Privacy

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Driver facing camera in cars (lemmy.ml)

submitted 19 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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[–] bstix@feddit.dk 16 points 7 hours ago (2 children)

It's an EU decision. It will be coming to many more cars as it will be mandatory from July 2026 for all newly registered vehicles. Renault 5 is simply one of the first new cars to feature it.

According to the same law, it is illegal to use the system in a way that can identify the person, it may not save biometrics, and it must function in closed loop without sharing the data. It's looking for things like head nodding or looking away from the road for more than 3.5 seconds while driving over 50 km/h. The camera is likely using infrared lighting as it should also work at night.

Anyway. According to the manual, it can be disabled by double tapping a button on the steering wheel or through the touch screen menus, though it will default to being enabled everytime you start the car as per the legal requirement.

If you cover it with tape, wear a mask or drive somebody else's car in which you don't have a profile saved, it will simply use the last previous profile and show an icon in the dashboard as a warning that the function isn't working.

[–] aikhae@lemmy.ohaa.xyz 1 points 2 hours ago (1 children)

Thank you for the clarification!

I wish, Renault and/or the salesperson would communicate clearly about the camera. It's way creepier when there is just a camera looking at you without having the context of it being required and which privacy requirements it has per law.

Interestingly, if I disable the function and then cover the camera, a warning still appears. I don't know if that's due to a weird implementation by Renault or a thing implied by the law

[–] bstix@feddit.dk 1 points 35 minutes ago

I think it's an update from January. The first produced R5s doesn't seem to have the camera on the A-pillar. It's part of the media system which is used in other models as well.

I can't imagine that rentals or fleet cars will throw a warning every time someone new uses the car, so I want to bet that the warnings can be disabled somehow with the right access to the ECU.

Renault uses their own ECU computers, which are quite expensive, but previous versions have been accessible using an OSB dongle with other software.

I'm sure someone will eventually figure out how to get into the system once these cars get old enough to reach the used market.