this post was submitted on 03 Jun 2026
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Hello people, my family recently bought a Renault 5 e-tech. The car itself is great, but there are some aspects that creep me out, especially the driver-facing camera. We didn't actually know that such a camera existed before we bought the car, it was only mentioned as the car was given to us.

The cameras official purpose is to see, if you are tired and paying attention to the road, by some "AI magic", I suppose. You can also let it scan your face, so that you automatically get logged into your profile.

I personally think, that that is kinda creepy, especially as there is no visual indication if the camera is currently recording and no official way to disable the camera hardware-wise. When it is being coverd, the car immediately complains about it.

When talking to friends or family about it, I got one of two reactions: equal concern, or "nice feature actually", "what about the camera on your laptop?", "you are way too paranoid", "I have noting to hide; it is only me driving being recorded".

I have also seen such cameras in other cars, BYD for example.

What do you think, is this creepy or am I too paranoid? Does anyone know where the actual data is processed, on device or on some cloud server? Do you have any experience with such cameras? I couldn't really find any information about it on the internet.

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[–] mindwanderer@feddit.org 33 points 15 hours ago (2 children)

Cars collect data about you to sell them to insurance companies. There was a study by the mozilla foundation about this and they said that there is basicly no modern car that does not do that.

The only thing you can do to avoid them is buy an old car.

[–] Buddahriffic@lemmy.world 5 points 14 hours ago (1 children)

There was an article about removing the modem (or other essential piece of that data path) from a specific model of car (prius I think?), hoping to see more of those.

[–] FineCoatMummy@sh.itjust.works 3 points 7 hours ago

Yeah I want an entire ass web database with how to do that for every car. Spin up the hw hacker community on that shit.

I haven't found a centralized place for it though. Just some piecemeal info. Moz has a good centralized db for what info different cars collect. But nobody seem to have one for how to disable it, per make and model.

[–] Bluegrass_Addict@lemmy.ca 1 points 15 hours ago (4 children)

or use electrical tape on the cameras...

[–] douglasg14b@lemmy.world 5 points 12 hours ago (1 children)

It's a lot more than just video. It's all your audio while you're in the car. Your driving habits, your location, your devices, who is in the car with you so on and so forth.

There's a ton of data that can be gathered and associated without having to have a camera.

If you ever talk in your car and it's a modern car. Congratulations! That's being recorded cataloged and sold off to the highest bidder.

I hope they like me talking to myself in funny voices and belting out songs at the top of my lungs, because that's all the audio they'll get out of me.

[–] scrion@lemmy.world 6 points 14 hours ago

Additional data about your driving behavior is also collected, completely unrelated to cameras. In fact, this data is the majority.

[–] mindwanderer@feddit.org 5 points 15 hours ago (1 children)

and if they realise that and disable the car until you remove it?

[–] RampantParanoia2365@lemmy.world 1 points 10 hours ago

Reread this post.