9 ms·

Tracking and technology in cars is being weaponized by abusive partners

88 points by edward 3y ago

CodeBeater 3y ago
[flagged]
- ghaff 3y ago
  While there are trade offs do you actually think there aren’t good reasons for emergency notification systems? You might be happy to do without personally but that won’t be everyone’s informed choice. And location sharing between individuals has advantages as well at least on a temporary basis. Comments like yours are the sort of low effort kneejerk reaction that pollute so many discussions. Just stop.
  - nicce 3y ago
    That is poor argument. You can make privacy respecting emergency notification system which uses data only for that service or even if you share it only for individuals as well. But manufacturers want all this data and sell it too.
    - ghaff 3y ago
      Yes manufacturers should have far less leeway to use/sell the data for many purposes even if that increases consumer monetary costs. Even open to legislation along those lines. But that doesn’t really have a bearing on this case.
  - CodeBeater 3y ago
    Well don't get me wrong, this is Hacker News, you'd be hard pressed to find people who don't love tech here. I agree with your main idea, but the lack of informed consent just bothers me. The mere fact that most people don't realize their cars could (not saying that is the norm, at least not just yet), track their every move by default, sending their data to an unknown server to do unknown things and you have to opt out of that is just frightening. GM can't even do a simple entertainment center that doesn't lag out like a $20 tablet, so what are they making with my live location and how well are they taking care of it?
  - blackbear_ 3y ago
    > You might be happy to do without personally but that won’t be everyone’s informed choice. In fact this is nobody's choice since everybody is forced this shit down their throat with no way to opt out.
  - dang 3y ago
    Please don't respond to a bad comment by breaking the site guidelines yourself. That only makes things worse. Personal attacks are particularly not ok, and we've had to ask you not to do that more than once before. If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
- dang 3y ago
  Please don't post unsubstantive and/or flamebait comments. We're trying for something else here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html Edit: your comment downthread (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38825159 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38825159) was much better and would have been fine if you'd posted that instead (minus the first sentence I guess).
CharlesW 3y ago
https://archive.is/7lhOw https://archive.is/7lhOw
ghaff 3y ago
This case seems difficult. On the one hand, maybe the restraint order should have been enough? On the other hand, it’s at least somewhat understandable that the car manufacturer would be hesitant to cut the owner off from access to their property. The broader issue is that if a couple has turned on all sorts of data and account sharing it’s easy to see how information leaks can easily happen in spite of efforts to plug them by one party.
- HnUser12 3y ago
  Yeah. This sounds more like a user problem and also very specific one in this case. Sounds like car was granted to her use, but officially it was still under her husband’s name. So Mercedes doesn’t seem to be at fault. Privacy concerns with manufacturer aside, I find the tracking feature to be very useful due to the amount of theft and break-ins we have over here in Canada.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
pluc 3y ago
Solution: tune it right out of the shop and never bring it to your dealer for scheduled maintenance. Would love to finally see the hacking community pay some attention to infotainment systems. Cars are becoming like PCs or phones, pre-bundled with a bunch of shit that you'd want to selectively purge upon acquisition but somehow car manufacturers don't have to give you the option.
- jncfhnb 3y ago
  Cars are too expensive to mess with if you’re rights to do so are not protected and risk warranties
  - anonym29 3y ago
    For DIY efforts, sure. Blatantly untrue for commercial modification though. There is no shortage of performance shops that will take a car that makes a couple hundred HP from the factory, replace a bunch of internals, completely void the warranty, and bump it up to the 4-digit range of horsepower, albeit mostly with a small handful of the overall number of makes and models, as not all cars are good platforms for high performance. I suspect the reason that we don't see much of a commercial privacy modding scene for cars is that there simply isn't sufficient demand. The manufacturers may be educated, listening, and watching us, but most people would simply prefer to bury their heads in the sand and choose to act ignorant, deaf, and blind in the face of this problem. It's almost like non-technical folks have developed a "learned hopelessness" over their privacy, which is really sad in some ways. That's the same thing people living under many brutal, murderous, totalitarian dictatorships developed too after their privacy was obliterated, like in the former Soviet Union.
    - jncfhnb 3y ago
      Completely voiding the warranty is the problem, not the cost of the mods.
    - sidewndr46 3y ago
      You're living in a fantasy world if you think a 200 HP car is going to make 1000+ HP with a few modifications. The people doing this have a factory engine block and that is it.
kyledrake 3y ago
