Massachusetts voters pass right-to-repair expansion opening up car data
engadget.com
engadget.com
The whole premise of this, as I read it, was that while OBD ports are fair game (and any protocol over them), there is other data that is (often) necessary to diagnose and repair cars that is not available from OBD and is phoned-home. That's simple enough.
What I think is superb is that the law requires data to go _directly to consumers_ as in, car makers would be required to change immediate locations of outbound telemetry such that they can't get it. This is key as I, first, don't want data leaving my car at all, and second, if it does, I don't want the automaker or insurance company to get to it.
I'm sure automakers (Tesla especially, since they pioneered brutally connected cars and data capture) aren't thrilled about this, but I am optimistic to see where it goes. Maybe I'll be able to buy a new car that doesn't phone home (or only phones home to a service I personally own). I can dream.
So even though I think it's awesome to give people more diagnostic data, I don't think it goes far enough if that info is along the lines of "Unauthorized tires detected. Your vehicle must be serviced by an authorized repair shop."
Every step counts.
This is a very useful step in the right direction.
No, it clearly isn't totally useless. The case you point out means that there is an argument for stronger protections also.
And if you buy it directly from him, the ebook version is DRM-free.
or just be able to say no.
these company fear the data loss, but honestly I think most people will leave it going.
This would also promote competition or new sources of data.
What if startup automobile tech companies or mapping companies could offer you money for your video feed or navigation data?
Or you could give it all to open street maps or new things like open traffic or open weather or whatever.
It could - at your discretion - democratize the mobile data your car collects.
What an amazing idea. There is no problem with telemetry if the user owns and controls the data it produces. They should make this law cover more classes of products and software.
“It will allow these people to access very detailed
information, including how, when and where a person
drives. From this information, a third party, such as
a sexual predator, could stalk and/or harm victims by
exploiting insecure transmissions of vehicle
information.”
Instead of spending millions of dollars campaigning against this quite sensible proposal, why not spend the money developing secure transmission of information? Or better yet, transmitting as little information as possible in the first place?
Why do telematics companies need to know where you are? I'm aware that car insurance telematics companies provide location tracking for cases of vehicle theft (I had such a device in my car for my previous insurance provider), but that doesn't have to be actively-transmitting location data at all times; it could instead do so only after a secure request to the device from the telematics company after a theft is reported.
I've found that industries irrationally oppose reasonable legislation on principle. Do you remember cell phone number portability? (In the US?) Cell phone carriers vocally opposed it, and then the day it was passed they all put up signs saying you could keep your number if you switched today.
There comes a point where the public's best interest outweighs a corporation's best interest.
Or are you of the opinion that profits matter over everything else?
An extreme example I expect you'd agree with to illustrate the structure:
* Individuals shouldn't just be able to take corporations' property without compensation. Individuals' being able to obtain a TV just by taking it from Best Buy would undoubtedly be a benefit. However, it would mean no sane retailer would stay in business. Having a functioning retail economy is more important to me than getting a free TV.
The equivalent argument here is:
* Developing cars is hard, expensive work that benefits the public (improved safety, reduced emissions, etc.). If retail car prices were just a bit lower, many more people could afford them, allowing them to access jobs and escape poverty. One way to lower retail car prices is to allow manufacturers to sell telemetry data from cars. They'll still need to compete on price for customers, but since they'll have this new data revenue stream, they'll be able to lower consumer prices further while still covering their costs. If you care more about poverty than you do about data privacy, you should support letting manufacturers sell usage data.
I happen not to buy that argument and voted Yes on this measure, but I hope it clarifies how conceptually, people can be for corporations on issues where giving corporations more or fewer rights is at issue.
