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Car Owners Should Control Data Collected by Cars

• schintan 7y ago
  unrelated to this particular article, but it seems nytimes coverage is tending more and more towards tech Luddite category these days. It is one thing to inform the readers but they seem to be bent on spreading fear about all things tech.
  • pixl97 7y ago
    This is exactly what you should expect when tech companies get to run roughshod over any regulations or consumer protections. This isn't fear mongering against technology. This is bringing up absolute points about corporations completely out of control. I mean, for all that is good, the phone companies are still fighting the government on why it is good they can sell our cellphone/location data to whoever they want.
    • 54thr 7y ago
      Are you suggesting that government is fighting to protect people's privacy in a world where cameras and sensors are being erected on every streetlight, commercial building, and roadside pole? Is government not one of the primary consumers of personal data?
    • brokenmachine 7y ago
      > tech companies get to run roughshod over any regulations or consumer protections. Lol, what consumer protections?
  • brokenmachine 7y ago
    Tech nowadays evokes fear all by itself. From drones to cellphones to Smart TVs to cars, it's all big brother now. Orwell could only dream about the things that are possible, and our governments certainly don't seem to be fighting for the little guy who wants to live a private life. /r/aBoringDystopia
• bwb 7y ago
  Why? Why not have that data go someplace it could do real good in informing better safety systems, better traffic management and so on. Privacy is a spectrum, I am getting kinda tired how people think data about them is "theirs". In some cases maybe it should be, in other cases, it should not be. Now maybe you should have a right to see it, download it, and remove identifying markers but I am so tired of this extreme privacy movement.
  • danso 7y ago
    > I am getting kinda tired how people think data about them is "theirs". Huh? How is users wanting to control the personal data they create (e.g. telemetrics) an “extreme” movement?
    • bwb 7y ago
      Semantics :), the device created the data, they played a role but I don't see why that means they control it. If the data plays a role in improving services or life for everyone let the data serve its role. We still need strong regulations and gov agencies to enforce/protect, but I just don't see the point of claiming everything is your data blah blah.
      • danso 7y ago
        If the device is the primary contributor in terms of “creating the data”, then why are users needed? The users and their personal behavior and usage metrics are obviously the valuable part of the data — not the device that logs and measures the data. Also, (though I’m sure there’s “semantic” nuance in this too), the users are the ones who pay to possess and maintain the data-creating device.
        • bwb 7y ago
          It is a symbiotic relationship :) I do not think just because you are involved in creating data that means it is yours. When you give data to the census that isn't your data... when you click an ad and buy something that data isn't your data... I just don't get this notion that data is yours because you are involved in its creation. There is data about you that might be private or personal and should have protections, but the notion that data you have a role in creating is yours seems extreme.
• Pfhreak 7y ago
  Why limit this to just cars? Is there something unique about cars? Why not phone users? Or internet users?
  • 0n34n7 7y ago
    Let’s throw in our toasters, fridges and washing machines as well. Then some data scientist can correlate the best before dates of foods in my fridge by the number of panties in the washer in order to target me with ads for tummy meds.
    • cheerlessbog 7y ago
      Not as creepy as giving a big corporation access to microphones around your house. It astounds me that much of America has done exactly that.
      • ghaff 7y ago
        I assume you don't use a smartphone, for the sake of consistency. It's really hard for me to draw a distinction between home voice assistants that you can activate via a voice command and smartphones that you can activate via a voice command.
        • mixmastamyk 7y ago
          Siri and location services are the first things I turn off.
          • 14 7y ago
            Same. Also Cortana or any other thing like it which is really sad seeing how useful they could be. To have to choose convenience or privacy sucks. I wish there was a middle ground. I would happily pay for a voice assistant that lives on my machine and respects my privacy.
            • 7y ago
• bhauer 7y ago
  What? > We know our smartphones, Nests and Alexas collect data, and we’ve come to accept an implicit contract: We trade personal information for convenience. With cars, we have no such expectation ... What carmakers are doing with the collected data isn’t clear. At least Tesla has demonstrated that their data collection is for training their full self-driving capability. That represents tremendous end-user value, in my opinion. To me, this NY Times article is an argument that smartphones and smart agents should exfiltrate less data than they do. It's the purported end-user value of smartphone and smart agent data collection that I find less credible. Yes, they should collect data, but it's quite unclear why so much of the data needs to be hoarded and used by cloud motherships. That data can be stored and worked with on-device; the premise that on-device computation is too limited is just flimsy. Frankly the value of smart agents as a whole is a bit murky, especially when lined up against full self-driving cars.
