8 ms·

We're going to have to do this for cars soon. More long term, we're going to need a digital revolution against corporate overreach, hopefully leading to a cons

We're going to have to do this for cars soon. More long term, we're going to need a digital revolution against corporate overreach, hopefully leading to a constitutional amendment.

Test0129 4y ago
It really will. After riding in a friends Tesla I realized that the mixture of OTA updates, unauditable firmware, and the rise of subscription add-ons for cars means that in the future it will likely be necessary. With phones, the cost is cheap enough (sometimes free) that people won't jailbreak. When you realize your car can be remotely shut down for using aftermarket parts or driven back to the lot autonomously for missing a payment suddenly it's not just necessity, it is duty to jailbreak the car.
- MonkeyMalarky 4y ago
  Not only do I want the right to 100% own something after I buy it, I think we'll need the right to buy in the first place. Similar to the right to pay in cash? Otherwise buying will just be replaced with leases.
  - WanderPanda 4y ago
    If there are enough customers like you these offerings will exist. If not, you‘re just trying to force your world view on others…
    - MonkeyMalarky 4y ago
      What if the majority of customers have my view but manufacturers realize they can extract more money from us by not giving us a choice?
      - EarthLaunch 4y ago
        That incentivizes customers to shift to a significantly different alternative. For instance, a less car-centric life. In a way, forcing cars to be bearable helps reinforce their influence. (Quality road repair, extra consumer protection, no liability for deaths, etc.)
        ehnto 4y ago
        People will just lease cars even if it doesn't align with their world view, because many of us live in car-centric cities where that would not be a sensible hill to die on. Just like many of us pay an amount of rent that no longer feels fair, because taking a morale high ground and not doing so would leave us homeless.
        CatWChainsaw 4y ago
        That will be a hard sell in the US outside of urban areas.
        msrenee 4y ago
        So let car companies run roughshod over consumers because you don't like cars? I'm glad you're in a situation where you have another option besides driving a personal vehicle. I'm not. I didn't build this stretched out chunk of suburb with no safe way to get anywhere on foot, so don't punish me for it.
        Test0129 4y ago
        Supposing this was even possible, that enough people banded together and said "enough with cars" and decided to change the way of life, it would take several decades, maybe even a century, to turn a town that is primarily driven to a town that is primarily walked. It's not practical and everyone knows this. The utility of cars is too much to be simply tossed away. Imagine how hard visiting the mountains would be without one. Perhaps a more metropolitan person could live with just seeing pictures but I am an outdoorsman and this idea actually causes significant existential concern. The solution is to make obviously anti-consumer behavior illegal in the same way we make monopolies illegal. Companies should build usable, fixable things. Planned obsolescence, subscription car services, etc are all a way they exploit this position they have. The free market would ideally fix this but given that it's very well known every car manufacturer is in bed with each other once one adopts this exploitative behavior the rest will surely follow. MRR is extremely desirable. Since it's not tenable for at the very least our generation to experience a less car-free life why not try to fix the thing causing the problem and THEN solve the greater problem?
    - davemp 4y ago
      There is historical precedent for those with power forcing leases on the general population (lords and peasants).
    - msrenee 4y ago
      These offerings exist now, but have you tried to buy a vehicle outright in the last 10 years? At least half the salespeople I spoke to when I was looking for my truck would not even tell me the sales price of the the used vehicles on their lot. They wanted to know how much I could pay per month. Seriously. They used every sales tactic they could drum up to hide the price of the truck they were selling. Is that not a bit terrifying to you? How is wanting to know the actual cost of a big purchase and being able to purchase it outright "forcing your world view on others"? If you want to constantly be paying on a lease, that's your own problem. Don't act like expecting to actually own the thing I'm paying thousands of dollars for is unreasonable and somehow inhibits others from from using subscription models for everything under the sun.
    - Test0129 4y ago
      I think that this is a form of exploitation by car manufacturers to be honest. Consider that ownership can be expensive and so charging subscriptions with walled gardens and lock-ins makes sense for lower income consumers. You might think this is a good pro-consumer thing to have. I don't believe so. There is no reason for example a manufacturer should be able to cajole another $40/mo. out of me for heating or cooling. Or $20 for their "radio station package", or any other thing they can imagine. Sure, you could argue Tesla's performance upgrade model might not be anti-consumer in the sense that they save money building one engine/one car and the consumer gets in at a level they can afford. But what is stopping them from pushing this further? Engine mileage fees? The point is that often times the average consumer is not considering the choices they make 5, 10, 15 years down the road. That doesn't mean it's okay for this position to be exploited, it means we need to educate people on their rights including the right to ownership and repair and do what we can to stop the exploitation of the cattle class. I have no idea why I can't have an unlocked phone with most carriers, or a gaming system that I can install what I want on, etc. I have no idea why most computers built today use soldered on components so I have to go to the them for repair. At the end of the day I don't like not owning things. When my entire life is determined by a list of dozens or even hundreds of subscriptions I am simply a meat machine that converts calories into corporate profits. Rent for an apartment because all of the houses are bought up is yet another way they keep you on the treadmill. If you own nothing you have no control. If you have no control your position is easily exploited. We need to fight tooth and nail to maintain control and ownership of everything we have.
