From sex life to politics: car driver data grab presents ‘privacy nightmare' | Hacker News Reader

From sex life to politics: car driver data grab presents ‘privacy nightmare'

theguardian.com

This is a dupe of multiple HN submissions, including https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37404413 (403 comments) currently on the front page.

The car data collected predicted you'd post the above :)

Most modern data collection uses embedding vectors. Those vectors are just a short list of numbers (for example, 128 decimal numbers).

However, from those numbers, one could make a pretty accurate guess about your sex life, political alignment, desire to buy a lawnmower, or how many rotten teeth you have.

In fact, even the developers of the system don't know what the embedding vectors will be useful for. They just know that if they take a bunch of data and create a user embedding vector, then that vector typically doesn't count as PII, yet can be used for almost all moneymaking schemes.

Unfortunately, a lot of people agree with privacy protection only in theory, but when they're asked to choose between privacy and convenience, all too often the latter wins.

I've meant for a long time to find the component in my car that send data and either remove it or wrap it in aluminum foil or whatever it takes to make it stop phoning home. But you know what? Not doing that is so much more convenient...

fyi, there might be an Onstar fuse you can pull. My owners manual had a diagram and list of all the fuses.

This appears to just be a review of privacy policies.

There is no software in the car that looks for bouncing on the back seat while the car is in park and the humidity is rising...

But the privacy policy lets them add such software if they wanted to.

Can we finally get some good data privacy laws in America? Can we have an open, anonymized ledger of all data sold between companies like some kind of data securities exchange?

The problem is humans are all so similar and predictable from a few signals. There are maybe 20 buckets for all of humanity and even if you `anonymize the ledger`, it's going to be trivial to reconstruct your likes, preferences, i.e. which bucket you fit in, based on a few of those signals. Which to advertisers and others, is all that matters. I'm reminded of the `Life of Brian` where a crowd says in unison `We're all individuals`. That being said, let's not let the perfect be the enemy of the good.

I was happy to learn the 3G radio in my 2016 VW Golf no longer works. Obsolescence can be a savior.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com