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Comment by elil17 | Hacker News Reader

If you read the actual patent filing and look at their claims strategy it's very clear that what they want to be able to do is have it so when you drive by a billboard or road sign you can press something on your car's navigation display to navigate there. That seems like a useful navigation feature (e.g., for getting to a gas station) and not at all related to "beaming distracting ads into your car."

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Not only should the in car interface lock itself when driving to a map or rear camera, but distracting video billboards in general should be banned for safety reasons. Tempting drivers to push buttons to make pop ups go away is just going to lead to deaths. I have a friend who died in a car accident and “ad revenue” doesn’t impress me as a justification

> distracting video billboards in general should be banned for safety reasons

My state bans all billboards. They're thought pollution.

https://movia.media/moving-billboard-blog/why-is-billboard-a...

This law holds in Alaska, Hawaii, Maine, and Vermont. 3 out of the 4 are outermost states of the U.S., and the other is close to being so. Perhaps since there isn't much interstate traffic going through these states and their state populations are low, there was not so great of an incentive for advertisers to lobby against such laws banning highway ads.

Fantastic. They have this huge bright video billboard where I drive - at night it is ridiculously distracting. I have no idea how they pass muster on road safety rules.

That’s amazing. They’re getting ridiculous in the big cities in Australia. You can’t avoid them.

I was in Byron Bay town last Saturday night. I saw a truck with three massive screen billboards driving around (advertising the new alcohol deliver service by Dan Murphys’s...). I couldn’t believe how bright it was driving behind it. How that is legal is beyond me! Last thing the country needs is more alcohol. Advertising in Australia is getting out of hand.

WTF that is awesome, I had no idea this was a thing!

How does that not run afoul of first amendment rights? For example if I wanted to advertise my political view on a sign mounted on my land, would that really be something the state Dan block?

They're state laws. It's a 9th/10th Amendment issue. A federal billboard ban would certainly seem to violate the 1st.

A ban in California would seem illegal as well, due to the affirmative right to free speech contained in the California Constitution (see Pruneyard Shopping Center v. Robins).

Here in Maine, on-premises signs are allowed but have strict limitations:

https://legislature.maine.gov/statutes/23/title23sec1914.htm...

But the supremacy clause (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supremacy_Clause) prevents state laws from preempting federal laws, including the constitution.

Yeah, you're right.

It looks like sign bans are usually unconstitutional when content-based, where the substance of what is being communicated is taken into account (e.g. bans on only commercial signs), but generally hold up if content-neutral and based on reasonable factors, such as safety or aesthetics.

See Reed v. Town of Gilbert (content-based ban struck down) versus Scenic Arizona v. City of Phoenix (content-neutral and safety-based ban on electronic signs upheld).

https://www.scenic.org/sign-control/billboard-laws/important...

If the sign throws fireworks at passers-by, yes. Because the point of a billboard ban is not their contents, but the distraction they cause. It would be enough to tune them down and nobody would mind but yeah, losing perceived ad revenue is somehow never the first thought.

I imagine in the denser cities you could get away with banning driving altogether (except transit).

If they were building an in-car communication service, that would be one thing.

But "click here to interact with street ads" seems pretty pointless to me, just one more bullshit distraction.

I will note, I have not owned a car this century, and only drive when I need to. But I don't even want a screen in my car. The only useful feature is the backup camera, and I'm fine parallel parking for myself, if the cost of the camera is every other control moves to a fucking touch screen.

I'm probably going to have to buy something in the next couple of years, and I'm pretty sure it is going to be a very old truck that predates the crapification.

It seems some auto manufacturers are having second thoughts on touch UI. Mazda is getting rid of it:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20200335

I'd hope it would just be a simple button to "bookmark" the content or program the coordinates into your navigation. Otherwise this seems like the exact kind of distracted driving that most distracted driving laws are trying to prevent.

Clearly this will never be hacked to automatically reroute nav to unwittingly send car to target location.

While I can imagine ways to design a simple protocol so poorly that what you suggest is possible, I don't know if I'd be able to make one by accident. It seems unlikely that the designers of the technology are aiming for that.

"Here is the address to the advertised burger king. Do you wish to go there now?" The yes fills the screen and can't be dismissed, the little 'x' to close it is offscreen because a developer forgot that screens have different sizes in different vehicles.

Now that I can see. Not really a hack, but yeah that squares with the ability level I'd expect from someone who puts a touchscreen in a car.

I am more worried about being goatse’d when I’m driving.

Do advertisers pay Ford for this privilege?

Because that would be awesome if Ford slashed the price of their vehicles since they will be paid for by ads.

It's not like that.

The value is that the kind of person who like, buys a new car, is someone who buys shit generally, a proverbial whale consumer. They could just sell the purchaser lists directly, and it would already get you 80% of the way there (20% is the intent, although is there really intent if you look at a billboard?)

There is intent of you hit the "navigate me there" button.

This is definitely on their radar, at least conceptually. At the Ford developer conference they shared the idea of the zero dollar car. At signing, you are given the option to let them collect various data points (barometer, location for traffic, location for advertising, etc) in exchange for cost reductions on the final price.

I am usually very anti advertising, but I don’t understand the backlash here. If it’s done tastefully as you describe it’s basically just a hands free QR code.

Rules:

- opt in: nothing happens unless I click the “I saw something on a billboard” button

- no animation or sound, just a button/link

Making drivers click extra stuff is always dangerous. It doesn’t matter what it is.

> That seems like a useful navigation feature

Not really. I have a phone that can do this for me without the company needing to actually advertise.

I just tried it, from the navigation screen it's one tap to "search along route" and another to pick the category I want to search for.

I would add to this; I’ve driven by billboards and actually wanted the phone number/website but didn’t catch it in time. So while like anything it could be abused. It also serves a useful purpose

Having your navigation display change because a company want to divert you from your destination sounds exactly like "beaming distracting ads into my car". Even a message will distract people more than necessary, humans already prove their focus is poor as hell. It'll feel like your car has a life of it's own, and that life is now capitalism.

I don't see why this couldn't be toggled off with a simple setting.

Same reason your browser doesn't block all ads and popups by default.

It really should be opt-in then, not opt-out.

The closest thing to this that exists now is probably the ads in Waze, but those only show up when you're stopped and vanish when you start accelerating again.

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