    - npteljes 4y ago
      No, demand will not translate to supply. The first priority of producers is not to satisfy demand, but to retain and gain power. On the demand side, what people really need doesn't translate perfectly to market demand. The imperfections of these sides won't create a system that satisfies the participants. What I'm trying to get at is the phenomenon of market failure. From the supply side, history saw countless examples when this happened; think of any cartel and monopoly.
  - josephcsible 4y ago
    Exactly. Remember the GM EV1? That's going to be everything soon unless we do something.
  - xhkkffbf 4y ago
    While I generally support the right to repair, I'm not sure that forcing 100% ownership works in all cases. There are just plenty of cases I can imagine where it's better for the manufacturer to continue to own something and lease it to people. Basically, leasing something encourages the manufacturer to build for the long haul avoiding obsolescence. If the manufacturer is forced to sell things outright and then provide parts for fixing the devices, well, that just encourages them to skrimp on engineering so that parts will break sooner and they'll be able to make money on the fixable parts.
    - tomrod 4y ago
      > it's better for the manufacturer to continue to own something and lease it to people. This is why recalls exist, for manufacturers to fix their broken things they failed to fix before releasing to the public.
    - bluehatbrit 4y ago
      I think MonkeyMalarky is saying they want the right to purchase something to own if they choose, not to rule out all forms of leasing.
      - Brian_K_White 4y ago
        Why do some people leap to that unimplied projection? I see it all the time. Saying it should be illegal to prevent something in no way says it should be illegal to do anything else. If I say there should be regulation to protect the right to ride bicycles on roads, no where in that statement is the words everyone must only ride bicycles on roads.
        xhkkffbf 4y ago
        I'm going to defend my leap in logic here, not so much to defend it outright but merely to explain it. What I didn't say is that I generally believe it's hard to engineer for multiple business models. In my mind, it's sort of one path or the other. Own or rent. If you engineer for long-term leasing, well, the price for ownership is going to be rather high. The potential owners, especially the militant ones, will grouse about the price and maybe use this as a new way to attack. They'll say the ownership price is gouging. And then they'll want lower prices on parts too. I see your point about absolutism. I'm not really an absolutist. I just believe that the nature of business models means that insisting on ownership will essentially push the businesses into a corner. I elided that detail to keep things a bit shorter.
  - chasil 4y ago
    It sounds like all Deere equipment can be placed in administrative mode. Deere has shipped a system that cannot be secured. Thanks, Deere. "He's unsure how comprehensively the company can patch the flaws without implementing full disk encryption, an addition that would mean a significant system overhaul in new tractor designs and likely wouldn't be deployed in existing equipment."
  - chmod600 4y ago
    Ownership is a more nuanced concept in a world of complexity. It's a bit like a 12-year-old emperor: he's not really the leader because he doesn't understand what's going on. If you want to own something, you need to understand it. Consider open source software. Why is compiled code not good enough? Because it's too hard to understand, so you're at thw mercy of the company that does understand it. Open souce puts others outside the company on a more even footing for understanding the code. But complexity and the rate of change in products really gets in the way of understanding. Especially for anything involvong software, which is almost everything. You can see it even with open source software that has become such a giant maintenance burden that there's no way you can reasonably fork and maintain it without a pretty major investment. The only hope of restoring the concept of ownership is to simplify and slow down. In many cases, this means a regression to simpler times, but not all. We can reach much better trade-offs than exist currently, but it will take a lot of work and education. Let me give an example: the notion of buying something seems simple now, but it's actually a contract in the context of a lot of statutes and even more case law. Why can't signing up for a web service be accomplished without an unreadably-long contract? It can, but we need to develop the right statutes and case law and expectations to enable it.
    - npteljes 4y ago
      It does raise the issue of the 12-year-old emperor, but nevertheless, the right should be granted by regulation. People don't understand lots of things and entrust themselves to different entities to make their life easier. But they should not let go of the rights that allow them to take the matter into their own hands. As long as we're on the topic of children, they have human rights too, for example, and while I don't imagine they exercise them often by themselves, that doesn't mean they shouldn't have them in the first place.
    - Brian_K_White 4y ago
