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Comment by tecleandor | Hacker News Reader

> The very worst offender is Nissan. The Japanese car manufacturer admits in their privacy policy to collecting a wide range of information, including sexual activity, health diagnosis data, and genetic data — but doesn’t specify how.

My dad just bought a Nissan Qashqai (I hate it, but wathever). For legal reference, I'm on Spain, so EU GDPR framework. Every single time you start the car it shows a consent screen for data aquisition. By memory... "Driving data, location, statistics, blablabla for the Nissan Connect program."

  - I haven't connected nor I have a user or anything at all in the Nissan Connect apps
  - You can't disable the dialog, not even in the service menu
  - I've been digging in forums and everyone says you have to bear with that for the whole life of the car

That's not ethical, and probably not even legal.

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> Every single time you start the car it shows a consent screen for data aquisition.

My parents new Hyundai does this too. You cant say no, and you cant store your reply. Incredible. I'll never ever purchase such a vehicle.

Thanks for letting me know this. I was considering one of their vehicles. Added them to the vehicle shitlist.

Which is illegal. They just haven't been sued yet.

Is their car connected? I have a 2022 Hyundai and all it does is tell me to drive safely but if you don’t respond it goes straight to CarPlay. I imagine you need to connect the car to Hyundais app for them to get data right?

I don't think its connected (my parents wouldn't set anything up), but who knows?

I wonder if the dealership connected mine. I have a lease so anyone could have test-driven the car and hit "accept"

If only that was the case! Cars have their own cellular modems and ship off your data without any end user involvement.

All cars? Man, I need to do something about that...but I never agreed to anything, though it may have saved my response since I am leasing the car.

Any modern car with eCall will. Some will even make you pay for it.

My Kia does this too, but the consent screen goes away after a while if you don't do anything.

I had a Kia rental a while back, exact same car UI and prompt as Hyundai.

And, from a pre-smartcar perspective, a terrible driver experience. I don't understand why the consumer marketplace puts up with this.

The data mining probably doesn't really register, I suppose it never shows up again when you press yes, which almost everyone will reflexively do right away.

Also, people will put up with a lot to have that BMW that marketers have programmed them to associate with success and status.

What else is there to buy?

Can you refuse as easily as you can consent?

Nag on boot already means that you can't refuse as easily as you can consent.

Presumably they don't harrass users to accept the agreement once already accepted.

Presumably they don't harrass users to accept the agreement once already accepted

They may have to, as long as they can't identify who's behind the wheel: a single driver can't (legally) accept those terms for all future drivers of the car.

> That's not ethical, and probably not even legal.

Sounds illegal indeed, GDPR requests the possibility to refuse the data and you can't just ask in a loop, that wouldn't be informed consent.

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