Hello people, my family recently bought a Renault 5 e-tech. The car itself is great, but there are some aspects that creep me out, especially the driver-facing camera. We didn’t actually know that such a camera existed before we bought the car, it was only mentioned as the car was given to us.
The cameras official purpose is to see, if you are tired and paying attention to the road, by some “AI magic”, I suppose. You can also let it scan your face, so that you automatically get logged into your profile.
I personally think, that that is kinda creepy, especially as there is no visual indication if the camera is currently recording and no official way to disable the camera hardware-wise. When it is being coverd, the car immediately complains about it.
When talking to friends or family about it, I got one of two reactions: equal concern, or “nice feature actually”, “what about the camera on your laptop?”, “you are way too paranoid”, “I have noting to hide; it is only me driving being recorded”.
I have also seen such cameras in other cars, BYD for example.
What do you think, is this creepy or am I too paranoid? Does anyone know where the actual data is processed, on device or on some cloud server? Do you have any experience with such cameras? I couldn’t really find any information about it on the internet.
I always bring up the magic of Scotch’s Magic Tape.
This tape lets most of the light through (useful for dynamic light features) while blurring the image as if out of focus or behind frosted glass. It is also mostly discrete unlike opaque tapes.
The car potentially can refuse to run because can’t validate that the driver is not impaired to drive.
That’s not the car’s responsibility
I mean, cars aren’t sentient so, this should be a given since they can’t have responsibility assigned to them. But here we are.
I mean it is if the government wants it to be. Same as putting the breathalyzers in someone’s car.
I think the US government thinks it is, IIRC there’s an upcoming regulation in 2027 for that
The libertarians are finally starting to make sense.
Libertarians would only care if the industry said they didn’t want it. But manufacturers are all lock step in favor of these regulations.
Exactly. The big manufacturers love stuff like this. The more mandatory features, the harder it is for new car manufacturers to enter the market. Back in the day, guys like Ford started out by selling cars they built out of their garages. Ford was built by starting in a garage and plowing the profits back into the business over decades. But modern cars are just too complex to build that way.
Want the good bits of “libertarianism” with internal consistency and a liberatory framework? Have I got the ideology for you!
Anarchism might be a bit too extreme for my taste
Its not that extreme when you look into it, but I get it. Anarchism has a lot of negative connotations, but It’s fundamentally an acknowledgement that hierarchy is the common thread that connects all oppressive structures (capitalism, racism, patriarchy, homophobia, transphobia, nationalism, the state, etc). As such, if we want to be free from oppression we should be dismantling hierarchies by whatever means necessary, so long as those means are compatible with our ends. This could look like the anarchist of days past, sabotaging factories, killing union busters, and assassinating kings. But it also looks like starting community gardens, running food shares, setting up free stores, tool libraries, and time banks. There’s a million ways to be an anarchist, and very few of them involve bombs
While I oppose all oppressive structures mentioned, how is hierarchy inherently oppressive?
Also, I definitely support serving the community through actions such as those you mentioned.
Yeah that’s the problem, they make just enough sense that you can squint at it and think they’re fine. I have a number of relatively intelligent acquaintances that are full on libertarian without having any idea it’s a political pyramid scheme until you start having them dissect it and explain the parts on who gets to decide what gets pair for.
the locations of the cameras are no published and you’re likely to miss at least one.
For that we still have the Internet. Better nerds than I will find out for each car model where each last camera is located
yes, thankfully; but only for now and even then, they permanently have the advantage in this cat-and-mouse game.