      No regression or simpler times needed. The right to own is orthogonal to what you do with the thing you own. The right to choose who I trust to operate my thing, and why, is just as important as the right to operate it directly myself. Even if I can't write all the code in my doorbell, I am still harmed by an inability to choose who's code runs on the doorbell, and still harmed even if I do have a choice but none of the available choices are open source because some artificial process prevents it. It requires no simpler times to simply choose freecad instead of autocad, etc. It doesn't even require deep knowledge to make that choice either.
- josephcsible 4y ago
  Why do people always seem to single out Tesla when complaining about stuff like that? Are they really worse than any other automaker in that regard? How much of Toyota's firmware can you audit?
  - xbar 4y ago
    Tesla is cutting edge in corporate overlordship?
  - frob 4y ago
    I think it's mostly because of how aggressive and one-way tesla is. My 6-year-old volt can probably get firmware updates over the air, but I've never stepped into my car to discover that the emergency blinkers are now hidden, the windshield wipers are now on the other side of the column, and my battery has been limited to only 60% of what I bought because telsa flipped the wrong bit 4 years ago and two owners back and has decided to "remedy" my experience.
    - Handytinge 4y ago
      If we're providing anecdotal evidence, I've never stepped into my Tesla and discovered such things either.
  - macNchz 4y ago
    Tesla has pretty clearly led the way on some of this stuff, they’ve been doing unattended OTA software updates and remotely-revokable paid add-on features for years. Other manufacturers do not have more auditable firmware, but they are behind in how much control they have of their vehicles once they’re in a customer’s hands.
    - Karunamon 4y ago
      Please give a source showing "unattended" OTA updates. The car never updates without the owner initiating it, since the process makes the car unusable anywhere from 20 minutes to an hour. Source: I own a model 3
34679 4y ago
Technically, an amendment could say anything, but historically, the US Constitution outlines rules the government is supposed to follow. The Constitution should be amended to eliminate 3rd party circumvention of existing constitutional protections. Why is it that an agency needs a warrant to track you directly, but not to purchase tracking data from a data broker? How much less tracking and general invasion of privacy would Congress tolerate if the government wasn't directly benefiting from it?
- sidewndr46 4y ago
  Because you consent to the data gathering and tracking when you signed up for the service. It's not different than if the police ask "can I search your vehicle" and you say "yes". You consented to a search. At that point there is no concept of what is legal & what is not.
  - gambiting 4y ago
    You never constented to your data being given to the police though(or more accurately in this case - to be sold to the data broker and then given to the police) More accure comparison would be if you left your car with a garage to have it serviced(giving them permission to enter the vehicle), then the police come to the garage and pay them some money to enter your car and search it.
    - sidewndr46 4y ago
      At least in the US almost everything follows "right of first sale" doctrine. Otherwise I'd have a claim against a car dealership when I trade in my used vehicle. The only thing I can think of that don't follow this is real estate. Racial covenants were functionally invalidated by the federal government a while back. But you can attach almost any other restriction to property you want. For example, you can include a no-commercialization clause when selling property.
  - causality0 4y ago
    You could make the argument that contracts which say one party can spy on the other and do whatever they want with the data fall under the category of unconscionable.
LargoLasskhyfv 4y ago
Your future care won't start at all, until it has verified its secure boot chain against Skynet.
- LargoLasskhyfv 4y ago
  ...err... car
_fat_santa 4y ago
My optimistic prediction is that there will be regulation around this pretty soon. Were going to have laws similar to smog standards that specify what can and can't a car manufacturer can charge a subscription for. I would imagine legislation would look something like. > You may offer subscription features, but you must also give the option of a one time purchase that unlocks the feature forever. or > You are allowed to charge subscription for features A, B and C. But critical features including X, Y and Z must be provided standard on a vehicle at no extra charge.
- josephcsible 4y ago
  > You may offer subscription features, but you must also give the option of a one time purchase that unlocks the feature forever. You can subscribe to air conditioning for $10 per month, or buy it outright for $100,000.
  - dento 4y ago
    Limiting the one-off purchase to some multiple (maybe 100) of the monthly payment should be part of the law too.
kurupt213 4y ago
Constitutional amendments are dangerous. The whole constitution is at risk of change during a constitutional convention. We are at risk of losing much more than we gain
- swader999 4y ago
  Constitutions don't matter when media, big tech and judiciary are controlled or in cahoots in a single party system.
- CatWChainsaw 4y ago
  Is it, though? Getting 2/3rds of the US to agree on anything seems to be nigh impossible these days. I don't see how a convention could be called to amend [extremely popular issue] but then all of a sudden enough of the convention votes to scrap the Constitution altogether.
IshKebab 4y ago
Cars are already like this. My Skoda Octavia had a headlight levelling issue. Pretty clearly just needed recalibration. Can you do that through the dash interface? Of course not. God forbid they actually use that huge touchscreen for useful diagnostic information. Took it to my normal garage who are very good, but they clearly couldn't fix it because they didn't have VW's proprietary software tools. Ended up taking it to an official Skoda garage and they easily fixed it and didn't even charge me. I presume even they felt bad charging someone £80 to press a button in some software that only they have access to.

