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Comment by Cider9986 | Hacker News Reader

Related: Mozilla did a review of different cars for privacy:

(https://www.mozillafoundation.org/en/privacynotincluded/arti...)

>Nissan earned its second-to-last spot for collecting some of the creepiest categories of data we have ever seen. [Their privacy policy] includes your “sexual activity.” Not to be out done, Kia also mentions they can collect information about your “sex life” in their privacy policy. Oh, and six car companies say they can collect your “genetic information” or “genetic characteristics.”

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Ignoring the fact that it's absolutely unhinged and bonkers to include that in the first place, I don't even understand how they could possibly ever get any information about that. Are they using LLMs to generate these policies without review? Or are there really lawyers out there who thought this was pertinent and important to include?

Any car that can record audio in the cabin could have information about your sexual activity. Could also argue it based on location data.

Some laws require discussing very specific lists of categories of information they might have. I'm guessing this is a completionist CYA lawyer accounting for this.

Or malicious compliance by a true friend to privacy.

I was thinking all it takes is an IMU to tell if the car is a rockin'

150lbs on each front seat at 8pm, 300lbs on one rear seat at 2am, they gotcha like Kalanick & the Uber one night standers

https://web.archive.org/web/20140827195715/https://blog.uber...

Legal wiggle room in case the sleepy eyes cam catches some action? Disclaimer: no idea how the tired driver sensors work.

But that safety functionality doesn't require storing or transmitting the footage ...

You’re thinking like a consumer and not a business who could make money by transmitting that footage and using it for other purposes!

Well, there's the old cliche of someone being conceived in the back seat of their grandparent's Chevy... so a little extra DSP analysis with the seat occupancy sensors? :-)

Now I want a hacker competition - I’m seeing utilizing the microphone, TPS, roll sensors, seat occupancy/airbag sensors …

They’re just including everything to be clear that you have no privacy in this agreement, so they don’t have to think about it too much when they realize there’s something more they can collect.

Just wait until genome sequencing becomes cheap enough...

Apparently there are cases of passenger's jaw closing on the driver's protrusion on crash, causing injuries

I get your point of view. But many many many years ago meta searches for persons already included categories like "sexual orientation" and got this data points from myspace profiles no one ever thought of. So, in a lawyers mind there might be some logic behind it, when marketing says, they collect data about people, who recently became parents and the conclusion to somehow classify this type of information into a data category of "sexual activity" as collecting such data is by law allowed in some countries, while collecting data about relationship or children is prohibited. For me, this sounds very much like this corporate thinking of how to defend against the slightes legal risk of undisclosed data handling.

I wonder how Slate ( https://slate.auto ) will rate when production begins? I suspect poorly as it's a Bezos property.

If it doesn’t get a perfect score then it was overbuilt and maybe will be underpriced counting on the sale of customer data

Main reason why I will never buy an EV, and keep driving my Internet-free Honda until it dies, which will likely be after me.

nothing about this has anything to do with EVs

I think the GP was talking about the fact it is hard to find an EV that is bundled with a lot of invasive software.

There's another post on this article asking for an EV that doesn't: "need internet connectivity via wifi/esim at all? I'm looking for something really simple. A chassis, four wheels, an engine, airbags. Basically my current ICE car, just electric."

I'm hoping that they get a lot of good suggestions, but I'm not holding my breath.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47865868

^^ Not EV, but... :)

There are a number of basic EVs that have no more telemetry than the equivalent ICEV.

Someone with the requirements you outline is not in the market for any new car, regardless of powertrain.

What are these on the us market?

The boring ones. Things like Bolt, Niro, Equinox, Lightning, etc. Not every EV is like Tesla.

I just did a search on the bolt and apparently users are having to modify their antennae to stop onstar telemetry. Kia also collects telemetry. Equinox also with the onstar issue. Ford also collects telemetry.

Once again, are there any that work functionally like my airgapped ICE car? It is only 8 years old. I’m worried there aren’t.

Price / fanciness has nothing to do with the amount of telemetry (if anything, there is a weak negative correlation).

BMW was one of the best for privacy the last time I checked.

It is still collecting data. That is the nonstarter for me. My car does not collect any data on me. There will be no software update in the future changing any privacy policy because my car does not ever receive software updates. Even if the ECU did get an update after some repair, it is airgapped with no ability to send out telemetry. I still get certain telemetrics logging for maintenance, locally, of course, via OBD-II.

OnStar telemetry has been a thing since well before your 8 year old car.

As I said, nothing to do with being an EV. All new cars have some variety of telemetry. You may choose not to buy a newer car, but it has nothing to do with whether it is an EV or not.

But be careful because an 8 year old ICEV from GM has OnStar

No onstar here. No satellite or cellular antenna either. Again, I know my machine. There is no data going out. Seems now there is no choice I suppose. Older cars are like low background steel now.

EVs and luxury cars tend to have more fancy features that enable these issues than ice or hybrid cars. That’s changing as more advanced tech filters down.

This is the part that's seriously sucks. We need greener alternatives (current state of things especially highlighting that) and car dependency has crushed us, so instead of just giving us the basic EV most of us want, they've taken the capitalistic approach of giving us massive luxury cars with premium features often cloud-tied, that happen to also be EVs.

You can count the exceptions to this on one hand.

I wonder if Tesla was a grift from day 1. They seemed to be the halo EV company that everyone accepted, until the charismatic leader moved on.

You need government support to make EVs a preferred option. Poor folk buy cheap cars, and they mostly rent. The whole scenario around EV charging is a shitshow, and the tax incentives were insufficient to fix it. I had a Model Y for awhile and really liked it, and now have a fancy Japanese hybrid SUV. It's much less of a pain in the ass then the EV was.

In retrospect, most of Musk's ventures would indeed appear to be grifts from the very start. Many of them were plainly transparent grifts with only a perfunctory attempt to hide the fact (hyperloop)

It can be true. I've owned two Teslas, which meet that description. I've also owned a Bolt, which was just a basic car. I still own a Lightning, which is also pretty basic (it can get occasional ... very occasional ... OTA updates, but the ICE F150 got OTA update ability before the Lightning existed).

I think a bunch of people have decided that EV means Tesla or Rivian, and maybe Hyundai/Kia, and possibly VW if they think about it. But there are a bunch of EVs driving on the roads that people don't even realize exist, they look like every other car. They tend not to have fancy features.

A real car wouldn't track your sex life or your genome. They effectively stopped making real cars. We will drive the real cars and never buy fakes as long as this remains the case.

A couple days ago there was this article on hn about a startup from Canada making tractors with no electronics and they mentioned that they had 400 orders overnight. I hope we will see something like this also for cars. I suspect the demand is there.

That’s been the pitch of Slate Auto, which is supposed to release its standard model at the end of this year.

https://www.slate.auto/en

Unfortunately, they’ve been suspiciously quiet since their initial announcement, but fingers crossed. Might actually have a viable new car option if they’re successful.

Makes it all the more shocking that Tesla placed last in the review. How do you even beat that?

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