Many cars monitor the driver now, often with facial recognition enabled cameras. Mazda, infinity, Hyundai/genesis, others. It feels a bit like every brand will end up with invasive tech, ads, and subscriptions.
It's bad enough as it is, and consumers should try and fight against that by not buying those cars.
Especially now that we see that the CEO can turn fascist and feel entitled to do whatever he pleases with the data. How long before federal employees get fired because their Tesla showed that they arrived late to work?
At the very least, don't buy Teslas. At this point that's probably one of the riskiest choices.
Now we have to worry about the government AND the big tech companies AND their crazy CEOs as the lines get blurred between the three.
People were worried about Google in the early 2000s, after they bought doubleclick. There's nothing new here, except a continuous walk along the same path.
Data collection was a big trend of the 80s. Credit bureaus and points cards were the big start.
If you go into a forum about cars, you can see people asking about 5 or 6 years ago, to turn off telemetry in their cars. They are mocked relentlessly.
Then the insurance issue came to light, where car companies were caught selling data without consent. Suddenly, everyone cared.
Point is, the average person hasn't the time, or the inclination to understand, or even care... until it hurts them.
Of course, by the time the hurting happens, it's too late...
So give them pennies (point cards) and they'll be happy to be tracked.
From what I've noticed in my life, many people are incapable of being aware of dangers, without perspective. Thus, to survive mentally, they must dismiss dangers they cannot control. They deride concerns, to protect themselves menrally.
I'd say at least 50% of the population is like this.
Which surely has some connection to why Musk (like many other Silicon Valley billionaires) hates the EU so much.
Things tend to get demonstrably worse before it gets better. SIGH
Also, whether people choose to do the right thing is less interesting if they have no choice.
American's believe we're exceptional and dont have to learn from others. We'll do it OUR WAY and it'll work. We'll force it if we have to. This isn't something most people are consciously aware of, but it's something you can notice if you start to look for.
They aren't laughing.
On the contrary, the surveillance capitalists (many of which frequent this site) are vocal because they are spreading FUD. After all, sensible data protection laws affect their business models.
[1]: https://au.pcmag.com/cars-auto/107185/ford-patents-in-car-ad...
[2]: https://fortune.com/2025/02/13/jeep-in-car-ads-popup-stellan...
I want my car to monitor both me and the surroundings. I also want to be able to do things like speak in natural language to my phone, use my phone camera to OCR and translate documents from a foreign language, and all sorts of other 90s sci-fi stuff.
Unfortunately the future we were graced with is a dystopian reality where all of this is built on proprietary black boxes that spy on you 24/7. And somehow the government takes no issue with this state of affairs, instead constructing their own data feeds.
How do you propose these driverless / driver assist systems work?
This cracks me up. You're only saying that because he's vocal, and you're aware of him daily.
After all, I don't see people commenting on the other 1M CEO, nor aware of what they're doing right now, which do not post on X.
Being vocal is one thing but constantly attacking someone on x while spreading misinformation or straight up lies doesn't add to ones credibility either.