We're going to have to do this for cars soon. More long term, we're going to need a digital revolution against corporate overreach, hopefully leading to a constitutional amendment.

Test0129 4y ago

It really will. After riding in a friends Tesla I realized that the mixture of OTA updates, unauditable firmware, and the rise of subscription add-ons for cars means that in the future it will likely be necessary. With phones, the cost is cheap enough (sometimes free) that people won't jailbreak. When you realize your car can be remotely shut down for using aftermarket parts or driven back to the lot autonomously for missing a payment suddenly it's not just necessity, it is duty to jailbreak the car.

MonkeyMalarky 4y ago
Not only do I want the right to 100% own something after I buy it, I think we'll need the right to buy in the first place. Similar to the right to pay in cash? Otherwise buying will just be replaced with leases.
- WanderPanda 4y ago
  If there are enough customers like you these offerings will exist. If not, you‘re just trying to force your world view on others…
  - MonkeyMalarky 4y ago
    What if the majority of customers have my view but manufacturers realize they can extract more money from us by not giving us a choice?
    - EarthLaunch 4y ago
      That incentivizes customers to shift to a significantly different alternative. For instance, a less car-centric life. In a way, forcing cars to be bearable helps reinforce their influence. (Quality road repair, extra consumer protection, no liability for deaths, etc.)
      - ehnto 4y ago
        People will just lease cars even if it doesn't align with their world view, because many of us live in car-centric cities where that would not be a sensible hill to die on. Just like many of us pay an amount of rent that no longer feels fair, because taking a morale high ground and not doing so would leave us homeless.
      - CatWChainsaw 4y ago
        That will be a hard sell in the US outside of urban areas.
      - msrenee 4y ago
        So let car companies run roughshod over consumers because you don't like cars? I'm glad you're in a situation where you have another option besides driving a personal vehicle. I'm not. I didn't build this stretched out chunk of suburb with no safe way to get anywhere on foot, so don't punish me for it.
      - Test0129 4y ago
        Supposing this was even possible, that enough people banded together and said "enough with cars" and decided to change the way of life, it would take several decades, maybe even a century, to turn a town that is primarily driven to a town that is primarily walked. It's not practical and everyone knows this. The utility of cars is too much to be simply tossed away. Imagine how hard visiting the mountains would be without one. Perhaps a more metropolitan person could live with just seeing pictures but I am an outdoorsman and this idea actually causes significant existential concern. The solution is to make obviously anti-consumer behavior illegal in the same way we make monopolies illegal. Companies should build usable, fixable things. Planned obsolescence, subscription car services, etc are all a way they exploit this position they have. The free market would ideally fix this but given that it's very well known every car manufacturer is in bed with each other once one adopts this exploitative behavior the rest will surely follow. MRR is extremely desirable. Since it's not tenable for at the very least our generation to experience a less car-free life why not try to fix the thing causing the problem and THEN solve the greater problem?
  - davemp 4y ago
    There is historical precedent for those with power forcing leases on the general population (lords and peasants).
  - msrenee 4y ago
    These offerings exist now, but have you tried to buy a vehicle outright in the last 10 years? At least half the salespeople I spoke to when I was looking for my truck would not even tell me the sales price of the the used vehicles on their lot. They wanted to know how much I could pay per month. Seriously. They used every sales tactic they could drum up to hide the price of the truck they were selling. Is that not a bit terrifying to you? How is wanting to know the actual cost of a big purchase and being able to purchase it outright "forcing your world view on others"? If you want to constantly be paying on a lease, that's your own problem. Don't act like expecting to actually own the thing I'm paying thousands of dollars for is unreasonable and somehow inhibits others from from using subscription models for everything under the sun.
  - Test0129 4y ago
