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

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

#231

Post by staticautomatic »

3eb7988a1663 wrote: post #88
staticautomatic wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IAALBNYL it’s not theft because they’ve been abandoned and are in the new owner’s possession. If the prior owner can’t be reached and the security company which claims to own them won’t take them, they’re probably fair game.

I do not see any way in which this property could still be considered the previous owners. Let's say the camera was in the bathroom pointed directly at the shower. You just have to suck it up forever, knowing that someone could be watching? In fact, I could imagine it being a criminal charge for trying to capture people in the nude. What if someone has a child who bathes there? Now they were trying to create CP.

It’s property law 101 that possession and ownership are not the same thing.

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

#232

Post by heresie-dabord »

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…

> Modern cars [...] and smartphones are just spying devices at this point.

I take it that you need a car (which is true for many) and also need a computer (also true for many).

What precautions do you take in computing given that you use a computer that is connected to the Internet ?

The former (i.e. computer) has an unknowable supply chain with blobs of code that you don't vet yourself, and the latter (the Internet) has overtly become a surveillance system.

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

#234

Post by rglullis »

jaredhallen wrote: post #210
brailsafe wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A car realistically just sits around doing nothing 80% of the time A bit besides the point, but isn't it wild how inherently wasteful personal cars are? Every time the thought crosses my mind to get another one, if I don't stop at the cost, I stop at the fact that I'll have this giant chunk of metal sitting idle on the street or somewhere else nearly all the time. It'd be useful in an extreme minority of cases (for…

Sounds like maybe you don't need a car. That's good for you, and I truly mean that. But that doesn't mean it's the case for everyone. It's a big, diverse world out there.

Unless your idea of "diverse world" is confined to (suburban) North America, the need to own a car is the exception, not the rule.

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

#235

Post by AnthonyMouse »

cipheredStones wrote: post #226
emmelaich wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, it is a kill switch. Just not the sort of kill switch that someone (who?) sometime (when?) described, and such description is one that you've neither quoted or given.

You and afh1 seem to be reading both the article and my comment as focused on whether it's appropriate to characterize a device that prevents a car from starting as a "kill switch". I didn't say anything at all about that term in my comment, and while the article says it's hyperbolic, arguing about that term is clearly not the focus of the article. Just going to quote the whole opener here - it's about the claim that…

> Just going to quote the whole opener here - it's about the claim that the law enables cops to monitor you and shut down your car, which is clearly false.

That's just the straw man the article is using to claim that it isn't a kill switch. They want the claim to be false so they adopt a version of the claim with a flaw in order to knock it down.

The obvious problem being that the actual implementation is at least as bad. Now you have the law mandating that the car activate the kill switch by itself, with no human in the loop you can even try to reason with.

What happens when you're driving erratically because you're on some dangerous ice road and trigger a false positive that strands you in the wilderness? What happens when you're actually impaired and then turn around to discover a wildfire approaching your location, in which case "don't die in a fire" should override "don't drive impaired" and you should immediately evacuate, but your car won't let you?

It's an ill-conceived and dangerous law and its critics are in the right. The operator should always be able to override the computer.

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

#236

Post by cipheredStones »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #235
cipheredStones wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You and afh1 seem to be reading both the article and my comment as focused on whether it's appropriate to characterize a device that prevents a car from starting as a "kill switch". I didn't say anything at all about that term in my comment, and while the article says it's hyperbolic, arguing about that term is clearly not the focus of the article. Just going to quote the whole opener here - it's about the claim that…

> Just going to quote the whole opener here - it's about the claim that the law enables cops to monitor you and shut down your car, which is clearly false. That's just the straw man the article is using to claim that it isn't a kill switch. They want the claim to be false so they adopt a version of the claim with a flaw in order to knock it down. The obvious problem being that the actual implementation is at least as…

As I said in a sibling comment, the fact that there are real concerns about something doesn't justify ignoring the truth value of inflammatory claims about that thing.

