It's hard to not want to throw your hands in the air screaming "whatever" when almost everything you use in public is somehow used to track you either as you move around, or in the future.
The FUD spouted on here by the scummy adtech industry about legislation to protect YOUR privacy is mind boggling. These are the people doing the digital equivalent of sniffing your underwear to work out what you had for breakfast.
(And before somebody shouts FUD about the UK/EU vehicle eCall 112 system, that certainly doesn't track you or seek to invade your privacy on any level!)
How do you know?
BTW, the checking all the opt-ins is usually the first thing the sales person does when selling a new car.
But maybe it IS true. I know it's legally mandated.
So do you think UK/EU vehicle manufactures are deliberately in mass breach of data privacy law... fully knowing the cost of a consumer backlash, fines and vehicle recall costs to fix any law breach?
Really?
It's genuinely amazing how many Americans on here (a tech news site!) are unaware of data privacy law and expectations outside their homeland.
They were also in mass breach of vehicle emission laws. The fact that there was some backlash (although people didn't really stop buying VAG cars), people got prosecuted, the company got fined, didn't really change their decisions while they were pumping out fraudulent cars.
Yes, we should have privacy laws like this in the EU, this is a good thing! But thinking that, when these laws are in place, all companies magically will follow them is naive. To them it's still a cost/benefit analysis, and history has shown short term benefit trumps many other things for these companies.
I'd also suggest the backlash from breaches in data privacy would be much larger than from fiddling emissions tests (as evil as the latter was, it actually saved many customers money on a (more polluting) car with higher performance).
> After news broke out of Volkswagen cheating on diesel emissions, multiple other vehicle manufacturers got caught falsifying emissions data, as well as exceeding legal emission limits. This uncovered a greater industry-wide issue that goes far beyond only Volkswagen Group.
Doesn't that depend on the company though? Not all companies are focused in the same amount on short vs long term benefits.
There are costs of not following the regulation (example, did not check in detail: https://www.enforcementtracker.com/) and I do not hear (media, social network, etc.) anybody complaining about fines so I think it will just continue ad hopefully will change their opinion at some point.
Of course, I can't or won't prove it.
And yes, I am _intimately_ familiar with the GDPR and other laws and regulations. The US also had (has) wiretapping laws that would have prevented snooping on Americans.
I'm not claiming the EU is no better than the US, it clearly has better intentions. But fundamentally, I think the EU will end up in the same place as the US sooner or later, simply because the same forces are at play: desire for security >> desire for privacy for most people if the rubber hits the road.
Here's some fun read for those who seek more info:
https://www.politico.eu/article/germany-privacy-watchdog-sid... https://www.bnd.bund.de/EN/Service/PrivacyPolicy/privacypoli... https://www.lexxion.eu/?newsletters_method=newsletter&id=477
Or, more succinctly - they are likely following the law but have figured out a way to avoid it as written using consumer opt-in and dark patterns.
You call it FUD, but this is hacker news and with overwhelming incentives it is not unreasonable to ask for verification that data isn’t being exfiltrated.
Maybe if you buy the car with cash, but if you finance it you are leasing from a company that has definetly accepted all the terms and conditions to capture and sell all the telemetry to various parties
>without an explicit opt-in
check out at a modern volvo/audi/whatever, they are making it so difficult to say no every single time the screen is powered on
The data is anonymized and you can opt out, but many people probably don't know it's collected in the first place.
Automotive EE here... You are completely wrong and your rationale is based on misunderstandings of the laws.
I have absolutely no idea how the laws work either, we’re the same. But, I promise you every single car in the EU with GPS and cell is reporting telemetry. Every and all.
I would like to see some form of IP/property rights applied to user data, with treble damages for willful infringement.
The entire concept of collecting user data and calling it “telemetry” needs to be abandoned — including (especially) in the software industry. Collecting any user data ought to be something that makes corporate lawyers nervous.
Unfortunately, I expect that to happen roughly after hell freezes over.
[1] I couldn’t confirm that any car currently actually does this. Hypothetically, iPhone tethering is possible over both USB and Bluetooth if personal hotspot is enabled.
Not only that. Them and the point-of-sale vendors (aptly shortened PoS), sell that data. They tend to attempt to do this anonymized. How successful they are in anonymizing that is very much so up for debate.