    I think that this is a form of exploitation by car manufacturers to be honest. Consider that ownership can be expensive and so charging subscriptions with walled gardens and lock-ins makes sense for lower income consumers. You might think this is a good pro-consumer thing to have. I don't believe so. There is no reason for example a manufacturer should be able to cajole another $40/mo. out of me for heating or cooling. Or $20 for their "radio station package", or any other thing they can imagine. Sure, you could argue Tesla's performance upgrade model might not be anti-consumer in the sense that they save money building one engine/one car and the consumer gets in at a level they can afford. But what is stopping them from pushing this further? Engine mileage fees? The point is that often times the average consumer is not considering the choices they make 5, 10, 15 years down the road. That doesn't mean it's okay for this position to be exploited, it means we need to educate people on their rights including the right to ownership and repair and do what we can to stop the exploitation of the cattle class. I have no idea why I can't have an unlocked phone with most carriers, or a gaming system that I can install what I want on, etc. I have no idea why most computers built today use soldered on components so I have to go to the them for repair. At the end of the day I don't like not owning things. When my entire life is determined by a list of dozens or even hundreds of subscriptions I am simply a meat machine that converts calories into corporate profits. Rent for an apartment because all of the houses are bought up is yet another way they keep you on the treadmill. If you own nothing you have no control. If you have no control your position is easily exploited. We need to fight tooth and nail to maintain control and ownership of everything we have.
  - npteljes 4y ago
    No, demand will not translate to supply. The first priority of producers is not to satisfy demand, but to retain and gain power. On the demand side, what people really need doesn't translate perfectly to market demand. The imperfections of these sides won't create a system that satisfies the participants. What I'm trying to get at is the phenomenon of market failure. From the supply side, history saw countless examples when this happened; think of any cartel and monopoly.
- josephcsible 4y ago
  Exactly. Remember the GM EV1? That's going to be everything soon unless we do something.
- xhkkffbf 4y ago
  While I generally support the right to repair, I'm not sure that forcing 100% ownership works in all cases. There are just plenty of cases I can imagine where it's better for the manufacturer to continue to own something and lease it to people. Basically, leasing something encourages the manufacturer to build for the long haul avoiding obsolescence. If the manufacturer is forced to sell things outright and then provide parts for fixing the devices, well, that just encourages them to skrimp on engineering so that parts will break sooner and they'll be able to make money on the fixable parts.
  - tomrod 4y ago
    > it's better for the manufacturer to continue to own something and lease it to people. This is why recalls exist, for manufacturers to fix their broken things they failed to fix before releasing to the public.
  - bluehatbrit 4y ago
    I think MonkeyMalarky is saying they want the right to purchase something to own if they choose, not to rule out all forms of leasing.
    - Brian_K_White 4y ago
      Why do some people leap to that unimplied projection? I see it all the time. Saying it should be illegal to prevent something in no way says it should be illegal to do anything else. If I say there should be regulation to protect the right to ride bicycles on roads, no where in that statement is the words everyone must only ride bicycles on roads.
      - xhkkffbf 4y ago
        I'm going to defend my leap in logic here, not so much to defend it outright but merely to explain it. What I didn't say is that I generally believe it's hard to engineer for multiple business models. In my mind, it's sort of one path or the other. Own or rent. If you engineer for long-term leasing, well, the price for ownership is going to be rather high. The potential owners, especially the militant ones, will grouse about the price and maybe use this as a new way to attack. They'll say the ownership price is gouging. And then they'll want lower prices on parts too. I see your point about absolutism. I'm not really an absolutist. I just believe that the nature of business models means that insisting on ownership will essentially push the businesses into a corner. I elided that detail to keep things a bit shorter.
