Automakers Sold Driver Data for Pennies, Senators Say

It kills me that I can’t remember where the article was exactly, because it’s one of mu favorite examples of why fighting indiscriminate tracking is important. I remember it being from a Scandinavian newspaper, maybe Dannish?

AI is legalized intellectual theft and breaks so many laws (privacy, copyright) yet it's a magic box that randomizes who is stolen from so people accept it.

All the business-speak about data privacy is an attempt to hold the general public at bay.

AI and data processing algorithms can do more advanced things, like stylometric comparisons, biometrics, and doing the grunt work of filtering out data associated with a particular individual. You're known and modeled with higher resolution and greater detail than any intimate partner or therapist.

No problem here! This will certainly not end poorly. There's absolutely nothing that could go wrong.

It is possible to do data collection in a relatively anonymous way (it's never possible to do it in an entirely anonymous way), but there's no way for a person outside the company to know if it's actually being done that way, and there still has to be an entity somewhere that processes the non-anonymous form of the data.

I've often thought that cynically, the real motivation for having non-technical people in these public-facing roles (sales, marketing, media etc.) is so that they can honestly, earnestly, present their understanding of the product. An understanding, that is, which lacks the nuance to properly convey the implications of pretty much any aspect of the situation.

fucking around and finding out is much less commendable when you fuck around with other people's lives and let them find out.

Its the continuation of https://techcrunch.com/2023/08/01/california-privacy-agency-...

https://gbhackers.com/toyota-data-breach/

"The in-vehicle GPS navigation terminal ID number / The chassis number / Vehicle location information with time data."

Toyota = Lexus = a lot of politicians and their families.

The money maker here is the scale of which it happens at.

I don't want to be paid for the collection and use of my personal data, I want for the collection and use to not happen without my informed consent.

On the flip side smaller questionable used car dealers have definitely installed trackers to help with repoing a car in the event the buyer stops paying, or even worse lock down the car so it won't start.

That sounds like they gave me a free GPS unit that I could repurpose.

It's why car interiors are so cheap, when alternatives aren't expensive.

Maybe if it was aggregated and restricted to average number of cars at X public locations at any given time. But it sounds like the individual data is being sold here.