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.
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.
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.
> 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.
I might be in favor of such a requirement if it only applied to larger organizations. Otherwise regular people would have to hire lawyers all the time even to write up a simple contract. If a company employs more than 500 people or makes more than $10m per year in revenue its employment contracts must not contain unenforceable sections, for example.
Even then I might want to keep the scope narrowly to employment contracts. A contract between two large companies would have wider implications if it could be invalidated completely.
My understanding is that contract law is nuanced and it is important for the functioning of society that small mistakes can be fixed without major repercussions, but I am in favor or making sure large employers aren’t misleading employees.
> I might be in favor of such a requirement if it only applied to larger organizations. Otherwise regular people would have to hire lawyers all the time even to write up a simple contract. If a company employs more than 500 people or makes more than $10m per year in revenue its employment contracts must not contain unenforceable sections, for example.
I presume, perhaps incorrectly, that an industry would spring up around "standardized contracts" offered for very cheap/free. Seems like something Intuit might offer for free as a hook to get you on the platform.
Individuals would also likely use standardized contracts when dealing with other individuals, ideally. I would be okay with exempting them, but I really do think there benefits to centralizing on some standardized contracts. We could do something like what GitHub does when you look at licenses and it tells you what the license grants and denies. You could probably get specific case law for questions, because there are a lot of cases using the exact same contract.
I think it's typically (though not always) an anti-pattern for two individuals to write their own contract. I do not want my landscaper to write his own contract, which I then have to make sure I understand correctly. I'd much rather get "Standardized Lawn Care Contract V2 /w Owner Liability Option" and be able to find an infographic that summarizes who has what responsibility, up to what amounts, etc, etc.
> Even then I might want to keep the scope narrowly to employment contracts. A contract between two large companies would have wider implications if it could be invalidated completely.
I specifically limited it to contracts between individuals because I think having lawyers at-hand is a fair expectation of companies. They have enough resources to find out what's enforceable and what isn't, and B2B contracts would typically be for amounts where hiring a lawyer doesn't erase all the gain from the transaction.
You find out your contract has an invalid clause. What now? Contract null and void and you pay back all the wages received? Or just stop being employed from that moment forward?
Apologies, I never thought you were disingenuous, it's just a busy time of year :)
In that circumstance, if both parties are still happy with the terms they would presumably sign a new contract minus the unenforceable terms.
If the company opts not to create a new contract, I would say it counts as firing the person without cause.
It is an interesting question though, especially as it pertains to future incentives. Something like the person having earned a bonus that hasn't been paid out yet, the contract is found invalid so the bonus part is scratched out.
Perhaps the individual deserves a choice in that case, whether to proceed without a contract or under the terms minus the unenforceable parts, or maybe something more punitive to the company like the individual keeping any rights they got and the company losing theirs.
I still think it's a workable idea, but you do raise an interesting point that's probably worth adjusting my idea around.
You also rely on many people being able to hide things if you want a pleasant society - journalists, whistleblowers, activists, anyone doing politically sensitive work (e.g. Tor or Signal developers, labor organizers, even small businesses trying to enter established markets) that could be destroyed by a smear campaign.
Last but not least, any new political party can be crushed by information asymmetry - if every minor indiscretion of their members is outed, while the ruling parties can keep their own sins hidden, thanks to a friendly intelligence apparatus, no new party will ever upset the status quo. It also means the old parties will be compelled to remain friendly with said intelligence apparatus (wonder why section 702 of FISA got extended again [1]?)
In other words, even if you personally somehow go your entire life without having to hide a single thing, unless others can hide things, you will one day wake-up under tyranny.
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.
> 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.
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.
"I have nothing to hide" is a horrible statement and I wish people would stop using it as a defense for why they allow invasions of privacy and breaches of personal rights. Saying you have nothing to hide isn't an absolution of any perceived guilt, it's a forfeit of your personage and control.
For example, you drive the same way anybody else does on the road, you "have nothing to hide" in that sense, but you still wouldn't want your insurance getting up to the minute data on where you're driving and how because that places the control of your finances in their hands. You cook your breakfast the same way everyone else does, you have "nothing to hide" in that case, but you still wouldn't want your neighbours to be able to see a livestream every morning of you cooking without you knowing.
