An investigation by consumer advocacy group Choice found most of Australia’s popular car brands collect and share “driver data”, ranging from braking patterns to video footage.
Kia and Hyundai collect voice recognition data from inside their cars and sell it to an artificial intelligence software training company.
Privacy and consumer rights advocates are pushing for law reform to limit data collection to what is “fair and reasonable”.
… and Tesla ‘most concerning’
Why am I not surprised.
Tesla collects short images and videos from cameras inside and outside their cars. Tesla workers have been caught sharing among themselves highly invasive camera recordings of Tesla customers in the nude, as well as images of crashes and road-rage incidents.
The videos and images Tesla collects may be shared with third parties, Mr Blakkarly said.
Wow, worse than I thought. I figured it’d be external video for the purposes of self-driving AI training - which is bad enough for privacy - but why the fuck do they have internal cameras?
I’m driving around in a 10+ year old car. It doesn’t have any of these ‘back to base’ features. I’m really at a loss as to what these features bring you as a customer? Why would I want to buy a car that is connected to the Internet?
I’ve never had this feature, so I honestly don’t know what I’m missing.
They bring nothing. My wife doesn’t care even after I explained what it’s doing. I was going to cut the modem antenna to stop the communication but she’s dead set I’ll wreck the car doing that.
This just a milquetoast rehashing of https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/privacynotincluded/categories/cars/
Still, improving consumer awareness may force some of the bastards to realise that privacy is a marketable feature.
TBH, I’m more concerned about what Android Auto is sending back …
For anyone using that, I’ve been trying out Magic Earth as an alternative to Google Maps, and it’s done a pretty good job so far in Sydney…
Scuttlebutt is that some Luxury and Prestige Manufacturers refused to support Android Auto initially because Google was demanding not only customer data but also vehicle telemetry and performance data. CarPlay was supported though.
The rumoured manufacturers all support Android Auto now so maybe Google changed their contracts.
I use Magic Earth as well. Closed source, but a better privacy policy than Google and it is easier to use than OsmAnd.