  • danso 7y ago
    The data collected by phones are used to train systems like web/voice search, voice translation, and routing algorithms, all which ostensibly (or, at least, purportedly) benefit billions of end users on a daily basis. I don’t see how you can say Tesla’s case is so obviously a more justified example. In any case, this article is about all cars — Tesla vehicles are still a sliver of the user base.
    • wool_gather 7y ago
      Maybe (some of) the information collected by the OS vendor is used for these purposes. The majority of it, the stuff sent by third-party SDKs back to that third party, is just to enable customer profiling or "analytics".
      • danso 7y ago
        Sorry, what’s this straw man argument that you’ve attributed to me? That I’ve asserted every piece of data collected by Android goes toward a public good?
    • JamesBarney 7y ago
• js2 7y ago
  > Modern cars collect as much as 25 gigabytes of data per hour. Links to this McKinsey study as a source: https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/automotive-and-assembly/our-insights/whats-driving-the-connected-car https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/automotive-and-assembly/... Which says: > Today’s car has the computing power of 20 personal computers, features about 100 million lines of programming code, and processes up to 25 gigabytes of data an hour. McKinsey doesn't cite any sources. But more importantly, processing 25 GB/hour is not exactly the same as collecting it. The later, in the context of this article, is definitely trying to imply that the data is stored in some sort of semi-permanent record. So, the piece is at least a little disingenuous. That said, I agree with the premise that to the extent data is saved, it should belong to the vehicle owner, not the manufacturer. Tangent: "the computing power of 20 personal computers." What are they trying to say here? I've got a 2017 Chevy Volt and 2016 Mazda CX-9 and I'd be shocked if there were half that much computing power between the two of them. Maybe they are trying to say there's 20 CPUs among the various systems in a modern car? Still that seems like a lot.
  • davemp 7y ago
    This is just using different scales to mislead. 25GB/hr is about 7MB/s which isn't even the computing power of a cell phone.
    • ggg2 7y ago
      7MBps sounds alrigth for anything consuming even a single source of video. it migth process that locally (lane departure, auto braking auto pilot, etc) and just upload the usage (e.g. how many times in the month you departed lane)
  • fit2rule 7y ago
    Processing means some conclusion was reached. You don't have to transmit 25gb of data to be spied on - only the results of having processed it.
    • m463 7y ago
      {"insurance-risk": True}
• stefan_ 7y ago
  I'm all for retaining ownership of your Spotify playlists, Bluetooth synced contact list and location data. But given the number of vehicular deaths, I'm all for having authorities access blackbox-style data like pedal state, acceleration vectors etc. that some controllers already keep around. If you are operating a 100 kW machine in public, how you do it isn't a privacy concern.
  • shatteredvisage 7y ago
    Yes it is, or did you go ahead and install that blackbox geico has been trying to sell you?
  • jchrisa 7y ago
    Agree. Any activity that is so hostile to other people should be monitored aggressively, and privileges revoked for the slightest reason. By the same token, you should need to file an individual route permit anytime you want to exceed 20 mph in a multi-ton vehicle. The externalized social costs of designating ~25% of our cities' surface area to violent human exclusion zones is hard to overstate. For one example, it's become rare for children to walk (to school or anywhere.) How much is that worth?
    • rootusrootus 7y ago
      My children walk all the time, including to/from school every day. And there are plenty of their friends on the sidewalk with them. It's also difficult to overstate how much value universal transportation has brought to the human race. Maybe more than enough to justify the surface area dedicated to it.
    • deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
  • tastroder 7y ago
    On the contrary, the how you do it includes where and when you do it, which is a major privacy concern. Sure, a black box to get telemetry after the fact might make sense, with specificity and my explicit knowledge when access happens. I'd have a hard time turning that into free data for any particular company or government to have though, vehicular deaths aren't the only issue in our world.
• wiggler00m 7y ago
  "What carmakers are doing with the collected data isn’t clear." Carmakers will reduce the mortality rate from motor vehicle accidents to almost zero (with full autonomy), using the collected data. There were 37,133 MV deaths in the USA in 2017 (more than 0.01% of the population) according to Wiki.
  • deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  • michaelt 7y ago
    Car makers will get data they can use to simulate and test their self-driving cars. But car makers will also get full GPS traces - showing where you live, where you work, where you shop and every time you speed. And they'll probably get what phone was seen on bluetooth, how many seats were occupied, and what radio station was listened to. All identifiable by vehicle, and very close to identifiable by driver. Will they manage to make good use of the former, while avoiding the temptation to monetise the latter? Of course, Google gets a bunch of data from Android users already, so one might very well argue most users aren't concerned about such things.