Honestly, the "I have nothing to hide" line is flawed in itself, regardless of whether you actually do or not. With enough data about someone, a narrative can be built that they are guilty of something. And even if it is finally determined that they did nothing wrong, it is a massive waste of time and energy to prove that. See "railroading", the US Law Enforcement's greatest national past time.
AND: data on someone provides a the means to coerce them in hard to identify ways.
Would you reveal everything about your financial, work and personal lives to someone you were in a business negotiation with? Just because they wouldn't do anything "illegal" with it?
Information about each of us is leverage. Even when used legally, it gives away our power over our lives to others, to use against us.
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.
Imagine bricking a Tesla with a shitty jail break from the internet. 99.99% of owners will not do that. Hell I don't even mess with the speed controller on my ebike. If there were standards that auto's had to adhere to then maybe. but until then messing with engine management on computerized cars is going to be a no go. Especially if you f--k things up and put yourself or others in mortal danger.
My dad is a car guy from way back, and laments today where “the computer fails in a new car and that’s it.” Entirely true. What he doesn’t see is the wonderful counterbalance we’ve had with open source in traditional computing against this proprietary nightmare hell now plaguing cars.
I’ve tried to tell him that a computer in the car should be a diagnostic asset, completely usable with open source tools. Imagine seeing the timing and dwell on an old car in curves on the screen rather than using a timing light (as delightful an analog solution that is) and dwell meter. Instead, computers have been used by auto manufacturers as a lock in tool—“check engine,” bring to dealer.
> counterbalance we’ve had with open source in traditional computing
Created by massive activism, unpaid labour of millions of passionate people who otherwise are very expensive and have a very well paying job.
This is not a practical and sustainable solution for most things. In fact it does not work at in when we have to deal with embedded software even in something as simple and cheap as a phone, TV or a smart coffee machine, let alone a car.
We need a bigger stick, legislative solution with serious criminal sanctions. Misusing user's data should be treated like a bank misusing customer money - serious business that must be audited.
Removing the SIM card or a specific fuse from the car is a strategy that has worked well for me. On a lot of these "connected" cars, they use a pretty ordinary cellular data connection. Break that connection and you break the data leak.
Bonus points for spoofing GPS to show the car in Antarctica or something like that, so that the trustworthiness in the accuracy of the entire dataset (and thus the commercial value) goes down, instead of just you choosing to opt out.
I don't know that cars have SIM cards that are constantly exchanging information... most of what I have been exposed with what a data dump obtained during (official) service that is then sync'd with the vendor. SIM card would be a pretty flagrant breach of privacy, and they'd have that shit on file instead of having plate-reading cameras at every intersection
Without saying too much; don't expect that to work forever. A requirement for the car to call home is in development, just still a lot of debate on what the consequences are if the car can't reach reach the home server.
If you're concerned with privacy, you probably shouldn't have the same corporation that built the spying apparatus have unsupervised physical access to the car.
Supporting small independent mechanics + right to repair is supporting your ability to protect your own privacy too!
Right, which is why I'm a fan of removing SIM cards and fuses. Wonder if it's possible to remove "black box" logging systems without rendering the car in question inoperable.
My guess is that even if it is possible now, it won't be for much longer.
Freedom, privacy, and full ownership/control are three concepts that are becoming increasingly foreign to young people, it's quite sad.
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.
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.
How did you translate "replace a bunch of internals" to "with a few modifications"? The guys doing "a few mods" are not the same guys "replacing a bunch of internals".
Besides, I wasn't really talking about a typical family car, but rather a handful of platforms like stuff with LS-family, Coyote blocks, R35's, Mk4 Supras, etc. There's variability even between those, but a gen 2 coyote motor will easily take 900+ crank on the stock internals, just need to swap oil pump gear and crank sprocket gear and something to make that power (turbos/supercharger/nitrous/etc). Swap some lower rotating assembly stuff and you're well into the 1XXX range with sufficient boost.
Also, some of the people I'm thinking of are most certainly NOT usng factory engine blocks, but rather aftermarket blocks. Factory blocks are mostly cast aluminum trash, with a few exceptions.
They can, very easily. Nissan's L28, Toyota's 1JZ and 2JZ, and Ford's own modular 4.6 are all well known for such raucous stupidity. If you really want to you can even make GM's Quad 4 push 900HP, as evidenced in the Oldsmobile Aerotech. Boost pressure can make a ton of difference.