Tracking a car also has value for finding it after losing it in a parking garage, determining whether it's been towed or stolen, rescue help in case it's in a more remote area during a blizzard, etc. There's more legitimate use cases here than illegitimate ones, and its odd to to ignore all of them and presume this tech is almost exclusively for stalking like this article is implying. Auto theft in a lot of places in the United States has spiked so much since COVID that being able to track your car is critical infrastructure at this point*, particular if you drive the cars that are easy to steal right now (I have a friend that had his car stolen 3 times). I think being able to steal a car with a USB cable is a much worse problem for car manufacturers to deal with right now and I really hope we don't hand criminals yet another theft tool (on top of their unlimited supply of dangerous weapons) by eliminating car trackers by law or self immolation. * https://www.axios.com/2023/07/20/car-thefts-2023-kia-hyundai-crime-data https://www.axios.com/2023/07/20/car-thefts-2023-kia-hyundai...
- hellcow 3y ago
  > Crime in a lot of places in the United States is so bad right now Citation needed. Crime rates have been falling for decades. [1] I have no doubt there are individual areas with high crime, and for those isolated pockets, people could opt-in to buying and installing tracking devices on their vehicles. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_the_United_States https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_the_United_States
  - kyledrake 3y ago
    One of many articles on the topic https://www.axios.com/2023/07/20/car-thefts-2023-kia-hyundai-crime-data https://www.axios.com/2023/07/20/car-thefts-2023-kia-hyundai...
    - pc86 3y ago
      Property crime as a whole is decreasing even when accounting for this spike of a very specific sub-sub-category. All this does is prove that other crimes are decreasing so much that this largely irrelevant sub-sub-category (most people do not own Kias or Hyundais as they're pretty terrible vehicles) increase is more than completely wiped out.
AlexandrB 3y ago
It's "I have nothing to hide" until suddenly you do. But by then it's too late to do anything about it.
- anonym29 3y ago
  And yet every single person who says this continues to lock the door when they sit down to use the restroom in public. They're doing nothing wrong. They have nothing to hide. Everyone knows what they're up to. And yet, they have this strange, inexplicable desire for privacy in spite of those three things!
  - deaddodo 3y ago
    > They have nothing to hide. Most people would take umbrage with this portion of your argument. They clearly do have something to hide; whether it's from shame, embarrassment or politeness.
  - pests 3y ago
    It's just social expectations. No one wants to see it. Please don't allow yourself to be exposed to others, might even be children attempting to open the bathroom. Yet, walk into a gym changing room and you'll see balls swinging everywhere. They've done nothing wrong, nothing to hide, everyone knows what they are doing - but yet, they don't care about privacy?! Social expectations set privacy expectations. People conform to those expectations outside of their own desires or wants for privacy / non-privacy.
    - anonym29 3y ago
      > Yet, walk into a gym changing room and you'll see balls swinging everywhere. They've done nothing wrong, nothing to hide, everyone knows what they are doing - but yet, they don't care about privacy?! As someone who's been to YMCA locker rooms in the 1990s, 2000s, 2010s, and in the 2020s, this is increasingly only true of the elderly. I don't think I've seen anyone under 30 walking around outside of the showering area without a towel for years now. Another important distinction is that gymgoers in the changing rooms are free to choose whether to exercise their right to privacy, or to waive it, and there is not a corporation with a 9/10/11 digit valuation with entire teams of engineers dedicated to annihilating their privacy in pursuit of monetization. What carmakers are doing to the privacy of end users is not terribly dissimilar from gyms prohibiting the use of towels / bathing suits in changing rooms, punishable with loss of contractual rights you had as a customer of the gym for the first violation, like getting financial recourse if the gym fails to abide by their contractual duties. And yet almost nobody seems to think this is enough of a problem to stop going to that gym, which of course will only encourage the gym to roll out even more bizarre, draconian infringements on the privacy and freedom of their clientele.
Spivak 3y ago
This is a nothingburger story. The legal owner of a car as far as Mercedes is concerned has access to it. This is really a story about the courts being inept at "declaring" that the woman in question owns the car but not actually transferring the title and loan into her name. "Your phone may be tracking you (when you don't actually own it and you're on your abusive partner's iCloud account)."
baz00 3y ago
My abusive ex partner used to poll me to work out where I was. I divorced her. You can do that with your car too if it's prone to abusing you by proxy (get something that doesn't have any intelligence in it at all).
quadrifoliate 3y ago
"Connected" car services are complete shit and I never opt in to them. That being said, this also seems like the basic legal system needs to catch up in some of these cases. For example, in the first one, the wife had been granted sole use of the car but the husband's name was on the title? That doesn't even seem legally consistent to me, leaving aside all technology matters.
- genewitch 3y ago
  On 2023 subaru even if you're not opted in it appears that they OTA update the firmware. The "driver steering assist" has gotten weaker and weaker since we got a 2023 crosstrek. It used to only completely shut off on 1 road near my house, now it shuts off on about 40% of roads, with no other changes. Car is about 6 months old.
  - Modified3019 3y ago
    Fortunately my (work provided) Dodge Ram allows me to turn steering assist on or off and have it stay that way until I change it. I actually like it when rarely doing hours of highway driving, but for my normal use it’s absolutely unsuitable on the narrow and degraded backroads where I’m often squeezing by farm equipment. Definitely don’t like it trying to second guess me having to go over the line.