    • agentofuser 7y ago
      Most users are concerned, they just feel powerless to do anything about it.
      • dzader 7y ago
        lol no they aren't
    • rootusrootus 7y ago
      With occupant weight sensors in the seats, I bet they could pretty accurately identify the driver and passengers. Maybe our car will start sending us notes when we gain weight, reminding us that we haven't been seen at the gym location lately.
    • 14 7y ago
• umvi 7y ago
  > Today’s car has the computing power of 20 personal computers Then why does the touchscreen still lag as if powered by a Pentium 4?
  • dwrowe 7y ago
    This. Also - I have doubts about how much data is collected, and by whom - who is paying for the bandwidth on a cellular network to send this data...somewhere?
  • mixmastamyk 7y ago
    P4 was pretty fast, though it tended to overheat. I'm thinking 486.
  • ascagnel_ 7y ago
    Because hardware and automotive engineers make for poor software designers and developers (and vice versa).
• the_snooze 7y ago
  Something that bothers me is why are companies so casual about attaching fragile networked software to long-lived durable goods like cars? The manufacturer has no economic or legal incentive to keep that patched over the life of the hardware. This is the rotten shortsighted mindset of modern-day tech: all the benefit for the company, none of the responsibility.
  • Silhouette 7y ago
    Something that bothers me is why are companies so casual about attaching fragile networked software to long-lived durable goods like cars? The manufacturer has no economic or legal incentive to keep that patched over the life of the hardware. Indeed. See also: almost all new TVs are now "smart" TVs, almost all new phones are now "smart" phones, a high proportion of "smart home" and IoT devices simply stop working if some remote service is discontinued (or your Internet connection is slow or down), and so on. Without reaching much further, mobile operating systems, Windows 10 and a significant amount of locally run desktop software are also practically built around phoning home and relying on remote services by design now, and doing some shady things around tying security or compatibility updates in with other changes you might not want or need. I came around to the view some time ago that some sort of fairly draconian regulation is the only way to stop this. It simply shouldn't be a prerequisite for using normal, everyday devices that you have to give up your privacy, nor a prerequisite for continuing to use something with a software element the same way as when you bought it that you have to accept arbitrary changes in the software or legal terms later.
    • brokenmachine 7y ago
      My own little soapbox is that if you buy a product, it should always be possible for the consumer to return it to exactly the state it was at the time of purchase. So no forced or unrevokable updates that ruin (or even change) things. I have a TV that has on multiple times broken things with firmware updates, and there is no known way to downgrade. I'd name and shame the company but I'm sure that almost every manufacturer gets away with the same bullshit. Same with cellphone manufacturers.
  • 7y ago
• sys_64738 7y ago
  Collecting my car data as a sanitized way of saying a creepy auto manufacturer is constantly spying on us. In what scenario did it suddenly become okay for corporate America to spy on us constantly?
  • 54thr 7y ago
    I think for most people there is a strong disincentive from acknowledging certain realities. Superficiality is practically a social expectation in the age of twitter. Human discourse occurs through a series of one-liners. The subject of privacy in the age of IoT is esoteric and difficult for the average user to grasp or implement, and is basically discouraged. Of course, there is enormous money in data collection, and insidious corruption is an evidently common human faculty. So the truth gets distorted, the field gets flooded with (mis)information, and the average user, bewildered by the complexity and opaqueness, elects to ignore it, because all his friends do.
• leptoniscool 7y ago
  Isn't the logical next step to collect massive data from airplanes, which should be easier to automate too. But the limiting factor is still trust.
  • kevas 7y ago
    ...this has been happening for a long time already.
    • salawat 7y ago
      Under the radar. Without visibility. How does it come as a surprise when things that were only recognized as having gone on underneath layer after layer of technical jargon are finally brought to general public awareness? You don't get in trouble for doing things, you get in trouble for getting caught doing them. It's been a long time in coming, but awareness is finally starting to hit tipping points in meaningful ways.
      • lutorm 7y ago
        Under the radar. No, literally by the radar... I'm confused what you mean. Surely it's not news to a pilot that ATC facilities save radar data. For how long is a different question.