To the people that would seriously make this argument though, I ask them this:
If the location or other telemetry data is so valuable that the manufacturer selling it can have a real impact on the purchase price of the car, then doesn’t that value have to come from somewhere? Other companies wouldn’t buy that data if they didn’t think they could use it to make more money than the data is worth. That money the data buyers then are hoping to make would come from the very people that the data did, in most cases, right? So the consumer has ended up with less money compared to if they didn’t have their data sold, even if they got some trinkets in return.
Moreover, for the general public, money flow is good, even if we think car owner #75834 got duped in how he spent his $100. Buying an extra trinket creates trinket-making jobs, who eat at restaurants, which hire cooks, etc. Estimates vary, but suggest $100 of flow generates an additional $50-$250 in economic activity [0].
[0]See Table 1... https://www.cbo.gov/sites/default/files/114th-congress-2015-....
I don't think that the point of corporate vs public best interest is "unconditional", but we skew way too far to the corporate side than is good for our society
In effect, your suggesting they be double counted as both the owners and members of the public.
That being said, an individual's share of the "public interest" is incredibly miniscule, and there's relatively few owners, so it's not like it's equal on both sides. In fact, that's ultimately the problem; that we constantly bend due to "corporate interests" that are subject to the whims of an incredibly small fraction of society that is, in general, massively disconnected from the norms of society.
Add on to that, generally having a large amount of money and privilege means that most of the things that are in the "public interest" aren't really of significant concern to you because you can simply buy your way into a completely different system (see public vs private education)
To some extent, an organization is a host for emergent behavior. An organization (like an ant colony) may behave in ways that are counter to the best interests of, and incomprehensible by, any given isolated individual in that organization.
I'm struggling to understand why this should be the case. I understand this is how it works now, but this seems like a flaw, not a desirable aspect of life.
Edit: To clarify, I meant I don't understand why it's a good thing we expect corporations to look out for their best interests while ignoring the best interests of society/individuals.
If an individual does it, their known for being selfish, egotistical, maybe even narcissistic. There's a natural push back from society to this behavior.
Corporations should be disincentivized from doing this as well. Society would benefit as a whole. The fact that people expect selfishness out of corporations and see it as a good thing is concerning.
The correct response to this is to make the data opt in with a strong warning about how it could be abused, not make it only abusable by corporations.
I wish we'd also passed ranked choice voting, but it did alright at 45% yes (93% reporting).
[0] https://www.vice.com/en/article/qj4ayw/auto-industry-tv-ads-...
Sadly when I have explained it to them, they usually change their mind over it. Just need better voter education next time I guess.
The right-to-repair question was simple and very clear. It explained the ballot initiative within the question:
> A "yes" vote supported requiring manufacturers that sell vehicles with telematics systems in Massachusetts to equip them with a standardized open data platform beginning with model year 2022 that vehicle owners and independent repair facilities may access to retrieve mechanical data and run diagnostics through a mobile-based application.
Compare with the RCV question, which didn't define RCV (that is probably impossible in a single sentence...):
> A "yes" vote supported enacting ranked-choice voting (RCV) for primary and general elections for state executive officials, state legislators, federal congressional and senate seats, and certain county offices beginning in 2022.
Both ballot initiative questions were preceded by a wall of text explaining the details, of course. But I bet most people didn't read those paragraphs.
Here is a reasonable try.
Everyone lists candidates in the order that they like them, then candidates get knocked out one by one with votes always being for the remaining candidate that the voter liked best.
Don't ask me to explain any Condorcet method in one sentence though. :-)
The problem in US politics is that it's polarizing (by design?) and always boils down to either voting for the least-worst candidate (rather than the candidate you actually like), or voting for someone you hate simply because there's a key issue that aligns with your thinking.
This is better than nothing, but this approach would seem to open the door to issues such as previous owners still having access to the data, OEMs obfuscating the API to access the data, the apps being geo-locked and possibly requiring paid subscriptions, etc...
The 2013 right-to-repair law resulted in a nationwide change to allow OBD access after negotiations with the state legislature.