- chasil 4y ago
  It sounds like all Deere equipment can be placed in administrative mode. Deere has shipped a system that cannot be secured. Thanks, Deere. "He's unsure how comprehensively the company can patch the flaws without implementing full disk encryption, an addition that would mean a significant system overhaul in new tractor designs and likely wouldn't be deployed in existing equipment."
- chmod600 4y ago
  Ownership is a more nuanced concept in a world of complexity. It's a bit like a 12-year-old emperor: he's not really the leader because he doesn't understand what's going on. If you want to own something, you need to understand it. Consider open source software. Why is compiled code not good enough? Because it's too hard to understand, so you're at thw mercy of the company that does understand it. Open souce puts others outside the company on a more even footing for understanding the code. But complexity and the rate of change in products really gets in the way of understanding. Especially for anything involvong software, which is almost everything. You can see it even with open source software that has become such a giant maintenance burden that there's no way you can reasonably fork and maintain it without a pretty major investment. The only hope of restoring the concept of ownership is to simplify and slow down. In many cases, this means a regression to simpler times, but not all. We can reach much better trade-offs than exist currently, but it will take a lot of work and education. Let me give an example: the notion of buying something seems simple now, but it's actually a contract in the context of a lot of statutes and even more case law. Why can't signing up for a web service be accomplished without an unreadably-long contract? It can, but we need to develop the right statutes and case law and expectations to enable it.
  - npteljes 4y ago
    It does raise the issue of the 12-year-old emperor, but nevertheless, the right should be granted by regulation. People don't understand lots of things and entrust themselves to different entities to make their life easier. But they should not let go of the rights that allow them to take the matter into their own hands. As long as we're on the topic of children, they have human rights too, for example, and while I don't imagine they exercise them often by themselves, that doesn't mean they shouldn't have them in the first place.
  - Brian_K_White 4y ago
    No regression or simpler times needed. The right to own is orthogonal to what you do with the thing you own. The right to choose who I trust to operate my thing, and why, is just as important as the right to operate it directly myself. Even if I can't write all the code in my doorbell, I am still harmed by an inability to choose who's code runs on the doorbell, and still harmed even if I do have a choice but none of the available choices are open source because some artificial process prevents it. It requires no simpler times to simply choose freecad instead of autocad, etc. It doesn't even require deep knowledge to make that choice either.
josephcsible 4y ago
Why do people always seem to single out Tesla when complaining about stuff like that? Are they really worse than any other automaker in that regard? How much of Toyota's firmware can you audit?
- xbar 4y ago
  Tesla is cutting edge in corporate overlordship?
- frob 4y ago
  I think it's mostly because of how aggressive and one-way tesla is. My 6-year-old volt can probably get firmware updates over the air, but I've never stepped into my car to discover that the emergency blinkers are now hidden, the windshield wipers are now on the other side of the column, and my battery has been limited to only 60% of what I bought because telsa flipped the wrong bit 4 years ago and two owners back and has decided to "remedy" my experience.
  - Handytinge 4y ago
    If we're providing anecdotal evidence, I've never stepped into my Tesla and discovered such things either.
- macNchz 4y ago
  Tesla has pretty clearly led the way on some of this stuff, they’ve been doing unattended OTA software updates and remotely-revokable paid add-on features for years. Other manufacturers do not have more auditable firmware, but they are behind in how much control they have of their vehicles once they’re in a customer’s hands.
  - Karunamon 4y ago
    Please give a source showing "unattended" OTA updates. The car never updates without the owner initiating it, since the process makes the car unusable anywhere from 20 minutes to an hour. Source: I own a model 3