        • salawat 7y ago
          Sorry. My apologies. I think I see the misunderstanding. Under the radar is an idiom. It is used to describe things that occur in areas not typically subject to observation, or widespread acknowledgement/general awareness. In this case by regulators, or the public in general. I think you might have misunderstood the poster above you when they suggested trying to fully automate airplanes; maintaining the analog of every sensor required to fully enable totally automated operation would require the installation of full suites of broadband sensors on the plane, allowing it to collect all information with regards to the environment it is working in, and sending it "back home". Admittedly, this is less problematic, because planes don't operate within the confines of everyday life, and thus are not omnipresent, capable of acting as a ubiquitous surveillance platform. When I say this has been going on "Under the radar", I'm referring to the slow adoption of increasingly more varied and densely packed sensor packages in vehicles offered to provide some token discount, but with very little oversight into what type of data is generated, communicated, stored, or otherwise. Planes being tracked by radar is fine. That comes with the mode of transport. It's an air transport's version of a Stop light or signage. Long term persisted data collected by cars, however, is not, and should not be.
• doctorRetro 7y ago
  Why stop at cars? How about: [Device] owners should control data collected by [the device]
  • bradknowles 7y ago
    Who said you own the device? You may have paid your money, but with most software it's a license to use or a lease, but not actual ownership. The same is becoming more and more true for other cases as well.
• lifeisstillgood 7y ago
  I think that the ideas of Personally identifying information and Personally generated information need to be clearer. Information that exists because I pass through the digital world is still about me. Then we can envisage some changes in the law - the presumption in law should be that data about or generated by me should be owned by me - in the same way copyright is presumed to belong to me. If we then add in a public commons right to access such data royalty free (ie health researchers get a free pass at my data presuming they follow normal protocols) and chuck in any commercial or other licence I might grant is time limited an automatically runs out after a year and needs to be renewed with my consent, and I think we can sort this data privacy problem out. (in short - I agree )
  • JohnFen 7y ago
    > Personally identifying information and Personally generated information need to be clearer The problem is that with Big Data, there isn't much difference between those two things. Almost all unique data can be combined with other data points to become personally identifying.
• gpvos 7y ago
  In Europe, the GDPR should protect against this. Is that actually the case, and is an opt-out possible for all EU car owners? And would, e.g., a Tesla whose owner has opted out still get software updates?
• agentofuser 7y ago
  If I'm a pedestrian getting my body filmed, 3D-scanned, with potential facial recognition and internal-organs-penetrating sensors added on top, _I'm_ the one who should own that data (and the right to not consent to its collection in the first place). Why are people weirded out by some Google Glass-wearing rando filming them on the sidewalk but ok for everyone behind a wheel to be suddenly promoted to a CCTV omnisensing recorder?
  • dsfyu404ed 7y ago
    >Why are people weirded out by some Google Glass-wearing rando filming them on the sidewalk but ok for everyone behind a wheel to be suddenly promoted to a CCTV omnisensing recorder? Pedestrians are promoting dense and walk-able cities, environmentally sustainable transportation, healthy lifestyles and are generally virtuous. Drivers are wasting space, killing the planet, promoting a sedentary lifestyle and are generally evil. Yes I'm being a bit absurd and over the top here but the point is that most people aren't disciplined enough to stick to their principals when a group they don't like is the one getting screwed.
    • stcredzero 7y ago
      Principles. The principal is your "pal." most people aren't disciplined enough to stick to their principals when a group they don't like is the one getting screwed For most people, it's hard to keep out of group-think mode 100% of the time. It's especially hard to do when emotions are involved. As a consequence, most are only too happy to screw the members of the groups they don't like. This is why one should stay away from politics where one is labeling another group as inferior or bad, based on how they were born, or based on what they believe. It's better to convince than to condemn.
    • stuart78 7y ago
      I think it is even simpler than this in that most people don't realize they are being tracked in this way. It is easy to seem hypocritical when you are simply ignorant of a potentially parallel case.
