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Comment by KCUOJJQJ | Hacker News Reader

I'm not a car owner but I wouldn't buy a car from Google or a car that is connected to the internet / saves data into logs that can be read in a garage.

I wouldn't buy a car from Google because of this [1]. Even if Google promised not to collect data I wouldn't believe them.

[1] https://www.theverge.com/2017/11/21/16684818/google-location... Google admits it tracked user location data even when the setting was turned off

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Maybe I haven't been following Waymo too closely... but are they even planning on selling cars? I thought the end goal was to build a fleet of self-driving cars to have a lower cost Uber/Lyft replacement. You wouldn't own the car, but merely a subscription to their self-driving fleet.

Doesn't look like it. Waymo seems content to do taxi and delivery, though my guess is Google took such a large stake in Uber and Lyft in order to license the tech there. Or integrate Waymo fleets with their apps.

Despite the glut of subprime car loans, the newer generations are buying less cars, and Waymo is probably not going to try to sell vehicles.

Frankly, nothing you said amounts to anything more than FUD.

You're clearly extremely paranoid and not a car owner and also Waymo does not sell cars to consumers. They aren't trying to sell someone like you anything.

No one cares that you don't trust Google or that you wouldn't buy a car that's not for sale.

I care. Not a ton, but I do care.

This is a pretty aggressive response for what is a reasonable observation. There’s a growing sense by broad swaths of the population that Google is too powerful and doesn’t care much about your privacy. I know many non-techies who switched to iOS or refuse to use Android because of privacy concerns. It’s not crazy to think that they’d be reluctant to buy a car from Google. It’s definitely not “extremely paranoid”.

Similarly I wouldn’t buy a car with a self-driving system from Facebook or Amazon.

Do you carry a cell phone?

Yes, but it's in flight mode usually, except once a day. If I've missed a call I call back the next day. My main issue are the spam callers. I turn the cell phone connection on temporarily when needed, for instance for using https://f-droid.org/en/packages/de.schildbach.oeffi/ or if I'm waiting for a call.

If you have an iPhone you can enable 'silence unknown callers' which will prevent your phone from ringing for any incoming call that's not in your contact list. This solves the spam problem.

Super curious to know when you start following this lifestyle?

At this point wouldn't you be better off just getting a landline?

Baseband pings can still track you, I think.

Are there any modern cars that don't have at least an EDR?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Event_data_recorder

Yeah, a Waymo car is a whole different kettle of fish, but modern cars keep logs- if not location, then other data.

Don't Waymo-equipped vehicles cost upward of $400K for car + sensor add-ons? How would anyone hope to recoup that cost with a bunch of $5 rides?

You are not factoring in the economies of scale that will kick in if Waymo really figures out autonomous driving. It will change the world forever, and the costs will go down.

But they're only really trying to figure it out in fenced areas like Phoenix, no? It's not like they can get Phoenix sorted out and then start building systems that are intended to operate outside Phoenix -- I don't see any sort of a reasonable path to scaling. They're not building learning systems -- only training systems.

> It's not like they can get Phoenix sorted out and then start building systems that are intended to operate outside Phoenix

Um... Yes it's absolutely like that. They're using phoenix because it very little rain, so they can get cars that work ignoring bad weather

Afterwards they can scale out to other good weather cities and focus harder on expanding the weather they can drive in

By giving more than 80,000 rides in each car.

For anyone curious, if each ride takes 10 minutes, and the car can spend 8 hours a day doing rides, it would take 5.7 years for a car to give 100,000 rides. (I added a little to accommodate the price of charging the vehicles and maybe some maintenance)

I think this is pretty reasonable considering that for $5/ride I would expect there to be quite a lot of demand, and there's opportunities for things like food delivery as well.

If you're not a car owner, how do you get around in vehicles?

I offer that it's entirely possible that the tracking you are attempting to avoid, you may be already entirely subject to, via things like Uber or your mobile phone.

I doubt there's any meaningful way to avoid IC/Telco/FAANG location/movement surveillance these days.

This is not to say that your decision is wrong (it's the same reason I cancelled my Cybertruck preorder!), just that I think people like us may be out of luck.

>If you're not a car owner, how do you get around in vehicles?

With a subcription for the trams/trains/busses in my area. I use taxis sometimes, but not Uber. On holidays I like to share a car with others. If you share the costs, cars aren't even expensive.

>This is not to say that your decision is wrong

Thanks!

How do you feel about Tesla in this regard?

I don't know. The police in the city of Basel bought seven Teslas. It seems this wasn't OK regarding data protection. And I don't know if it's OK now or if the police were just allowed to keep the cars because they had already bought them. According to an article, written in German, the police had to replace the SIM cards inside the cars with Swiss SIM cards [1]. IMHO this looks (partly) like a pseudo action because there is still an internet connection. (However, according to the article the cars are considered to be OK now.)

[1]https://www.baublatt.ch/kommunal/datenschutzproblem-bei-tesl...

Telsa is outright hostile in this regard, and several others. Regardless of if they make a good car, you have to accept a lot of negative things to purchase one.

I wouldn't buy a Tesla and I wouldn't drive one if it was given to me free. Despite the legal property of a car title, you can't really own a Tesla, they control the software "activation" and "license" that it won't operate without. And even if you don't use the Autopilot sensors, Tesla uses them to collect data for itself.

Waymo would have all the same problems, except I doubt Waymo is targeting cars people would buy at all. Google seems set on delivering a transportation service. It's questionable if they'll ever sell their system at all.

They might disable supercharging for crashed vehicles but the software itself was never deactivated for anyone.

It's a little more than supercharging: https://www.teslarati.com/think-twice-buying-salvaged-tesla-...

"However having Tesla Motors maker of the Model S activate the car’s onboard computer and allowing it to drive"

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