    - genewitch 3y ago
      I can consistently and repeatedly make the Crosstrek attempt to murder me. Drive to the left of a semi truck, and begin to hug the left line on the road. The car will fight you to recenter in the lane. If you loosen your grip on the wheel at all, the car will immediately and violently swerve to the right, and without correction will wind up in the lane to the right. I can always catch it at exactly the right line of the lane i am in, but i imagine if you weren't expecting it you'd wind up underneath a semi. I absolutely loathe driving the crosstrek. edited to clarify: I can shut off steering assist, but sometimes i drive with it on because my wife does (normally) and i like to make sure it's still "safe" - so each time i get in and the steering assist is "slightly different" than the last time, i notice. She only sees the gentle curve, like maybe the cameras are dirty, or this road's lines aren't sufficient for steering assist, etc. Whereas i notice immediately that it's acting different.
eimrine 3y ago
What is an injustice when having a working SOS button requires you to give away a lot of potentially sensitive data.
- tastyfreeze 3y ago
  SOS doesn't have to be always tracking location. Ships and airplanes have radio beacons that only activate when something bad happens. Cars could do the same.
xhkkffbf 3y ago
It's sad that the man in this story died and can't give his side of the story. It sounds like the Mercedes did exactly what it was supposed to do-- answer questions about its location to the titled owner. The fact that this woman had bad credit and couldn't take over the title in the process of the divorce just put the car and the Mercedes network admins in a strange position of trying to decide which legal claim to believe.
- mannykannot 3y ago
  > ...put the car and the Mercedes network admins in a strange position of trying to decide which legal claim to believe. Mercedes has lawyers as well as network admins, and the fact that the victim had a court-issued restraining order is not the sort of thing that one can simply choose to believe in or not. If the law currently supports Mercedes' response, it's time for the law to be updated to recognize the increasing scope for this sort of abuse. The husband forfeited a certain amount of freedom of action through the behavior that earned him the restraining order, and neither Mercedes' interest in the car as security on a loan nor the many other advantages of tracking a vehicle necessitate, let alone justify, Mercedes' response.
  - s1artibartfast 3y ago
    I fully disagree. This isn't about Mercedes' interest in the car, but the legal owner's interest in the car. This whole article is misleading in that it refers to it as "her car" while it simply wasn't. Replace it with "his car" and everything makes sense. >Mercedes has lawyers as well as network admins, and the fact that the victim had a court-issued restraining order is not the sort of thing that one can simply choose to believe in or not. It has nothing to do with belief in a restraining order. A restraining order says nothing about transferring the car title.
    - mannykannot 3y ago
      > This isn't about Mercedes' interest in the car, but the legal owner's interest in the car. I anticipated this response, but apparently I didn't make it clear enough: The husband forfeited a certain amount of freedom of action through the behavior that earned him the restraining order. At this point in the divorce proceedings, where continued use of the car has been granted to one of the spouses pending a final resolution, and there is also a restraining order in effect on the other, there is no justification for the other spouse having a right to track the vehicle. If it had been stolen (which is not the case) and he was unable to track it himself, that would just be a consequence hehad brought on himself through his bad behavior. If Mercedes did not have any interest in tracking the car, then that just removes one possible justification for its inaction. > A restraining order says nothing about transferring the car title. And this issue is nothing to do with transferring the car title.
QuantumQuester 3y ago
[dead]
thepasswordis 3y ago
I’ve noticed a trend with some subgroups of people, which I ended up copying. I share my location with a lot of people on iMessage. Basically any time I have ever had to meet somebody, if they’re a close friend or family member, I share my location with them indefinitely and never turn it off, and lots of people do the same thing to me. I think this is like the 2020s version of giving somebody a spare key to your house.
- ghaff 3y ago
  There are very few people I’d grant indefinite sharing to. I’ll forget that it’s there and I can think of all sorts of scenarios like white lies about why I can’t attend some event they’re putting on. Maybe not the end of the world but just aren’t many people who need that sort of deep visibility into my day to day comings and goings. It seems very invasive. And the spare key analogy seems poor. I can trust a friend not to use a spare key to facilitate robbing my house which they could presumably break into anyway—without my minute to minute movements being any of their business.
- eek2121 3y ago
  That is nuts. I don’t even share my location with my spouse.
- AndrewKemendo 3y ago
  This is the first time I’ve ever heard of any anybody doing that at that level of scale. That doesn’t mean that you’re incorrect certainly but I don’t think that’s as universal as you think it is.
  - wesleychen 3y ago
    It’s pretty universal among my friends in their early 20s, spanning across the country.
    - genewitch 3y ago
      forgetting to turn off location sharing is universal?
maerF0x0 3y ago