We're the exception, not the norm, unfortunately. A vast supermajority of people in the West seem to have absolutely no qualms about having an always-on, always-recording device next to them 24/7 that reports pretty much everything they're thinking to multiple companies that have a lengthy history of voluntarily cooperating with their own shady government, other shady foreign governments, etc. Which sounds completely insane to me, and maybe you too.
Remember the words of former head of the NSA, Michael Hayden, "The U.S. government kills people based on metadata".
For sure, it's an expensive gamble. For me, I took my car from the dealer to the tuner on day 1. We actually found some factory issues like turbo hoses disconnected. Then I replaced a few parts for compatibility and performance and tuned it Stage II. That was 6 years ago and car still runs A1 (and I drive it like I stole it). Never brought it in for servicing.
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.
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.
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.
I don’t think they’re saying anyone is forgetting anything. Rather they’re saying if they turn it in for some specific reason they just don’t bother to turn it off once that reason is past. Which seems insane to me but to each their own.
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).
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...
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.
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).
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.
> ...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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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)."
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Even with Hyundai's idiocy, vehicle thefts last year were lower than they were in 2008[1] and lower than at any time in the 90s or 80s. Decades where being able to track your car with GPS was a sci-fi fantasy.
A lot of the recent fear of crime feels like it's being driven by sensationalist reporting and overstating of the facts. E.g. "crime has doubled" has a very different meaning when you realize we were at record low crime rates just a few years ago.
Letting other people track my location all the time is a very steep price for me to pay for any perceived benefit.
> losing it in a parking garage
I stop for a second and pay attention to where I parked my car. Maybe even take a quick picture of the surroundings with my phone. The "lock chirp" using my key fob usually makes up for the times I'm not quite sure where it is.
> determining whether it's been towed or stolen
Most municipalities where you're likely to be towed have an impound vehicle search website. I'm not going to let other people track me all the time just for a bit more convenience on the extremely rare occasion that my vehicle might be towed or stolen.
> rescue help in case it's in a more remote area during a blizzard
I check the weather and don't drive into remote areas during blizzards. I suppose if you're inclined to do that, you might want someone to track you all the time so they can maybe rescue you when you make those kinds of choices?
> Crime in a lot of places in the United States is so bad right now that being able to track your car is critical infrastructure at this point
If you are unfortunate enough to park a Kia in Seattle or San Francisco, I guess you've got a problem. But tracking my car is more for the benefit of my insurance company in that case.
You have a patchwork of solutions to deal with the lack of tracking. Some people don't like the mental overhead of that patchwork of solutions and would rather have GPS tracking. It's a valid trade off.
It is however typical HN mentality to assume that nobody wants tracking whereas it is a matter of individual choice.
> a very steep price for me
Great. Now have some empathy with people for whom the price isn't steep at all.
> It is however typical HN mentality to assume that nobody wants tracking whereas it is a matter of individual choice.
Indeed. Which is why car manufacturers should make it easy for individual drivers to disable tracking in a way that can't be remotely reenabled by car companies.
It seems this is a case of too much tech for some people. Disabling most vehicle tracking is easy. It's usually a matter of disconnecting a wire/fuse/antenna/bridge. The criminals can easily learn it and defeat it, while many drivers don't know how to, or just don't care too until they are a victim.
My friend has a 2020 I-PACE sitting in his garage and wants to disable remote tracking. Exactly which wire, fuse, antenna, or bridge should he disconnect in order to do that without negatively impacting any other functionality of the vehicle? What tools will he need to do it? How long will it take him? What damage might he cause to his car if he makes a mistake because he's never done this before? How will this modification affect his warranty?
That's a bit of a cherry picked example since most cars are not expensive imports.
The usual way to get that info is to go to the model specific forum (very common for common vehicles). If there are no existing instructions, a shop manual is hugely helpful.
I agree that it should be an individual choice. Right now it's basically quietly defaulted to on. So not much of a choice currently.
I do question your argument about some people not being able to find thwir car. Do people who lack the mental faculty to find where they parked simultaneously have the mental faculties required to safely operate the vehicle?
Remembering to do the right things isn’t possible for everyone. So you’re kind of blaming the victim here.
I’ll always have the parking garage problem due to poor memory. Sometimes I remember that I take a picture but my brain can’t remember to do that reliably. Building habits is nearly impossible for me. I even have a documented disability saying this happens, so it’s not for lack of trying.