  • Phlarp 7y ago
• nimbius 7y ago
  disclosure: im a full-time engine mechanic for a chain of midwestern diesel repair shops. Quite a bit of this data is already at your fingertips! open source OBD readers exist for linux. I use this one regularly to pull and reset codes for older mercedes: https://samhobbs.co.uk/2015/04/scantool-obdii-car-diagnostic-software-linux https://samhobbs.co.uk/2015/04/scantool-obdii-car-diagnostic... the OBD is the computer in your car for sensors but has turned into a massive repository for anything CAN (car network) related. Some newer cars store radio station presets, seat positions, and even dimmer settings in the OBD alongside their battery-backed RAM. some models of BMW even store the unlock codes for their pricy radios in the OBD tables. hardware like onstar is stored in a dedicated metal box usually under the glove compartment in most cars. it includes a harness for the OBD data, and a small modem usually mated with a riser. That modem also controls any wireless features and of course cellular transmissions. if you dont like your car phoning home, you can pull the riser or clip the antenna leads, but this will likely also affect wifi. Bluetooth pairing is generally part of the head unit in older cars, but if you have onstar this is commonly being added to the daughterboard for wifi. as for processing? absolutely. sensor samples are sometimes taken thousands of times per second for things like airbag state and seatbelt pretensors. i guess if you counted up the bits and bytes over the CAM as your datapoint, then yeah its 25GB of data...but its not meaningful...unless youre in the process of a crash. onstar is always my biggest gripe. anything that can remotely stop my car or unlock my doors makes me a little too paranoid, and ive never once pressed that stupid button expecting to speak to anyone who can help do anything meaningful. but what about emergencies? onstar uses data triggers from the OBD/CAM to sense airbags in the deploy state, and that apparently triggers an automatic dial out to onstar whether you like it or not. If youre removing or replacing airbags, that means you have to disconnect onstar first or youll wind up with firetrucks and ambulances outside your garage. Speaking from experience.
• OrgNet 7y ago
  I wish that there was a manual for how to turn any car into a dumb-car (or at least how to disconnect them from the internet).
  • JohnFen 7y ago
    There are instructions for how to disable the comms antenna for a lot of cars out there.
    • OrgNet 7y ago
      Do you have any link by any chance?
      • JohnFen 7y ago
        I don't know of any one-stop shop for such instructions (they vary according to the make and model of the car). The last time I needed to learn this was a number of years ago, and I just searched the web for "<car make and model> disable antenna" or "disable telemetry cell".
• cjensen 7y ago
  I have a new ford. There is a clearly labeled switch in the settings to disable data collection. I leave it enabled because they display critical parts of the data to me through a phone app.
• stuart78 7y ago
  One thing I'm confused on from this article is which car brands might be more or less egregious in this dimension. For example, I drive a VW, and my car is Car-Net capable, though I have not enabled the service. Is Car-Net (or some similar service) collecting data despite my not having enabled it? Clearly the car has the ability to transmit data since Car-Net is an option. Secondarily, is data transmitted during tune ups?
• oldjokes 7y ago
  One of the reasons I didn't buy a Tesla was because I didn't want Elon tweeting about my actions if something happened and I died on the road. The salesman laughed at me when I said this. While I acknowledge this is extremely unlikely, I'm still not interested. I want to be in control of all my data, all the time, in all situations. I don't want any third party to benefit from studying my behavior, ever. If you try to build a business model around mining people they are going to start fighting back sooner or later.
  • m463 7y ago
    I agree with you - their public disclosure of details of incidents over the years lacked... class. Also, you can opt-out of all tesla data collection. There are a few levels of this. One is in the car's UI, LITERALLY hidden at the bottom of "safety and security" there is a [Data Sharing] screen that you have to scroll to see. It supposedly prevents video clips from being uploaded to tesla. Other parts of the UI ask for permission, such as traffic-aware routing. I don't know about the new chrome-based browser - we know google has baked tracking baked into chrome. Level two is basically "disable the SIM" no online access. Stuff doesn't work, like the map tiles won't load from google and loads of other data can't be transferred to tesla. It's still not clear what happens with level two when you enter a service center, because onboard wifi will auto-connect to tesla APs.
• jakubp 7y ago
  (X) owners should control data collected by (X) I'd add: at least possess this data, maybe also control (but not necessarily 100% e.g. I would want to be able to say, as the nation-state, that some data must be made available to others, e.g. safety related, accident related, energy efficency related) Sounds like a fairly obvious rule. Doesn't make it easy for the business to sell the value added services things or to make moat vs competition...
• jjellyy 7y ago
  Good luck with that
• LinuxBender 7y ago
  I agree with the article and I am voting with my wallet. My next vehicle will be a 1970 Chevy truck.
• webninja 7y ago
  While working in technology design & specs at Toyota HQ, I was told that one day, it might, in theory, be able to make cars free just funded by all the data it generates from you. Whether that will ever pan out is speculative but that’s a startling concept nevertheless.
• xfitm3 7y ago
  Crash data recorders typically store ~5 seconds of control inputs and are designed to survive a crash. This evidence can either hurt or help you. What should be done here?