Older cars may not have cellular data, and some new cars (e.g. the Slate electric car) may be specifically designed without cellular connections or with easily removable chips, but so much can still be inferred from omnipresent roadside surveillance.

It's not enough even to have private cars. The solution must be legislation that limits all of: data collected by cars and cameras, data shared among third parties, and placement of cameras without informed, specific, continuing public consent.

And every time flock-style cameras "could have" done some good, the surveillance state's cheerleaders will beat their drums and bleat their demands.

Clearly, the 25 major brands examined by Mozilla collect a ton of data. Allegedly, BYD does so as well.

What about the Slate truck? Was that even released? What about some of the Indian brands? Surely there's some useful car being produced somewhere that's just a car?

The car owner is buying a car, using computer to handle complicate hardware I understand, but at what point it make sense to share the data automatically without consent?

For example, when a user suddenly brakes with large delta v, is it really due to this driver's aptitude to not predict the results of their driving decisions? Or is it because they frequently encounter the same reckless drivers?

It seems this could also be detected: for each braking event, consider a disc of sufficient radius and similarily downscore other drivers in this disc, use proper Bayesian inference of course, not naive linear score incrementing decrementing...

Simply downrating the driver of the braking vehicle risks taxing the less reckless chickens vis-a-vis the dare's in chicken or dare scenario's, naive calculations risk taxing specifically those parties that decrease the total kinetic energy in potentially dangerous situations, if the reckless drivers don't flinch even if it would have gotten them into trouble if a chicken had been a reckless dare.

My wake up moment was at Walmart self-check out when there was an error and the monitor showed screen shots of me from every angle. "So that's what the back of my head looks like."

That's when you notice they have more cameras than casinos.

Not only did they store sensitive data about me, it also included personal data about 2 random Toyota owners who were incorrectly linked to my email address. I could see their full names, phone numbers, home addresses, details about their cars and every interaction they'd had with their dealers. It is a goldmine for a bad actor.

And this is despite me not signing up for "Connected Services", because Toyota/Lexus's privacy notice says they too may sell your location and driving behavior to third parties including insurance companies if you enable features like Emergency SOS.

I tried to look this up on my own but my results were always polluted with public transportation, or vehicle accident situations or just this gem "share your concerns with your driver, they can explain the data being collected".

Here's some examples I thought aren't for my benefit.

- How long I let the car warmup before driving after every start, - max speed, - acceleration rates, - Lateral acceleration around corners tagged with GPS data, - every GPS datapoint, - destinations and exactly when I set off and arrived

EDIT: Sorry, I meant a legal requirement.

But i you regress under stress, technology becomes a trap. The very thing allowing us to stay sane and civilized, winds up with destructive potential like a bomb. So, the panopticon is a lesser evil, compared to everyone rushing for the replicators to get a bomb to throw at their fellow man.

Technological utopism is not a ideology, its a diagnosis.

So a panopticon is a good thing, but the center does not hold, government and companies abuse powers. A resistace culture is needed that replaces centralized panopticons with public open source panopticons and feeds power thirsty actors wrowrong information.

Problem solved.

More and more we are becoming subjects to be controlled and exploited by whoever has the means to do it, with the state as an accomplice and an interested party. Piece by piece, our agency is being taken away and we are too complacent and learnedly helpless to do anything about it.

Roslin: I heard you're one of those people. You're actually afraid of computers.

Adama: No, there are many computers on this ship. But they're not networked.

Roslin: A computerized network would simply make it faster and easier for the teachers to be able to teach-

Adama: Let me explain something to you. Many good men and women lost their lives aboard this ship because someone wanted a faster computer to make life easier. I'm sorry that I'm inconveniencing you or the teachers, but I will not allow a networked computerized system to be placed on this ship while I'm in command. Is that clear?

Roslin: Yes, sir.

Adama: Thank you. 'Scuse me.

This is a BBC article. UK public broadcasting, paid with taxpayer money and aggressively collected - one of the first things I got when moving to a new home in the UK was letters from tv licensing.

Yet it's all "In the United States". "Federal Law and state law". The US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration that, this Maryland researcher for Mozilla there. There are two references to the UK and Europe (lumped together) that vaguely say, "It's a little better for certain classes of data" and "you can request your data". Which effectively means, "GDPR exists and the UK has its version".

Personal inventory:

Suzuki DL-650 V-Strom 650 $3500 1999 SW1 $1500 1998 SL2 $1500 1998 SL2 $1500 2005 Sienna $1000 (!). This one does have a crash "black box" but no phone home bullshit.

I'd take any of them across the country tomorrow.

> [...]

> The information they harvest can include [...] whether you buckle your seatbelt, drive too fast or brake too hard.

In a way this is good -- I want bad drivers to be incentivized to change their behavior.

Just need to legislate away all the other, actually creepy stuff. Just.

At least in the EU it’s quite illegal and even if a car maker slips something in, GDPR is always there so one can request a copy and have it deleted. Wish the regulation was even stricter though.

On the other hand, Chinese OEMs are very saavy in this area. They know what to do with your data (Mobile phones background helps a lot here) and they're doing everything they can to get an edge over all other OEMs. This is why the industry has been going towards "who has the best tech and apps" instead of "who gives safest chassis and better engines/gearboxes"

Most people use smart phones. Those are generally GPS equipped and can also be triangulated between cell towers down to a few hundred meters. When using a WIFI, that gets a lot better. And they have a few other active radios as well (uwb, bluetooth, nfc, etc.).

And they have active microphones that respond to phrases like "Siri!", "Hey Google!", etc. And they probably have exploitable back doors that shady government agencies might be exploiting. At least popular spy fiction from a quarter century ago suggests that governments might be doing such things. You'd have to assume they are at this point and that there's some level of truth to these Hollywood spy fantasies.

Your car might be reporting its location and listening in on conversations as well but it's not adding a whole lot of new information. Most new cars actually come with induction phone chargers. Drivers put their phone right next to them to charge. Very convenient. And it connects to the car even! Shock horror. Most of the tracking and spying tech in the car is a bit redundant if you consider that. Nice to get a bit clearer audio from some extra microphones and slightly better precision of the user's location.

But the good news is that most car drivers don't car pool and sit in the traffic jam alone mostly not having meetings. They might be taking calls (on their phone). But otherwise, there isn't a lot to spy on that wasn't already well covered for those interested in doing the spying.

If you are worried about being spied on, have your meetings in a Faraday cage or in nature far away from any devices. And don't take your smart phones anywhere near those meetings. Also consider wearing a tin foil hat. And maybe don't hold your secret meetings in cars. You'll be fine. Otherwise, the bad news is that you are probably in reach of a vast network of cameras, active microphones, etc. regardless of what you do with your personal devices (including your car). You have been for the past few decades.