My solution to solving this problem is to not require habits but to preemptively account for my blind spots. AirTags have been life changing for me.
>The "lock chirp" using my key fob usually makes up for the times I'm not quite sure where it is.
Ah, yes, the "letting people who don't care know I'm now home or letting everyone know that I'm walking away from my unattended vehicle (so robbers better not touch it)" alert everyone loves.
Do you do the thing where you hit it a bunch of times to blast the horn and show off that 90s tech because you need people to see how cool you are?
> Do you do the thing where you hit it a bunch of times to blast the horn and show off that 90s tech because you need people to see how cool you are?
Heh, I do this but it's because depressing the button on my remote doesn't guarantee that the alarm will arm. The sound of the chirp is key to whatever mode I put it in. I could also just use my phone, but the app is stupidly slow and I kind of hate that my car has an app. I'd much prefer the equivalent of dance dance revolution on a 90s key fob than accept all the things that come with an app.
I sort of like I can lock my newish car silently by just touching the door handle while still having the usual fob functions if I’m not sure exactly where my car is.
> Do you do the thing where you hit it a bunch of times to blast the horn and show off that 90s tech because you need people to see how cool you are?
This line was unwarranted. What part of steelframe's response suggested that steelframe likes letting other people hear the parked car's location, never mind honking?
> 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.
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.
Property theft has been on the decline while the use of device tracking technologies, among other simple deterrents and measures, have simultaneously been increasing. Correlation?
Considering the lack of interest by police in following stolen tracked vehicles and arresting car thiefs, I'm not so sure that the tech is a significant factor in crime reduction.
> … a relationship you should probably end immediately if they are doing this …
> … tiny handful of creepy boyfriends …
Way to downplay the very serious issue of domestic abuse and coercive control.
“However, at Refuge we’re keenly aware that technology is often used by perpetrators of domestic abuse to further isolate, intimidate and stalk their partners from their support networks, making it even more difficult for women to escape their abusers“ [1]
There are legitimate uses for tracking, but it's a pretty reasonable ask for companies to mitigate the illegitimate uses and respect consent about the collection to begin with.
I've seen that internal data before. It's profoundly creepy and not something I'm okay with the manufacturer having on my family, but I can't meaningfully opt us out of.
I don't equate the desire to have the option to not be tracked with 'handing criminals another theft tool', and I also certainly don't consider having my movements monitored to be 'critical infrastructure'. These sentiments are just acquiescence to mass surveillance for the sake of property control.
Both the tracking described in the article and the usb vulnerability are symptoms of an industry that has irresponsibly deployed potentially dangerous technology.
"Official" FBI stats only go through 2019 but the rates match so I have no reason to believe that the graph showing a marked and steady decline in property crime rates decreasing is incorrect. Property crime rates have decreased every single year for two decades and look to be approximately half what they were 20 years ago.
Every single year people regurgitate this "crime is so bad right now!!1" meme that never seems to die and is always wrong. Crime is decreasing, it has been decreasing in almost every geographic area in almost every category. If you're younger than Gen X this has been happening for most of your entire life. We live in one of the safest times in human history, most of us reading this live in one of the safest countries in the world, and Kias being easy to steal or some idiotic DAs refusing to prosecute petty thefts out of some misplaced sense of social justice does not change reality.
We don't have statistics on the number of crimes committed. We have FBI statistics which are statistics on the number of crimes that local law enforcement agencies reported to the FBI. Not all crimes are reported to law enforcement, not all law enforcement agencies report to the FBI, and not all crimes reported to law enforcement agencies that do report to the FBI are included in their reports.
We also have surveys of the public asking if they have been a victim of crime, for example the National Crime Victimization Survey.
According to the FBI statistics, crime is down recently, according to the victimization survey, crime is up recently (both say that crime is down since the 1990's). According to the victimization survey, the majority of crimes are not reported to law enforcement.
"The violent victimization rate increased from 16.5 victimizations per 1,000 persons in 2021 to 23.5 per 1,000 in 2022.
From 1993 to 2022, the overall rate of violent victimization declined from 79.8 to 23.5 victimizations per 1,000 persons age 12 or older.
In 2022, about 2 in 5 (42%) violent victimizations were reported to police.
Motor vehicle theft victimization increased from a rate of 4.3 victimizations per 1,000 households in 2021 to 5.5 per 1,000 in 2022."