As others have said, tracking data has value. The problem is a lack of (or abuse of) our rights and companies which serve their customers more than themselves. Simply put we need the perpetual right to own, revoke, and control the flow of our data. We need the perpetual right to real privacy from intrusive governments which, ironic to the consitution, are beginning to resemble and exceed the very governments they formed to overthrow.
- fnorder 3y ago
  "To access content, please click 'I relinquish all my rights and expectations to privacy, and my right to challenge this agreemment.'"
  - Buttons840 3y ago
    If there's the will, we can make such agreements unenforceable. Recognizing their danger, we can even make the mere presence of such a clause in a contract illegal, punishable by a large payment to whoever reports the clause.
  - TaylorAlexander 3y ago
    Plenty of laws prevent certain rights from being relinquished by contract. For example California employment law prevents employers from controlling what you work on in your spare time on personal equipment, with few exceptions. I have had friends at Apple, Facebook, and Google question whether they could work on open source projects on the side and I highlighted this for them. Note that employers often still put unenforceable restrictions on these things in their contact which I think sucks. It confuses employees who don’t know their rights and chills valuable work on open source. https://www.aegislawfirm.com/blog/2023/01/california-moonlighting-law/ https://www.aegislawfirm.com/blog/2023/01/california-moonlig...
    - everforward 3y ago
      > Note that employers often still put unenforceable restrictions on these things in their contact which I think sucks. It confuses employees who don’t know their rights and chills valuable work on open source. This is a big reason why I think clauses in contracts with individuals should not be separable. The entire agreement is either valid or not, you can't stuff it full of a tenuous wishlist of rights. Lawyers are far too expensive to ask every citizen to hire one every time they want to find out which clauses are blatantly unenforceable. Maybe it made sense when the sum of laws that apply to everyone was a reasonable quantity, but at this point even lawyers only really know the parts they specialize in. There have to be millions of pages by the time you include all the case law that set precedent.
giantg2 3y ago
I don't want this type of tech in my vehicles at all. But all the examples they are giving have to deal with who the owner is. If the name is on the title, then this is a law issue, not a tech issue. Most of these technologies can be disabled by removing part of the connectivity hardware (I've done it before). This is a similar paradigm for other things like phone/family tracking, smart home, etc. Far too many people don't give a shit about privacy or security until they are a victim. Then the call is for some third party to make it secure for them rather than go with the more permanent and secure fix of doing away with the unused features (like removing the connection).
api 3y ago
A while back after reading about how many above ground atomic tests we did in the 1950s I found myself wondering: what are we doing right now where future generations will look back and ask "what were they thinking?" Other than burning all the carbon, I think this insane totally unregulated, opaque, user-hostile, leaky, insecure surveillance panopticon is a good candidate for a large scale human self-own. Privacy loss is a little like climate change. The problem builds but nothing obviously bad happens right away, so people don't notice or don't really care. Nothing bad happens until it does but when it does it's too late. One of the things I've found is that Europeans seem much more concerned about privacy than Americans. I've chalked this up to their experience in the 20th century with Hitler, Mussolini, Franco, and the Soviet sphere of influence. Maybe Americans need their own experience with totalitarianism to show them why surrendering all privacy for convenience and free candy might not be a great idea. (Who knows... we might get it soon!) Another class of very bad things that can happen is foreign influence powered by all this surveillance. We've already seen some of this from Russia, but China is smarter and better funded and probably has 100X the data and access. If they decide to invade Taiwan expect a full information warfare assault against the US population powered by fine grained surveillance data and delivered via social media. Since they probably know when you go to the bathroom, they'll be able to use AI with all this information to micro-target every single individual.
lcordier 3y ago
It prolly started as analytics for the engineers than corporate started seeing $$$ signs.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
kkfx 3y ago
A very small very personal note: dear automakers what about making connected cars, BUT connected to their formal owners? Like hey a car with a webui built-in. So for instance instead of crapplications and crappy APIs [1] we can simply connect directly with dynDNS or a personal domain to our cars and owning them fully enough to decide how to upgrade their crapware, witch services gives to whom and so on? I have three cars, only one a modern connected BEV, a modest MG ZS long range 2022. Just for instance with it's app sometimes I connect to someone else car in another country, localizing it. Apparently unlocking and remote command heating/A/c does not work sometimes, asking for a pin, sometimes does work not asking for nothing. The problem is not the ex-husband, the problem is the crappy crapware you put on your vehicles to control them as you wish without much formal owners but in reality just users controls... That's the real ABUSE. [1] https://samcurry.net/web-hackers-vs-the-auto-industry/ https://samcurry.net/web-hackers-vs-the-auto-industry/ also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34230093 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34230093
carolinahoward 3y ago
[dead]

