Your software is either trustworthy, part of that being that it doesn't perform surveillance on me, another part being that it installs through well-known automation (apt, nix, etc). Or it will never become part of my trusted computing base (yes, that term is another blast from the past).
If I am forced to use it, it will end up in some isolated VM or throwaway tablet, with the minimum of access required for the functionality I need. I will consider it a second class citizen and generally deprecate it as much as possible (eg for communication apps, work to move the conversation to a different medium).
I can't think of anyone I know who has a car that needs to phone home. But that's a very limited sample size, so you know. Also, I'm most likely in a different market to you, we've never had anything like OnStar make inroads here into domestic vehicles - some commercial operators are using telemetry on their trucks etc.
But rest assured, if all our cars were phoning home, I'd be making a massive fuss.
For example, an insurance company in my country has recently launched an app that will "measure" your driving and offer lower premiums if your driving is "safe" according to their algorithms. It's obviously opt-in, but at some point, the difference between a discount for opting in, and a penalty for opting out, becomes hard to differentiate.
You don't have any rights to review their algorithms if you feel that they got it wrong, it's a combination of Hail Corporate and Hail AI, and context is lost because it's impossible to capture that. E.g., does heavy braking indicate you were driving poorly, or did you encounter a situation where heavy braking was necessary, such as the damn cat down the road that thinks it's invincible deciding to make a sprint for it in front of you? Is acceleration in excess of their defined limit unsafe? Or were you accelerating more than you normally would, because someone gave you space to turn into the road and you didn't want to needlessly hold them up, given their courtesy?
And given what I've seen of the FAANG algorithms, I don't want algorithms from companies nowhere near FAANG level making decisions about me. A personal favourite of mine was FB removing a comment of mine, because my sister said she'd totally marry my wife, on account of how, well, pretty damn awesome my wife is, and I'd replied "Haha, I'll fight you" - and FB had flagged that as "hate speech/incitement to violence".
Anyway, thank you for coming to my TED rant.
Nissans do, my Leaf does. They connect to a mobile network or WiFi and upload data.
https://www.nissan.co.uk/ownership/nissan-infotainment-syste...
Goddamn, I don't want this post to be a screenshot for someone to point out that we can see the future.
I've been driving EVs for the past 10 years (LEAF -> Model X -> I-PACE) during which time I haven't used a gas pump. After reading your comment I had to go searching for this thing about ads playing while you're filling up. I found this Reddit post about being forced to watch ads before being allowed to even start the pump!
https://www.reddit.com/r/assholedesign/comments/819tcf/forci...
Oh. My. God. I'm disappointed. Not surprised. But disappointed.
> playing inside of the car
Yeah, that's definitely going at the top of my list of car "misfeatures" that would make me run screaming to another brand.
It's definitely the way the industry wants to go - I mean, free data, why not? Bit like the FAANGs, dress up the data collection with some features people want.
Might just be a case that no-one I know owns a late model car :D We're big on older Japanese imports in NZ, god bless our lack of tariffs. Although RIP our local car manufacturing industry, god bless neoliberalism.
You don’t know anyone with a Tesla? https://www.tesla.com/support/connectivity
Or a Honda? https://hondalink.honda.com/#/
Or a Bmw? https://connecteddrive.bmwusa.com/app/index.html#/portal
Or a Toyota? https://www.supraconnect.com/app/index.html#/portal
You don’t know anyone with a Chrysler, Dodge, Fiat, Jeep or Ram brand vehicle? https://www.driveuconnect.com/
You didn’t hear about the remote control vulnerability 6 years ago? Chrysler recalled their entire fleet to fix it. https://www.wired.com/2015/07/hackers-remotely-kill-jeep-hig...
Definitely no Chryslers, Dodges, Fiats, or Rams. They are very limited in market reach indeed in NZ, unless we're talking vintage cars, then there's a few more.
I also had the, ahem, "privilege" of owning a GM built "Toyota" previously[1]. It was... shall we say, a cacophony of interesting and bemusing engineering choices - the boot/trunk lid was incredibly heavy, yet the latch mechanism was made entirely of plastic, and to turn on the interior lights, you had to turn the dashboard brightness dial all the way up, and then a bit more, and then the interior lights would turn on. Only took me 3 months to figure that out. Admittedly, was handy for turning on the interior lights without looking away while driving, but was not at all intuitive.
Oh, I do know someone with a couple of Jeeps though, the poor bastards.
I guess you could rephrase my statement as "I don't know anyone with a car built after 2016", although as far as I can tell in NZ, Toyotas, at least, ship with telematics as an option for fleet management, rather than a default.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chevrolet_Cavalier#Toyota_Cava...
A lot of consumers (I would guess most) prefer to have default-on connectivity to provide services like theft protection, automatic emergency support in case of accidents, and up-to-date navigation maps, among many other modern conveniences.
As others point out, it's almost impossible to get a new car these days that isn't connected. Anything in the last five years in particular. It's pretty disgusting and one of the reasons I'm in no hurry to own anything new. I have a '97, '02 and '10 and they all work quite well for me and I intend to run them into the ground. And if I'm diligent they should last me until I am no longer fit to drive.
In NZ we tend to buy used Japanese imports because they're so damn cheap (IIRC, Japan has very strict rules about the age of a car for pollution control purposes, so they get shipped off to Australia and us after hitting that age limit, and we don't charge tariffs, unlike the Aussies), most people here would be lucky to buy a new car once or twice in their life.
Unless you go the usual route and start a building company, tick up a new Ford Ranger on the company's credit, transfer ownership to your spouse/partner, and then go into liquidation leaving behind devastated people who were trying to build their first home - and subcontractors who really need the $12k you owe them.
Cars Have Your Location. This Spy Firm Wants to Sell It to the U.S. Military:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26492322
One company wants to sell the feds location data from every car on Earth:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26511649
Military Unit Conducting Drone Strikes Bought Location Data from Ordinary Apps:
That is very much not true, on both counts.
There is a lot of nuance in this area.
Monitoring how well your own systems are working and how they're being used is one thing. It's obviously reasonable and necessary for a variety of practical reasons.
Monitoring how someone else's systems are being used, even if they happen to be running some of your software or incorporate some equipment you made, is something else. If you're no longer responsible for those systems and ownership has been handed over, including remote access or phone-home functionality means crossing some lines that maybe shouldn't be crossed, particularly not without the full knowledge and genuine consent of the person whose system you are communicating with.
This is like saying nobody cared about mass surveillance before Snowden. The problem is apparent, but the realization isn't evenly distributed.
The only difference between this Lua server and other Software Augmented with Additional Surveillance (SaaS) is your trust. You apparently trust them to not sell the data trove to a surveillance company (or to a VC who eventually will), but I see no reason to. Heck, I've been answering no to popcon for over a decade now, even though Debian is outstandingly trustworthy.
Even Backblaze, a company whose core product is securely storing your data, just recently suffered from an in house attack - apparently their security team didn't foresee the need to protect against javascript injection by their own marketing stooges. When data is there for the taking, most people cannot restrain themselves - the problem is endemic. The only solution is to assure the privacy of data, through means such as Free software, E2E encryption, and not collecting it in the first place.
I sure as hell am making a fuss about it, which is exactly why I drive a car that's old enough to vote (and pretty soon will be old enough to drink, smoke, and/or buy a handgun in California).