Privacy

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A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.

Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.

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Driver facing camera in cars (lemmy.ml)

submitted 20 hours ago by aikhae@lemmy.ohaa.xyz to c/privacy@lemmy.ml

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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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[–] FineCoatMummy@sh.itjust.works 19 points 19 hours ago

Moz's landing page about car privacy.

Depends on the car ofc, but the worst ones not only send video from inside the car to the company, they send data from outside the car! Like people walking around and stuff.

Reuters says:

Some of the recordings caught Tesla customers, opens new tab in embarrassing situations. One ex-employee described a video of a man approaching a vehicle completely naked. Also shared: crashes and road-rage incidents. One crash video in 2021 showed a Tesla driving at high speed in a residential area hitting a child riding a bike, according to another ex-employee. The child flew in one direction, the bike in another. The video spread around a Tesla office in San Mateo, California, via private one-on-one chats, “like wildfire,” the ex-employee said.

Other images were more mundane, such as pictures of dogs and funny road signs that employees made into memes by embellishing them with amusing captions or commentary, before posting them in private group chats.

“We could see inside people's garages and their private properties,” said another former employee. “Let's say that a Tesla customer had something in their garage that was distinctive, you know, people would post those kinds of things.”

Lots more troubling shit at the link. Tesla's probably close tot he worst, but most modern cars are like all the privacy clusterfuck of phones... but worse.