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.
Reminder that people with ADHD are regularly falsely flagged as not paying attention by eye tracking software. This camera shit is not only creepy and invasive. It likely doesn’t work well and has an ableist bias.
Oh it turns out the rapid scanning of what’s in front of me to look out for and avoid threats while heavily relying on sensing changes in my peripheral vision i.e. to keep distance with the car in front of me isn’t just a weird thing that I do because I’m built different, it’s an ADHD thing (i’d also do this when working retail doing online orders to run around the store and not run into people)
maybe i really do have adhd and that time i was like “hey doctor i can’t read so good no more” and he threw adderall at me he wasn’t being medically irresponsible and my adhd was just so apparent that’s all it took
Wait really? My work truck uses Samsara, and it alerts me for not paying attention while I’m looking at the road at least once a week.