Some of the data that is intended to be covered by Question 1 is data that was transmitted to the OEM last week. MA already has a right-to-repair law that covers the wired/OBD2 interface (which is a CAN bus interface at this point).
As for data that was transmitted "last week" I'd rather my car not transmit data continuously, and if I wanted to monitor it continuously I could just plug in a scanner with an embedded computer. There are already a multitude of such devices for OBD, both that pair with your phone and which run as independent devices.
In other words, the prior question covered wired connections, but wireless telematics was a "loophole" of sorts. If I were an OEM and wanted to sell in MA, I had an easy way to get data that would be able to stay proprietary to me and my network of dealers so long as I transmitted that data wirelessly.
I probably agree with you on the continuous data transmission point wrt desirability overall, but given that your car is going to do it anyway, I want that data to not be locked in the OEM garden. This removes that major advantage to using wireless transmission to work around this.
The ideas are great but the implementation can be shoddy.
For instance, I think the first thing should have been the ability to easily disable collection, not get an app to watch your privacy be invaded.
I'm am glad that these scare tactics from the opposition failed.
California has its own stricter emissions laws and car manufacturers build to California standards as a result.
The manufacturers will continue to fight this tooth and nail and will only open this up as much as they are forced to.
Even ignoring the cost and complexity of the logistics, the manufacturers will open themselves up to an expensive and drawn out stream of lawsuits litigating every conceivable edge case (such as the above examples). All with little minimal upside for themselves, since right-to-repair primarily harms dealerships and minimally harms manufacturers (since most if not all states make it illegal for auto manufacturers to own dealerships).
Plus all of the above leads to higher costs the manufacturers have to bear, which will ultimately get pushed down to dealers/consumers. And isn't limited to just Massachusetts, due to the ripple effect of increasing overall complexity in their manufacturing/distribution/sales processes. Which could decrease sales volume across the entire market if everyone went this route, or result in loss of market share if other manufacturers do implement it nationwide and you can't maintain competitive pricing.
At the end of the day, it'll end up going nationwide, because there's no real reason not to. And every reason to go nationwide. Auto manufacturers would love to be able to have direct-to-consumer sales, and starving the primary profit stream of dealerships makes that easier to happen. It's drastically cheaper - every car rolls off the production lane exactly the same, there's no enforcement mechanism to maintain, and no potentially costly class action lawsuits to worry about. All while having a perfectly valid rationale to show they aren't deliberately harming the independent dealership model, and are simply complying with their legal requirements as efficiently as feasible.
Massachusetts passed a law, and car manufacturers voluntarily made it a national standard a year later.
They aren't going to build different cars for one state, and they aren't going to stop selling cars in one state.
The result in my town was an emphatic "yes".
In my area we had a ballot question about committing to 100% renewable energy in 20 years.
"Shall the representative from this district be instructed to vote in favor of legislation that penalizes officers on duty for the murder of unarmed and restrained citizens similarly to the penalty of first-degree murder?"
You probably missed the restrained part. Shooting a restrained person is nothing but 1st degree murder.
Crossfire or negligent discharge? Probably not.
If you are curious for more detail, Ballotpedia has a good overview of information in their "path to the ballot" section: https://ballotpedia.org/Massachusetts_Question_1,_%22Right_t...
One ridiculous example from just the other day when I rented a 2020 Jeep Cherokee: The toggle for turning on the backup camera is in the audio settings for some inexplicable reason. No, that is not a typo.
There are forums full of people discussing how to buy after market doohickies to turn on/have a backup cam on while driving to, e.g., monitor a trailer hitch … while the toggle is in the audio settings, at least in the 2020.
This is a huge, global, multi-billion dollar company that did that … handicapping basic functionality of the $30,000+ vehicle. Just think about that for a second.
MA voter here. Today / this week I'll take any good news I can get.
Which was grudgingly. I understand they've improved somewhat but their initial implementation was something like you could rent a service manual for some significant fee per hour.