessbog »

bwb wrote: post #32
cheerlessbog wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What if the data revealed your predilection for visiting strip clubs? Would you want to have control over that information? At least with Google maps you control when it is on - and there is a privacy policy of some sort.

#1 - On your specific example... what is wrong with visiting strip clubs? Is that not someone's prerogative and legally allowed by society? Why should we be ashamed of that? #2 - I am not saying "no privacy", I want smart privacy :). It is a spectrum, not a binary choice. If that data is combined together so that the city knows traffic on road 1 is high and they need to invest in infrastructure there that is great. O…

> what is wrong with visiting strip clubs

I don't have a problem with it but we can agree that some people do, right?

Re: Car Owners Should Control Data Collected by Cars

#236

Post by danso »

dominotw wrote: post #226
danso wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are in a fucking daft dream world to think Tesla is the only carmaker to have computers and data. Jesus Christ.

I am not claiming tesla is the only one, i used that as an example. You are making the inverse claim that you cannot buy a non connected car with your "don't need to see a doctor" analogy. Article is not about cars that "have computers and data" its about connected cars that are sharing personal information ( how fast we drive, where we live, how many children we have — even financial information ) with manufacturer.…

FTA, it’s clear the author is talking about what they see as an impending issue:

> What carmakers are doing with the collected data isn’t clear. We know they use it to improve car performance and safety. And we know they have the ability to sell it to third parties they might choose. Indeed, Ford’s chief executive, Jim Hackett, has spoken in detail about the company’s plans to monetize car data.

Re: Car Owners Should Control Data Collected by Cars

#237

Post by danso »

bwb wrote: post #201
mattmanser wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not extreme, it's what most people have had for millennia. New technology is deanonymizing public space, invasions of privacy previously required great effort and expense, now they can be done trivially by accessing data on your phone, or now your car. The ramifications of this haven't become clear to you because no-one important's decided to fuck your life over yet or you live as a conformist, but for many of t…

I think I am done :), you don't need to degrade the other person's intelligence to have a discussion. Or insult them. It is rude and unbecoming a member of this community.

When you continue to question whether people who are fearful are being rational, as if being fearful necessarily precludes that they have attempted rational assessment, you are the one being rude and dismissive of people’s intelligence.

I won’t even go into your absurd whining of the “extreme privacy movement” in the HN community, as if a huge part of HN’s audience aren’t daily optimists about the positive role and accomplishment of tech and data companies.

Re: Car Owners Should Control Data Collected by Cars

#238

Post by OrgNet »

JohnFen wrote: post #145
OrgNet wrote: post #142

I wish that there was a manual for how to turn any car into a dumb-car (or at least how to disconnect them from the internet).

There are instructions for how to disable the comms antenna for a lot of cars out there.

Do you have any link by any chance?

Re: Car Owners Should Control Data Collected by Cars

#239

Post by dominotw »

danso wrote: post #236
dominotw wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am not claiming tesla is the only one, i used that as an example. You are making the inverse claim that you cannot buy a non connected car with your "don't need to see a doctor" analogy. Article is not about cars that "have computers and data" its about connected cars that are sharing personal information ( how fast we drive, where we live, how many children we have — even financial information ) with manufacturer.…

FTA, it’s clear the author is talking about what they see as an impending issue: > What carmakers are doing with the collected data isn’t clear. We know they use it to improve car performance and safety. And we know they have the ability to sell it to third parties they might choose. Indeed, Ford’s chief executive, Jim Hackett, has spoken in detail about the company’s plans to monetize car data.

i am ok with cars collecting metrics about my car and improving safety. But I am not ok with car collecting info about my children.

Author( and you ) are conflating all of it and calling it "data". I have no idea which cars companies are collecting data about my children. Do you?

Spinning this into "they are coming for your children" is totally disgusting.

Even the line you quoted is dishonest

> And we know they have the ability to sell it to third parties they might choose. Indeed, Ford’s chief executive, Jim Hackett, has spoken in detail about the company’s plans to monetize car data.

Here is the exact quote

"We know what people make. How do we know that? It's because they borrow money from us. And when you ask somebody what they make, we know where they work, you know. We know if they're married. We know how long they've lived in their house because these are all on the credit applications. We've never ever been challenged on how we use that. And that's the leverage we got here with the data."

This has nothing to do with data collected by cars. Yes loan applications data should be regulated for privacy but that irrelevant to topic under discussion. Loan application data is not "car data".

Also,Jim Hackett did not mention anything about selling data yet putting those to lines together and using the word 'Indeed' sounds like monetize here means ford plans to sell( info about your children) to third parties. Infact its already might be illegal to sell that data [1].

Why so dishonest?

1. https://www.fdic.gov/consumers/privacy/yourrights/

Post reply on HN