88 points by edward 3y ago

CodeBeater 3y ago

[flagged]

ghaff 3y ago
While there are trade offs do you actually think there aren’t good reasons for emergency notification systems? You might be happy to do without personally but that won’t be everyone’s informed choice. And location sharing between individuals has advantages as well at least on a temporary basis. Comments like yours are the sort of low effort kneejerk reaction that pollute so many discussions. Just stop.
- nicce 3y ago
  That is poor argument. You can make privacy respecting emergency notification system which uses data only for that service or even if you share it only for individuals as well. But manufacturers want all this data and sell it too.
  - ghaff 3y ago
    Yes manufacturers should have far less leeway to use/sell the data for many purposes even if that increases consumer monetary costs. Even open to legislation along those lines. But that doesn’t really have a bearing on this case.
- CodeBeater 3y ago
  Well don't get me wrong, this is Hacker News, you'd be hard pressed to find people who don't love tech here. I agree with your main idea, but the lack of informed consent just bothers me. The mere fact that most people don't realize their cars could (not saying that is the norm, at least not just yet), track their every move by default, sending their data to an unknown server to do unknown things and you have to opt out of that is just frightening. GM can't even do a simple entertainment center that doesn't lag out like a $20 tablet, so what are they making with my live location and how well are they taking care of it?
- blackbear_ 3y ago
  > You might be happy to do without personally but that won’t be everyone’s informed choice. In fact this is nobody's choice since everybody is forced this shit down their throat with no way to opt out.
- dang 3y ago
  Please don't respond to a bad comment by breaking the site guidelines yourself. That only makes things worse. Personal attacks are particularly not ok, and we've had to ask you not to do that more than once before. If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
dang 3y ago
Please don't post unsubstantive and/or flamebait comments. We're trying for something else here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html Edit: your comment downthread (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38825159 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38825159) was much better and would have been fine if you'd posted that instead (minus the first sentence I guess).

CharlesW 3y ago

https://archive.is/7lhOw https://archive.is/7lhOw

ghaff 3y ago

This case seems difficult. On the one hand, maybe the restraint order should have been enough? On the other hand, it’s at least somewhat understandable that the car manufacturer would be hesitant to cut the owner off from access to their property. The broader issue is that if a couple has turned on all sorts of data and account sharing it’s easy to see how information leaks can easily happen in spite of efforts to plug them by one party.

HnUser12 3y ago
Yeah. This sounds more like a user problem and also very specific one in this case. Sounds like car was granted to her use, but officially it was still under her husband’s name. So Mercedes doesn’t seem to be at fault. Privacy concerns with manufacturer aside, I find the tracking feature to be very useful due to the amount of theft and break-ins we have over here in Canada.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

pluc 3y ago

Solution: tune it right out of the shop and never bring it to your dealer for scheduled maintenance. Would love to finally see the hacking community pay some attention to infotainment systems. Cars are becoming like PCs or phones, pre-bundled with a bunch of shit that you'd want to selectively purge upon acquisition but somehow car manufacturers don't have to give you the option.

jncfhnb 3y ago
Cars are too expensive to mess with if you’re rights to do so are not protected and risk warranties
- anonym29 3y ago
  For DIY efforts, sure. Blatantly untrue for commercial modification though. There is no shortage of performance shops that will take a car that makes a couple hundred HP from the factory, replace a bunch of internals, completely void the warranty, and bump it up to the 4-digit range of horsepower, albeit mostly with a small handful of the overall number of makes and models, as not all cars are good platforms for high performance. I suspect the reason that we don't see much of a commercial privacy modding scene for cars is that there simply isn't sufficient demand. The manufacturers may be educated, listening, and watching us, but most people would simply prefer to bury their heads in the sand and choose to act ignorant, deaf, and blind in the face of this problem. It's almost like non-technical folks have developed a "learned hopelessness" over their privacy, which is really sad in some ways. That's the same thing people living under many brutal, murderous, totalitarian dictatorships developed too after their privacy was obliterated, like in the former Soviet Union.
  - jncfhnb 3y ago
    Completely voiding the warranty is the problem, not the cost of the mods.
  - sidewndr46 3y ago
    You're living in a fantasy world if you think a 200 HP car is going to make 1000+ HP with a few modifications. The people doing this have a factory engine block and that is it.