The websites (and even their retail locations) you buy from send your purchase data to meta and other advertisers directly via APIs so they can better track their marketing conversion rates. You can browse their APIs [1][2] to see what kind of data they like to get, but it tends to be every piece of identification they have on you. Rewards programs make this a much richer data set. You don't need to be a user of Google/Meta for them to build a marketing profile based on this. Google links your physical conversion from ads based on your maps data. Facebook does the same if you give them your location data. Many retailers attempt to use the bluetooth/wifi signals from your phone to track the same data even if you pay in cash [3].
There's no legal framework preventing this outside of the EU and California.
1: https://developers.facebook.com/documentation/ads-commerce/c... 2: https://developers.google.com/google-ads/api/docs/conversion... 3: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/06/14/opinion/bluet...
Yeah I think the big thing to push or talk about is that there is no such thing as "anonymized".
There's only such as a thing as "can only be identified as X many people". Like for a given dataset you can make any data point correlated to 1 of say 50 people. If somebody is anonymizing data and they don't provide a k-anonmizity [1] you should just assume it's 1:1 and effectively not anonmized.
But now it's so convenient and discreet and common, we think nothing of it. Plus, Google and Apple and Facebook and their partners and everyone they sell data to are our friends, not enemies :)
let anon_id = md5(SSN);An agent will be shortly with you to assist in that endeavor.
In some parts of the world that's a death sentence for the target. In other parts, it's one for the agent.
Maybe, but what happens without the mod described is that Google and Apple track you in addition to the telecom company. That, of course, assumes that you carry a cell phone tied to your identity. Some people refuse to carry cell phones altogether because of the privacy implications, or use them mostly in airplane mode with an anonymous SIM for backup.
My car is old, so no gps/trackers there, but this is troubling of course. I think that if/when I buy a new one, it has to be either some vintage car, or I have to find a workshop who can rip out all the tracking.
CC payments can be mitigated by paying cash, when available. But yes, CC and bank are a concern and so is CCTV.
He's apparently now better known for other aspects than his insights into large databases!
You can also buy an older car that doesn't come with a SIM card installed.
Should that happen, I will move to a VoIP provider. Not perfect, but better than a smartphone.
If your operating costs are some percentage higher for accepting cash versus the coffee shop across the street that doesn't, you're more likely to fail.
Assuming you’re talking about the US here: there is no such requirement, at least not at the federal level. Individual states may have their own laws, but see for example this notice [0] from a Texas federal court that they will no longer accept cash as of May 21, 2021.
[0] https://www.txnb.uscourts.gov/news/notice-court-will-no-long...
If you wish to make an apple pie shop from scratch, you must first invent an economy that isn't hamstrung by legacy obligations from ventures that people who are long-dead somehow were allowed to finance with your paycheck. (Somewhere, a middle-aged nepo-baby is clutching her pearls at the thought, and I just think we should cherish, rather than shy from, the opportunity to throw her and her siblings under the bus.)
I worked at the gym in college and we sold like one item a day and it was still a whole bunch of work and pain to keep up on the cash counts correct.
I definitely believe that all businesses should take cash as much as is reasonable, but logistically it is understandable why some choose not to
If there was a posted notice that no cash is accepted it's unlikely you'll get a criminal charge, but you can get civilly sued. Most places will just accept the cash then put up a picture saying "If this asshole shows up again, trespass him"
But also, I think that most people would not consider any debt to be incurred for transactions where the payment and receipt of goods is done at the same time, like in a grocery store.
And if the competitor doesn't? Ouch.
I think there should be a "digital equivalency act" or something to hamper full digital capture, but my feelings aside, there's a few powers that dislike cash:
Free people like cash, but businesses with low-skill/low-trust workers dislike cash because despite the CC fees, there is less theft, less overhead with cash reconciliation, cameras to watch cash with, less safes to manage, less cash pickup services.
The IRS hates it because there is a cash industry (as there should be, imo, but I'm injecting too much opinion already) that doesn't report earnings. I personally know barbers, housecleaners, handymen that admit to reporting no or few earnings, and synthesize a living off cash and benefits. If you stop paying taxes, this actually works pretty well compared to a low-end tax-paying job. My housecleaner takes overseas vacations (like, thrifty ones in hostels) 2-3 times a year this way.
Banks (arguably the IRS again, deputizing them with KYC) squint at you when you deposit or withdraw significant cash - ask any weed industry participants. Untrackable currency is a natural catch-all for people they don't want to bank with, so it's just friction and headache naturally.
Did you know ... in many countries government tracks car number plates and the data is stored for many years.
Anecdotally via friends in law enforcement.