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It's also akin to Roko's basilisk's - the people who don't realise how pervasive and invasive it has become seem the happiest while the ones like us who've often been around computers since the 80's and just watched our society sleep walk into it feel the worst.

That many of us then end up working for the companies doing it makes for a bad feeling across the industry.

>only new legislation and regulations can get us out of here.

From the same goverments that want more state surveillance and even buy the private profile data from data brokers?

Only a new ...revolution would get us out of here...

Let's finish that thought too.

You're asking for new legislation written by governments that a/ want that data to spy on you too and b/ are lobbied by corporations to write the legislation corps want.

It's a closed loop of crap, that goes in one direction only.

I wish people would stop saying we created this hell, as if everyone had a choice as to whether or not they grew up in this increasingly dystopian reality. Blame the people that are actually to blame, not everyone else. It's a tired tactic to shift blame from those who are actually accountable for these systems and technologies.

> We live in a hell of our own creation

Well not "our" creation since only a few oligarchs control most of the companies that engage in this.

> and only new legislation and regulations can get us out of here.

The same oligarchs control nearly all the legislators, so no way out.

Those few decades where the normal person thought that they are not a servant to a feudalistic lord are over, the aristocrats don't need to hide any more. The old money is out in the open, because the populace has lost all their leverage.

They still lie to us about the true source of their wealth, but if you dig in the few archives that we can actually access it is clear that the same family names pop up over and over again.

If your family wealth came from feudalism/colonialism and was already safely stored in offshore accounts 100 years ago, you can send your nepo child to silicon valley or Hollywood, have your connections invest into them and tell the whole world what amazing self-made person they are. Some years down the line they go meet the King to get their hereditary Lordship title back for the whole world to know.

All of this is in the national security interest, so your kids are above the law even though they might only be a Hollywood talent scout, CEO of some startup or a real estate mogul focused on black neighborhoods.

For several hundred years being aristocrat was really unpopular, but ultimately they got a grip on it by owning all means of mass propaganda plus building a file on everyone.

I think the only problem may be how it's phrased. I don't mind technology checking if I'm alive and awake while operating a two tonne ballistic bullet in publicml.

I do mind, however, if the data is not immediately discarded, once it does its real-time safety purpose.

Yep, which is why I'll never buy another car without an ashtray.

That’s weird wording, it’s not live-streaming the DMS camera feed… is it?

Just because it's a camera based system doesn't mean it will be surveillance.

Except in mid to high end luxury cars, automakers will probably design the sensor to be completely self-contained and merely provide a "driver present, attentive" or "driver distracted" or "no driver." In high end cars they'll use it to switch driver profiles, like what Lucid already does.

Both you and that author need to go look at the massive amount of data that has been getting collected in cars, including location data, for close to two decades in any vehicle that even had the option for telematics and GPS navigation.

Also the issue is not so much the camera system, but the "OS" the car is running. A ton of vehicles now have Google's Android OS running on them and that is also a privacy dumpster fire in and of itsel.

Also, a nationwide network of license plate reading cameras is far more of a privacy threat, too.

Yet even those who aim to remake the state change their tune when they become the state.

To add to the argument:

5. Voting with your wallet hasn't worked so far. Why limit yourself to a tactic that is proven ineffective? Corporations don't limit themselves this way - they lobby and obfuscate and sometimes outright lie [1].

6. Regulation is how citizens organize. Corporations don't rely on employees just voluntarily doing what benefits the corporation - they fire them if they don't. "Vote with your wallet" means to throw away your rights and duties as a citizen, and retain only the meager powers of a consumer.

[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c3dr91z0g4zo

The best argument against "voting with your wallet" I heard was following: billionaires have much bigger wallets. They will outvote the rest of us every single time voting with wallet is used as political strategy.

Happen to be on their email list. They are taking orders soon and announcing pricing on 6/24. Initial delivery expected toward the end of the year.

Sadly, often once some new degree of connection becomes possible, its absence is very quickly seen as unconscionable. But that instinct is corrosive to human flourishing and freedom in the long term.

Once it's possible to monitor your children via networked phone or wristwatch and know at all times where they are, for example, if you do not spy on your own children then other parents who do will look at you askance, seeing you as neglectful. Some will call the authories to complain. Those same complainers will also wonder why so many children are no longer becoming effective, independent adults, with no introspection.