kyledrake 3y ago

Tracking a car also has value for finding it after losing it in a parking garage, determining whether it's been towed or stolen, rescue help in case it's in a more remote area during a blizzard, etc. There's more legitimate use cases here than illegitimate ones, and its odd to to ignore all of them and presume this tech is almost exclusively for stalking like this article is implying. Auto theft in a lot of places in the United States has spiked so much since COVID that being able to track your car is critical infrastructure at this point*, particular if you drive the cars that are easy to steal right now (I have a friend that had his car stolen 3 times). I think being able to steal a car with a USB cable is a much worse problem for car manufacturers to deal with right now and I really hope we don't hand criminals yet another theft tool (on top of their unlimited supply of dangerous weapons) by eliminating car trackers by law or self immolation. * https://www.axios.com/2023/07/20/car-thefts-2023-kia-hyundai-crime-data https://www.axios.com/2023/07/20/car-thefts-2023-kia-hyundai...

hellcow 3y ago
> Crime in a lot of places in the United States is so bad right now Citation needed. Crime rates have been falling for decades. [1] I have no doubt there are individual areas with high crime, and for those isolated pockets, people could opt-in to buying and installing tracking devices on their vehicles. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_the_United_States https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_the_United_States
- kyledrake 3y ago
  One of many articles on the topic https://www.axios.com/2023/07/20/car-thefts-2023-kia-hyundai-crime-data https://www.axios.com/2023/07/20/car-thefts-2023-kia-hyundai...
  - pc86 3y ago
    Property crime as a whole is decreasing even when accounting for this spike of a very specific sub-sub-category. All this does is prove that other crimes are decreasing so much that this largely irrelevant sub-sub-category (most people do not own Kias or Hyundais as they're pretty terrible vehicles) increase is more than completely wiped out.

AlexandrB 3y ago

It's "I have nothing to hide" until suddenly you do. But by then it's too late to do anything about it.

anonym29 3y ago
And yet every single person who says this continues to lock the door when they sit down to use the restroom in public. They're doing nothing wrong. They have nothing to hide. Everyone knows what they're up to. And yet, they have this strange, inexplicable desire for privacy in spite of those three things!
- deaddodo 3y ago
  > They have nothing to hide. Most people would take umbrage with this portion of your argument. They clearly do have something to hide; whether it's from shame, embarrassment or politeness.
- pests 3y ago
  It's just social expectations. No one wants to see it. Please don't allow yourself to be exposed to others, might even be children attempting to open the bathroom. Yet, walk into a gym changing room and you'll see balls swinging everywhere. They've done nothing wrong, nothing to hide, everyone knows what they are doing - but yet, they don't care about privacy?! Social expectations set privacy expectations. People conform to those expectations outside of their own desires or wants for privacy / non-privacy.
  - anonym29 3y ago
    > Yet, walk into a gym changing room and you'll see balls swinging everywhere. They've done nothing wrong, nothing to hide, everyone knows what they are doing - but yet, they don't care about privacy?! As someone who's been to YMCA locker rooms in the 1990s, 2000s, 2010s, and in the 2020s, this is increasingly only true of the elderly. I don't think I've seen anyone under 30 walking around outside of the showering area without a towel for years now. Another important distinction is that gymgoers in the changing rooms are free to choose whether to exercise their right to privacy, or to waive it, and there is not a corporation with a 9/10/11 digit valuation with entire teams of engineers dedicated to annihilating their privacy in pursuit of monetization. What carmakers are doing to the privacy of end users is not terribly dissimilar from gyms prohibiting the use of towels / bathing suits in changing rooms, punishable with loss of contractual rights you had as a customer of the gym for the first violation, like getting financial recourse if the gym fails to abide by their contractual duties. And yet almost nobody seems to think this is enough of a problem to stop going to that gym, which of course will only encourage the gym to roll out even more bizarre, draconian infringements on the privacy and freedom of their clientele.

Spivak 3y ago

This is a nothingburger story. The legal owner of a car as far as Mercedes is concerned has access to it. This is really a story about the courts being inept at "declaring" that the woman in question owns the car but not actually transferring the title and loan into her name. "Your phone may be tracking you (when you don't actually own it and you're on your abusive partner's iCloud account)."

baz00 3y ago

My abusive ex partner used to poll me to work out where I was. I divorced her. You can do that with your car too if it's prone to abusing you by proxy (get something that doesn't have any intelligence in it at all).

quadrifoliate 3y ago

"Connected" car services are complete shit and I never opt in to them. That being said, this also seems like the basic legal system needs to catch up in some of these cases. For example, in the first one, the wife had been granted sole use of the car but the husband's name was on the title? That doesn't even seem legally consistent to me, leaving aside all technology matters.

