Hacker News Reader

Comment by ilamont | Hacker News Reader

The researchers assessed 25 popular brands’ privacy policies and found that 21 of these allow car companies to share or sell customer data with external service providers, data brokers and other businesses. Privacy policies from two brands—Kia and Nissan—even include a clause that notes that each company may collect and disclose data on users’ sexual orientation or sexual behavior.

Failing regulatory actions or lawsuits, the only way these companies will change such policies is through very public airing, which includes criticism and ridicule.

View on HN

Which were the four good brands? Also, could this be regulated at the state level?

When I looked through Mozilla’s findings, it looked like Mercedes and Subaru had opt-outs.

BMW sounded good in theory but didn’t respond to requests for clarifying information.

When this friend of mine spoke to employees at Mercedes, they said that nowadays they play all the value on the "electronic butler" features and that if you dislike the model they prefer not to sell you the car.

When he spoke to BMW, they could not utter a sentence that did not include terms in the set 'credit card', 'subscription', 'smartphone', 'app', 'telematic board', 'remote connection' (etc.) in some mental framework that made them as granted, implicit and necessary as 'axle' and 'engine'.

> looked like Mercedes and Subaru had opt-outs

Oh cool, here is Subaru's [1].

[1] https://www.subaru.com/support/consumer-privacy.html

That doesn't opt you out of the cell carriers' tracking.

"All but two of the 25 car brands we reviewed earned our “ding” for data control, meaning only two car brands, Renault and Dacia (which are owned by the same parent company) say that all drivers have the right to have their personal data deleted."

Incidentally, while their SUV are as disgusting to drive as other SUVs, according to a mechanic i went to school with, Dacia is a really good brand if you want to be able to repair your car for cheap. easy to get parts, almost no electronics. I don't think they have backup camera though, so they might be illegal in the US.

> backup camera

You can fit aftermarket ones. (I checked, many models exist.)

My dad has a Dacia Spring and it has a backup camera. I think they wold be not popular in the US since they're a small no frills car.

The following paragraph clarifies: " “Kia does not and has never collected ‘sex life or sexual orientation’ information from vehicles or consumers in the context of providing the Kia Connect Services,” says Kia spokesperson James Bell. He adds that the brand includes the category in its privacy policy to define “sensitive personal information” under the California Consumer Privacy Act. "

It's not as bad as it sounds. It seems just like legalese making things sound more dire than they are.

> as bad as it sounds

They put microphones, cameras and location trackers in your car, and reserve the rights to use what they collected about the owner and (potentially very unaware) passengers¹. There seem to be no alternatives for what new cars are concerned.

It is as bad as it sounds, and more.

(¹passengers are considered subject to a "they shall be informed by the owner of the vehicle that by entering it they accept privacy loss" clause.)

yikes!

I'd be more interested in learning how they would've collected that data.

Any time someone tells you that some term in a contract doesn't mean what it plainly says that it means, or that it's just some kind of boilerplate that is never actually invoked, run away as fast as you can.

How does a car figure out your sexual behaviour? Does it ask you?

One assumes the car can see or hear the passengers and infer that from how often you use it together.

Otherwise they'd have to have literally invented a gaydar and that just seems like a weird thing for car manufacturers to be investing in.

Microphones and cameras in the car; geolocation...

Statistical algorithms can be used to segment drivers and if it is possible to figure out that someone in some segment is of a specific orientation then the probability that others in that segments are of the same orientation goes up as well.

People are extremely predictable, if they weren't then Google and Facebook would not be making billions from selling ads using user segmentation. Amazon and Netlfix operate similarly, buyers and viewers are shown content based on their previous browsing habits and what others with similar patterns have bought and viewed in the past. If you can recommend content and ads better than a coin toss then you can make a lot of money.

I'm not sure why car companies want to sell driving patterns but if it can be used in some ad model to improve click through rates then I'm sure that Facebook and Google will be more than happy to buy the data to help their bottom line.

We all live in digital panopticons designed to sell us consumer products but most people are either unaware or don't care about what such a state of affairs entails. It's better to just assume that eventually all data feeds will be integrated into some ad model because that is where things are headed. Further dystopian extrapolations of constant and ubiquitous surveillance are left as exercises for the reader.

I don't think it's just the driving pattern. GM is actively trying to come up with it's own App ecosystem:

https://developer.gm.com/in-vehicle-apps

https://developer.gm.com/app-gallery

Subaru at least also has driver facing cameras into the cabin for driver attentiveness monitoring. I believe the Mach E also has it but I don't remember right off the top of my head, and I'm sure there's others as well.

Digital storage density is increasing and most developed nations have 5G deployments. I imagine the ad models could probably be updated in real time because neither storage nor bandwidth are real bottlenecks so if you are frustrated during your drive by the time you get home Google and friends already know what products to show you in order to increase sales. Truly marvelous times to be alive.

An online service could ask m/f/other during signup, then collect other information through tracking. I’m not aware of a specific in-car use case today, but I could imagine some personalisation feature asking you in the future.

It doesn't have to be 100% accurate, it only needs to get it right, across the whole market, just enough for advertising preferences, so they can make money off of it. In this case, if you are a woman, and you drive a Subaru, your sexual orientation is towards other women.

The article includes an inquiry about this:

> It’s unclear if or how these automakers might be doing such things. “Kia does not and has never collected ‘sex life or sexual orientation’ information from vehicles or consumers in the context of providing the Kia Connect Services,” says Kia spokesperson James Bell. He adds that the brand includes the category in its privacy policy to define “sensitive personal information” under the California Consumer Privacy Act. Nissan spokesperson Brian Brockman similarly says, “Nissan does not knowingly collect or disclose consumer information on sexual activity or sexual orientation,” and adds that state laws such as California’s require the company to disclose inadvertent information that might be inferred from other data such as location tracking.

It sounds like they list everything, because anything might be inferable somehow.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com