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.
This car also comes with a ChatGPT based AI assistant which has a cursed Microsoft’s Clippy vibe, so it watches, listens to everything. Why would anybody want that?
Ayup that is the question. I’m tryin to figure that out with my friends.
Near as I figure… they just have an ENTIRELY different mindset. It’s like I might have about say a wrench. I buy the wrench. I use the wrench to wrench something. That’s all the thought I ever give to the wrench.
It’s like that for them with these surveilence products. It’s “cool”. Its “shiny”. It’s all Star Trek-y. They give exactly zero thought to their data. It’s a product from a big namebrand they know. They trust it based on that.
I try to get them to see a bigger picture. Iit’s an uphill battle. Endless rationalizations we all know, nothing to hide, I’m not important enough for anyone to care about, I’m not doing anything wrong.
Can’t wait for chatgpt to be discontinued
I was luckily able to disable that one through androids app manager
Yeah the problem is though its still there and nearly invetiably going to remove your ability to disable it at some point if your car is allowed to update.
That, or Privacy Zuckering. Every update, you turn all the options back to “spy on me”. And maybe change all the wording and locations for good measure.
Sure, you can turn them back to “do not spy on me you assholes”. But 3 months later, new update… bam! Everything reset! Or new ones intruduced you don’t know anything about and you got to pray you notice those.
That way, the co can continue to claim in court, “we give customers options to manage their own privacy”. The fuck you do…