genewitch 3y ago
On 2023 subaru even if you're not opted in it appears that they OTA update the firmware. The "driver steering assist" has gotten weaker and weaker since we got a 2023 crosstrek. It used to only completely shut off on 1 road near my house, now it shuts off on about 40% of roads, with no other changes. Car is about 6 months old.
- Modified3019 3y ago
  Fortunately my (work provided) Dodge Ram allows me to turn steering assist on or off and have it stay that way until I change it. I actually like it when rarely doing hours of highway driving, but for my normal use it’s absolutely unsuitable on the narrow and degraded backroads where I’m often squeezing by farm equipment. Definitely don’t like it trying to second guess me having to go over the line.
  - genewitch 3y ago
    I can consistently and repeatedly make the Crosstrek attempt to murder me. Drive to the left of a semi truck, and begin to hug the left line on the road. The car will fight you to recenter in the lane. If you loosen your grip on the wheel at all, the car will immediately and violently swerve to the right, and without correction will wind up in the lane to the right. I can always catch it at exactly the right line of the lane i am in, but i imagine if you weren't expecting it you'd wind up underneath a semi. I absolutely loathe driving the crosstrek. edited to clarify: I can shut off steering assist, but sometimes i drive with it on because my wife does (normally) and i like to make sure it's still "safe" - so each time i get in and the steering assist is "slightly different" than the last time, i notice. She only sees the gentle curve, like maybe the cameras are dirty, or this road's lines aren't sufficient for steering assist, etc. Whereas i notice immediately that it's acting different.

eimrine 3y ago

What is an injustice when having a working SOS button requires you to give away a lot of potentially sensitive data.

tastyfreeze 3y ago
SOS doesn't have to be always tracking location. Ships and airplanes have radio beacons that only activate when something bad happens. Cars could do the same.

xhkkffbf 3y ago

It's sad that the man in this story died and can't give his side of the story. It sounds like the Mercedes did exactly what it was supposed to do-- answer questions about its location to the titled owner. The fact that this woman had bad credit and couldn't take over the title in the process of the divorce just put the car and the Mercedes network admins in a strange position of trying to decide which legal claim to believe.

mannykannot 3y ago
> ...put the car and the Mercedes network admins in a strange position of trying to decide which legal claim to believe. Mercedes has lawyers as well as network admins, and the fact that the victim had a court-issued restraining order is not the sort of thing that one can simply choose to believe in or not. If the law currently supports Mercedes' response, it's time for the law to be updated to recognize the increasing scope for this sort of abuse. The husband forfeited a certain amount of freedom of action through the behavior that earned him the restraining order, and neither Mercedes' interest in the car as security on a loan nor the many other advantages of tracking a vehicle necessitate, let alone justify, Mercedes' response.
- s1artibartfast 3y ago
  I fully disagree. This isn't about Mercedes' interest in the car, but the legal owner's interest in the car. This whole article is misleading in that it refers to it as "her car" while it simply wasn't. Replace it with "his car" and everything makes sense. >Mercedes has lawyers as well as network admins, and the fact that the victim had a court-issued restraining order is not the sort of thing that one can simply choose to believe in or not. It has nothing to do with belief in a restraining order. A restraining order says nothing about transferring the car title.
  - mannykannot 3y ago
    > This isn't about Mercedes' interest in the car, but the legal owner's interest in the car. I anticipated this response, but apparently I didn't make it clear enough: The husband forfeited a certain amount of freedom of action through the behavior that earned him the restraining order. At this point in the divorce proceedings, where continued use of the car has been granted to one of the spouses pending a final resolution, and there is also a restraining order in effect on the other, there is no justification for the other spouse having a right to track the vehicle. If it had been stolen (which is not the case) and he was unable to track it himself, that would just be a consequence hehad brought on himself through his bad behavior. If Mercedes did not have any interest in tracking the car, then that just removes one possible justification for its inaction. > A restraining order says nothing about transferring the car title. And this issue is nothing to do with transferring the car title.

QuantumQuester 3y ago

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thepasswordis 3y ago

I’ve noticed a trend with some subgroups of people, which I ended up copying. I share my location with a lot of people on iMessage. Basically any time I have ever had to meet somebody, if they’re a close friend or family member, I share my location with them indefinitely and never turn it off, and lots of people do the same thing to me. I think this is like the 2020s version of giving somebody a spare key to your house.

ghaff 3y ago
There are very few people I’d grant indefinite sharing to. I’ll forget that it’s there and I can think of all sorts of scenarios like white lies about why I can’t attend some event they’re putting on. Maybe not the end of the world but just aren’t many people who need that sort of deep visibility into my day to day comings and goings. It seems very invasive. And the spare key analogy seems poor. I can trust a friend not to use a spare key to facilitate robbing my house which they could presumably break into anyway—without my minute to minute movements being any of their business.
eek2121 3y ago
That is nuts. I don’t even share my location with my spouse.
AndrewKemendo 3y ago
This is the first time I’ve ever heard of any anybody doing that at that level of scale. That doesn’t mean that you’re incorrect certainly but I don’t think that’s as universal as you think it is.
- wesleychen 3y ago
  It’s pretty universal among my friends in their early 20s, spanning across the country.
  - genewitch 3y ago
    forgetting to turn off location sharing is universal?