The same philisophical problem emerges independent of surveillance with most, if not all, new technology. Once everyone is genetically engineering children, bringing children into the world naturally will set them up for failure and serfdom (a la Gattaca).

In response to someone in another thread who argued against personal privacy, who said "Why do people feel they can behave in a way that can be blackmailed", I responded with the following:

---

Yeah, how dare someone do or say anything that some random crazy asshole could use to threaten that person's personal or professional life or even put them in danger of physical harm. To hell with gay kids growing up in very traditional religious areas in much of the world.

That person who made a racist joke on Discord when they were 13 years old? That should be able to ruin them when they're 30!

Someone confiding to a friend over social media DMs that they're in an abusive relationship with someone violent? Well - she shouldn't be surprised when her partner beats her within an inch of her life when he finds out. If only she did what she was told, right?

And let's not forget the cringiest or most sexual thing you've ever said online - make sure that your every utterance in private would pass scrutiny by your employer's HR department!

Seriously...I don't understand people like you. What a small, listless, and unusually safe world you must live in.

You may as well have asked why can't everyone think and act like you as well as live in your particular region of the world with the same friends, family, romantic, and professional opportunities that you've been provided throughout your life.

---

The end state is something like China, where petty street level crime is essentially solved. You can leave your bike unlocked because if anyone stole it the police would find them and return it since they can track the thief on a network of cameras.

But like you say, many things which have been crimes were based on unethical laws. It's easy to two sides this issue, less crime would on a whole be a good thing but some level of committing crime and getting away with it is required for society to progress.

If it happened in the Land of Freedom, of course its going to happen everywhere. Legislation WILL be exploited, its just a question of when.

The automotive OEMs are really bad at monetizing this data. How much they make is not how much could be made if the same data was in the hands of more capable entities.

Car business is ruthless, any profit margin is squeezed as much as possible. The reason the infotainment performance is bad in a lot of cars is cost-cutting on the chips used.

Procurement is expected to find ways % in cut costs continuously, every year, forever. Although data-gathering and selling is not part of procurement it is not surprising if car companies are exploring this.

That's what really gets me. Wasting an hour of my time is worth a few cents of advertising to instagram. That's how little my time is really worth.

Surely it costs more than that to run the internet connection as well. I know they choose to do that for other features and probably get good network deals, but the cost is tangible and I would be surprised if it worked out long term.

oh god yes... but I am carrying my self chosen surveillance device with me every single time I enter a car.

For that they would need to market it as a rolling spyware

Per-car prices (Hyundai 61 cents, Honda 26 cents): Source: Wyden-Markey Senate letter to FTC, July 2024. https://www.motor1.com/news/728428/automakers-sold-data-chea... https://therecord.media/markey-wyden-ask-ftc-to-probe-car-co...

GM $20M revenue / $12.75M California fine: Official CA AG press release, May 8, 2026. https://oag.ca.gov/news/press-releases/when-it-comes-data-pr...

Yes they do, and hedge funds buy it so they have consumer spending data before the rest of the market does.

Your bank is very likely doing just that. They even send you a notice about it every year.

You sure about that? Visa/Mastercars certainly are selling at least aggregated data if not more.

Indeed. It started with intercepting letters and couriers, then storing phone calls, radio communications, operating labs to build DNA databases from blood samples, and now large-scale data collection for AI.

Archives tie Epstein and Maxwell individually to various companies in those areas, and a truckload of familiar family names show up along them. My assessment is that people like Thiel and Musk are not self-made, they are intelligence nepo children leveraging aristocratic/colonial offshore wealth of their families.

What is better than being rich and above the law due to your role in intelligence?

This was literally in the Palantir manifesto posted a couple months ago. Karp called for more surveillance of the general population, but also more privacy for the tech billionaires and government officials.

Yes, we also need laws against dark patterns.

As you mentioned, electric bicycles flatten terrains (so do wide gear ranges), and jackets neutralize climate. There seriously isn't anywhere that is inappropriate to cycle. The only major limiting factor for people feeling comfortable biking everywhere is the threat of violence due to people driving cars.

Are you sure? Motorcycles already have computers, it isn't a stretch to think they could broadcast data about you. Maybe they are a decade behind cars in doing this, but I doubt it is anything else.