So whether you believe crime is up or down is going to depend on what data you choose to believe. In the victimization survey data, crime is slightly down recently in rural areas, about the same in suburban areas, and up by a large amount in urban areas.
According to my security cameras, crime in my neighborhood is down this year, but still at a much higher level than 2019.
This is about property crime, not violent crime, so conflating the two is probably not particularly useful, but I can see why you chose that as it shows your point a little easier.
But let's look at property crime at https://ncvs.bjs.ojp.gov/quick-graphics#quickgraphicstop: Down almost every year, and with the exception of 2010-2012 every year it increased it decreased the following year. The trend is clearly down every year with the occasional increase for one year.
According to the victimization survey, "Households in the United States experienced 13.4 million property victimizations in 2022, up from 11.7 million in 2021".
Similar to the violent crime statistics, it was flat in rural and suburban areas, up in urban areas.
I don’t know about anywhere else, but in 2020 the Seattle PD just flat out stopped doing their jobs. They had been dragging their feet for years but now they literally won’t do anything. I’ve called the cops for a violent crime in progress, requested that they contact me, and then find out later that the cop assigned had closed my report and had already contacted me and I said everything was fine now. lol.
The effective result of that is skyrocketing crime without skyrocketing crime reports. What use is a crime report if the police won’t do anything about it?
if you want to be a PITA, FOIA request the information related to the report, where they said they contacted you, which should have times/dates/etc and you ought be able to easily prove there was no contact. I'm not sure right now what you can do with that information, but perhaps the Washington State Police might care?
It's against the law to put false information on a police report. At least if you're just a scrunchie citizen.
>most of us reading this live in one of the safest countries in the world
with many of that group living in some of the most high crime cities in the country - SF, Seattle, Portland, Austin, Denver, NYC, Chicago, Boston, LA, etc.
I wonder what Baltimore, St Louis, New Orleans, Detroit, and Cleveland (and maybe Chicago?) have in common that SF, Seattle, Portland, Austin, Denver, NYC, Boston, and LA don't. There has to be some hidden third variable besides a weak correlation between crime levels and how far west a city is within the US, no?
Looking at the states,
MD, MO, LA, MI, OH v.s.
CA, WA, OR, TX, CO, NY, MA
I was thinking maybe guns but then why would TX and CO (relatively relaxed on guns) be in the lower category?
Then I wondered if maybe it's relating to the housing-challenged (more property crime maybe?), but I can't imagine that climates like those of Detroit and Chicago, with subzero temps and tons of snow in the winter, are very unhospitable to the unsheltered, probably even fatal to those who can't access shelter.
Anyone else have any ideas? I'm stumped here. I know crime is a complex social issue but it seems like there's some weird variable I must be missing.
> I was thinking maybe guns but then why would TX and CO (relatively relaxed on guns) be in the lower category?
There's basically zero correlation between US state gun laws and homicide (or US state gun ownership rate and homicide). I mean like the correlation there is 0.05 or something, quite literally zero. Some of the most lax states (Idaho, New Hampshire) have some of the lowest homicide rates (on par with Europe). Some of the other most lax states (Louisiana, for example) have some of the highest homicide rates. And v. versa for strong gun laws (as far as US can get lol).
Poverty correlates better. Income inequality correlates better. But neither sufficient to explain everything.
Isn't the US poverty line a level of absolute wealth that would put one among the top 10-20% highest income humans on earth? I wonder why such prosperous people are still so compelled to commit elevated levels of crime.
Sure, but people below the poverty line qualify for housing vouchers, food stamps, utility vouchers, public transportation vouchers, taxpayer-provided cellular phones & cellular service, and more.
All of those cities have average or below average reporting of crime, which informs the statistics you're citing from.
But the sum of reported crimes is almost certainly considerably smaller than the sum of all crimes actually occurring.
After all, how many people in SF or Seattle do you think even bother filling out a police report after their car is broken into for the 18th time, when doing so the first 3 times did absolutely nothing?
In most cases the car trackers are trivially simple for criminals to defeat. They really aren't a big detergent. Even if you're using a good aftermarket one, its not a detergent but a recovery tool - if they know about it they can usually disable it.
If you're friend has had their car stolen so many times, what are they doing about it?
Edit: your comment downthread (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).
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.
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.
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.
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?