maerF0x0 3y ago

As others have said, tracking data has value. The problem is a lack of (or abuse of) our rights and companies which serve their customers more than themselves. Simply put we need the perpetual right to own, revoke, and control the flow of our data. We need the perpetual right to real privacy from intrusive governments which, ironic to the consitution, are beginning to resemble and exceed the very governments they formed to overthrow.

fnorder 3y ago
"To access content, please click 'I relinquish all my rights and expectations to privacy, and my right to challenge this agreemment.'"
- Buttons840 3y ago
  If there's the will, we can make such agreements unenforceable. Recognizing their danger, we can even make the mere presence of such a clause in a contract illegal, punishable by a large payment to whoever reports the clause.
- TaylorAlexander 3y ago
  Plenty of laws prevent certain rights from being relinquished by contract. For example California employment law prevents employers from controlling what you work on in your spare time on personal equipment, with few exceptions. I have had friends at Apple, Facebook, and Google question whether they could work on open source projects on the side and I highlighted this for them. Note that employers often still put unenforceable restrictions on these things in their contact which I think sucks. It confuses employees who don’t know their rights and chills valuable work on open source. https://www.aegislawfirm.com/blog/2023/01/california-moonlighting-law/ https://www.aegislawfirm.com/blog/2023/01/california-moonlig...
  - everforward 3y ago
    > Note that employers often still put unenforceable restrictions on these things in their contact which I think sucks. It confuses employees who don’t know their rights and chills valuable work on open source. This is a big reason why I think clauses in contracts with individuals should not be separable. The entire agreement is either valid or not, you can't stuff it full of a tenuous wishlist of rights. Lawyers are far too expensive to ask every citizen to hire one every time they want to find out which clauses are blatantly unenforceable. Maybe it made sense when the sum of laws that apply to everyone was a reasonable quantity, but at this point even lawyers only really know the parts they specialize in. There have to be millions of pages by the time you include all the case law that set precedent.

giantg2 3y ago

I don't want this type of tech in my vehicles at all. But all the examples they are giving have to deal with who the owner is. If the name is on the title, then this is a law issue, not a tech issue. Most of these technologies can be disabled by removing part of the connectivity hardware (I've done it before). This is a similar paradigm for other things like phone/family tracking, smart home, etc. Far too many people don't give a shit about privacy or security until they are a victim. Then the call is for some third party to make it secure for them rather than go with the more permanent and secure fix of doing away with the unused features (like removing the connection).

api 3y ago

A while back after reading about how many above ground atomic tests we did in the 1950s I found myself wondering: what are we doing right now where future generations will look back and ask "what were they thinking?" Other than burning all the carbon, I think this insane totally unregulated, opaque, user-hostile, leaky, insecure surveillance panopticon is a good candidate for a large scale human self-own. Privacy loss is a little like climate change. The problem builds but nothing obviously bad happens right away, so people don't notice or don't really care. Nothing bad happens until it does but when it does it's too late. One of the things I've found is that Europeans seem much more concerned about privacy than Americans. I've chalked this up to their experience in the 20th century with Hitler, Mussolini, Franco, and the Soviet sphere of influence. Maybe Americans need their own experience with totalitarianism to show them why surrendering all privacy for convenience and free candy might not be a great idea. (Who knows... we might get it soon!) Another class of very bad things that can happen is foreign influence powered by all this surveillance. We've already seen some of this from Russia, but China is smarter and better funded and probably has 100X the data and access. If they decide to invade Taiwan expect a full information warfare assault against the US population powered by fine grained surveillance data and delivered via social media. Since they probably know when you go to the bathroom, they'll be able to use AI with all this information to micro-target every single individual.

lcordier 3y ago

It prolly started as analytics for the engineers than corporate started seeing $$$ signs.

deleted 3y ago

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kkfx 3y ago

A very small very personal note: dear automakers what about making connected cars, BUT connected to their formal owners? Like hey a car with a webui built-in. So for instance instead of crapplications and crappy APIs [1] we can simply connect directly with dynDNS or a personal domain to our cars and owning them fully enough to decide how to upgrade their crapware, witch services gives to whom and so on? I have three cars, only one a modern connected BEV, a modest MG ZS long range 2022. Just for instance with it's app sometimes I connect to someone else car in another country, localizing it. Apparently unlocking and remote command heating/A/c does not work sometimes, asking for a pin, sometimes does work not asking for nothing. The problem is not the ex-husband, the problem is the crappy crapware you put on your vehicles to control them as you wish without much formal owners but in reality just users controls... That's the real ABUSE. [1] https://samcurry.net/web-hackers-vs-the-auto-industry/ https://samcurry.net/web-hackers-vs-the-auto-industry/ also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34230093 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34230093

carolinahoward 3y ago

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