If one person is criticizing Big Pharma because they use shoddy trial methodology when they can get away with it and heavily market minor variations on existing drugs, and another person is criticizing Big Pharma because they're poisoning our blood with fluoride in service to the Illuminati, it's not appropriate to lump them together and say "Big Pharma's critics are in the right."

(Also, I think the idea that they deliberately adopted a weak version of the criticism to argue against is rather conspiratorial - dumb unfounded nonsense gets very popular on the internet all the time! Valuable criticism that requires nuance is memetically disfavored by comparison!)

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

#237

Post by AnthonyMouse »

cipheredStones wrote: post #236
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Just going to quote the whole opener here - it's about the claim that the law enables cops to monitor you and shut down your car, which is clearly false. That's just the straw man the article is using to claim that it isn't a kill switch. They want the claim to be false so they adopt a version of the claim with a flaw in order to knock it down. The obvious problem being that the actual implementation is at least as…

As I said in a sibling comment, the fact that there are real concerns about something doesn't justify ignoring the truth value of inflammatory claims about that thing. If one person is criticizing Big Pharma because they use shoddy trial methodology when they can get away with it and heavily market minor variations on existing drugs, and another person is criticizing Big Pharma because they're poisoning our blood wit…

> If one person is criticizing Big Pharma because they use shoddy trial methodology when they can get away with it and heavily market minor variations on existing drugs, and another person is criticizing Big Pharma because they're poisoning our blood with fluoride in service to the Illuminati, it's not appropriate to lump them together and say "Big Pharma's critics are in the right."

But it's also not appropriate to lump them together and say "Big Pharma's critics are in the wrong."

> Also, I think the idea that they deliberately adopted a weak version of the criticism to argue against is rather conspiratorial - dumb unfounded nonsense gets very popular on the internet all the time!

It's hardly a conspiracy to suppose that media outlets choose which claims to fact check based on how they want to influence readers.

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

#238

Post by whs »

tempest_ wrote: post #95
pnw wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a list at https://www.tesla.com/support/privacy and you can request a copy. They state never sell or rent your data to third-parties, and sentry and dashcam data is only stored locally. They anonymize the data they do use, presumably for AI training.

> sentry and dashcam data is only stored locally. That must be new https://www.reuters.com/technology/tesla-workers-shared-sens...

In that link "The company requires car owners to grant permission on the cars’ touchscreens before Tesla collects their vehicles’ data"

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

#239

Post by hexfish »

bouke wrote: post #12

The switch is probably for tax reasons, to record whether you’re making a business vs personal trip. Personal trips go towards the 500 km allowance before the car is seen as indirect salary and should be taxed as such. Setting it to personal might also disable the tracking for privacy reasons.

Having seen setups like this before this is pretty likely indeed.

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

#240

Post by cipheredStones »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #237
cipheredStones wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As I said in a sibling comment, the fact that there are real concerns about something doesn't justify ignoring the truth value of inflammatory claims about that thing. If one person is criticizing Big Pharma because they use shoddy trial methodology when they can get away with it and heavily market minor variations on existing drugs, and another person is criticizing Big Pharma because they're poisoning our blood wit…

> If one person is criticizing Big Pharma because they use shoddy trial methodology when they can get away with it and heavily market minor variations on existing drugs, and another person is criticizing Big Pharma because they're poisoning our blood with fluoride in service to the Illuminati, it's not appropriate to lump them together and say "Big Pharma's critics are in the right." But it's also not appropriate to…

> But it's also not appropriate to lump them together and say "Big Pharma's critics are in the wrong."

And accordingly, I didn't ever say that this was a good bill or all its critics were in the wrong. A lot of people in this thread seem to be reading that into my comments, but all I did was take issue with a misrepresentation of an article that argued against a specific negative claim about the bill.

Which I think is representative - it's very hard to make a narrow point about specific arguments without people assuming that you're taking a firm stance on one side or the other of a general issue.

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