34679 4y ago

Technically, an amendment could say anything, but historically, the US Constitution outlines rules the government is supposed to follow. The Constitution should be amended to eliminate 3rd party circumvention of existing constitutional protections. Why is it that an agency needs a warrant to track you directly, but not to purchase tracking data from a data broker? How much less tracking and general invasion of privacy would Congress tolerate if the government wasn't directly benefiting from it?

sidewndr46 4y ago
Because you consent to the data gathering and tracking when you signed up for the service. It's not different than if the police ask "can I search your vehicle" and you say "yes". You consented to a search. At that point there is no concept of what is legal & what is not.
- gambiting 4y ago
  You never constented to your data being given to the police though(or more accurately in this case - to be sold to the data broker and then given to the police) More accure comparison would be if you left your car with a garage to have it serviced(giving them permission to enter the vehicle), then the police come to the garage and pay them some money to enter your car and search it.
  - sidewndr46 4y ago
    At least in the US almost everything follows "right of first sale" doctrine. Otherwise I'd have a claim against a car dealership when I trade in my used vehicle. The only thing I can think of that don't follow this is real estate. Racial covenants were functionally invalidated by the federal government a while back. But you can attach almost any other restriction to property you want. For example, you can include a no-commercialization clause when selling property.
- causality0 4y ago
  You could make the argument that contracts which say one party can spy on the other and do whatever they want with the data fall under the category of unconscionable.

LargoLasskhyfv 4y ago

Your future care won't start at all, until it has verified its secure boot chain against Skynet.

LargoLasskhyfv 4y ago
...err... car

_fat_santa 4y ago

My optimistic prediction is that there will be regulation around this pretty soon. Were going to have laws similar to smog standards that specify what can and can't a car manufacturer can charge a subscription for. I would imagine legislation would look something like. > You may offer subscription features, but you must also give the option of a one time purchase that unlocks the feature forever. or > You are allowed to charge subscription for features A, B and C. But critical features including X, Y and Z must be provided standard on a vehicle at no extra charge.

josephcsible 4y ago
> You may offer subscription features, but you must also give the option of a one time purchase that unlocks the feature forever. You can subscribe to air conditioning for $10 per month, or buy it outright for $100,000.
- dento 4y ago
  Limiting the one-off purchase to some multiple (maybe 100) of the monthly payment should be part of the law too.

kurupt213 4y ago

Constitutional amendments are dangerous. The whole constitution is at risk of change during a constitutional convention. We are at risk of losing much more than we gain

swader999 4y ago
Constitutions don't matter when media, big tech and judiciary are controlled or in cahoots in a single party system.
CatWChainsaw 4y ago
Is it, though? Getting 2/3rds of the US to agree on anything seems to be nigh impossible these days. I don't see how a convention could be called to amend [extremely popular issue] but then all of a sudden enough of the convention votes to scrap the Constitution altogether.

IshKebab 4y ago

Cars are already like this. My Skoda Octavia had a headlight levelling issue. Pretty clearly just needed recalibration. Can you do that through the dash interface? Of course not. God forbid they actually use that huge touchscreen for useful diagnostic information. Took it to my normal garage who are very good, but they clearly couldn't fix it because they didn't have VW's proprietary software tools. Ended up taking it to an official Skoda garage and they easily fixed it and didn't even charge me. I presume even they felt bad charging someone £80 to press a button in some software that only they have access to.