Bicycles don't have enough power to spare to broadcast data. (but my ebike could and I wouldn't notice the difference)

To be fair, many of the newer cars make it more difficult/permanent because they barely built in and not connected via a bridge/wire.

It will be model and year specific. Mine happened to have a second board connected by a bridge.

I can't imagine it's designed to not log unless it had a live network connection.

You should use ForScan and disable the telemetry completely

You do understand that cars are designed to be in situations where they don't have network access for some time? parking underground and stuff?

I've got a couple older cars (2010, 2003), but the only new one I'm excited about - the only actually new car I've ever considered buying - is the Slate truck:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5_G4OfXTlvs

It has an LCD for the gauges and backup camera, but no modem and no surveillance tech. Bring your own phone/tablet if you want navigation or audio.

Setting the climate control remotely is handy, and it needs its own modem to do that.

This might make up for its lack of CarPlay for me.

Apple expends tremendous technical resources on privacy. It truly is a shame they killed Titan. (As a consumer. As a shareholder thank god.)

Sadly I can imagine car manufacturers using dark patterns to make the options really annoying, just like they do with cookies.

You’ll get some shit like one big “agree to all” button and 200 small opt-out buttons that reset weekly.

Yeah agreed, the data itself I don't have an issue with at all and this kind of info is stored on the vehicle. 1) We should have easy access to it. 2) Why is it instantly uploaded to some cloud, what I haven't done is tried to review how the data is used.

They won't be. The newer classics still have a lot of poor people driving them and so they don't date. The older ones so few exists (and most are only used in parades or Sunday drives) and so it isn't worth the bother - it wouldn't make a difference and would make the few people who have them mad.

Unless we see a great push in good public transit such that most people choose not to drive. However that won't happen: Republicans hate transit, and Democrats like transit for non-transportation reasons.

Thank you. I was missing that info because I do not get that banner, currently surfing that site from the EU without any login.

Visiting the same URL on the .co.uk version gives me a multi-article scroller with different layout and links (including a "What is BBC Future?"), but no trace of that banner. Guessing that you're in the UK from your comment history, my best guess is that they decide whether to serve that banner via geofencing.

They had to calculate jump fast to join the fleet and the only way was to break the taboo - connecting the computers.

Cylons seized the opportunity and despite of the software firewall they managed to periodically disturb this network. In the end all computers were disconnected. IIRC Gaeta later had to wipe drives and install operating systems again, from these fancy octagonal "cds".

Found the clip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6CkDyc1TLrQ

And everybody circulating virus for PCs and other systems in the 80s and 90s.

I wonder if there was a floppy disk virus for CP/M in the 70s.

Surely there's a parallel EPROM somewhere in there you can bake with a UV light and program.

> Is the idea that if a Cylon gets on the ship, they can access the CIC from the thermostat in the bathroom?

Yeah, it was intended to limit lateral movement from compromised systems.

When Cariad had a data leak, they were really quick to point out that no payment information had been leaked. That really shows how little they understand about PII. Screw the payment information, I'll just cancelled that card and get any abused funds refunded by my bank, that's not neither my problem nor my concern.

For some strange reason most companies do not understand the inherent danger of having e.g. location data and behavioural patterns leaked. That's much much worse than you stupid debit card number.

There is a very clear definition of PII so I don’t see this being a problem

GDPR is useful because it defines what must be protected (or avoided). It’s straightforward to do the right thing as a company.

To make it stricter or pack a bigger punch, there needs to be stronger mandate for such legislation. And we live in interesting times… wars, previously democratic allies disintegrating, useless right wing or russia-aligned governments and MEPs, etc…

So yeah, could be better but all you and I can do is talk to our MEPs, help inform people outside tech, vote this way and hope enough people share the concerns

No, you are putting words in my mouth. I'm saying that you can be upset or paranoid about cars doing whatever. But you are ignoring the reality that this is already happening on your phone right now and it doesn't really materially change anything in the level of spying that was already possible.

Surveillance technology is very real and has been for decades. This article naively portrays this as some scandalous escalation when in reality it's a very incremental thing that delivers very new relevant capability to those doing the actual spying. A car is just a phone with wheels. You have probably have one in your pocket.

> Every bit of surveillance should be prevented

Good luck with that. I don't see a grand strategy to make that happen here. Just click bait headlines and people reacting to those.