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.

  • Someone8765210932@lemmy.world
    36·
    9 hours ago

    Wasn’t there some news a while ago that talked about how bad car companies handle user data?

    Mozilla’s latest edition of *Privacy Not Included reveals how 25 major car brands collect and share deeply personal data, including sexual activity, facial expressions, and genetic and health information

    […]Says Jen Caltrider, *PNI Program Director: “Many people think of their car as a private space — somewhere to call your doctor, have a personal conversation with your kid on the way to school, cry your eyes out over a break-up, or drive places you might not want the world to know about. But that perception no longer matches reality. All new cars today are privacy nightmares on wheels that collect huge amounts of personal information."[…] (source)

    Not sure if this was the one I was thinking about. There was also this revelation made by the German CCC (Chaos computer club, pretty famous) about Volkswagen and some leaked GPS data. Here is an English article about it. (There is also the German CCC video, but the English doesn’t sound very good. It includes an interesting part where they show examples of how bad this GPS leak actually is. E.g. finding the cars of catering companies for important people.)

    Criminals or spies could potentially use such data to create a detailed movement profile of the car owners. For foreign intelligence agencies, for example, it may be of interest to see whose cars are parked daily between 8 a.m. and 5 p.m. near buildings belonging to the Bundesnachrichtendienst, Germany’s foreign intelligence service. Or those which are driven regularly to the U.S. Air Force base in Ramstein. The Cariad data provided such information.

    Btw. Any person who in the year 2026 response to privacy concerns with “I have nothing to hide” is a certified moron and shouldn’t be trusted with anything. They also have so little imagination that it should make everyone sad.

    • teyrnon@sh.itjust.works
      5·
      6 hours ago

      Also, police can get your car data without a warrant in the US as I understand it, and if you link your car to your phone, they can get into your phone without one, with no indication to you that they accessed it. Basically everything, phone calls, messages, contacts, etc.

      That may mean hackers could get into that backdoor they left open for the police too I would think.

      The enshitified search is not giving me the article despite finding it multiple times just this year, but I read it in the Intercept a couple of years ago or something.

    • OrgunDonor@lemmy.worldEnglish
      4·
      6 hours ago

      I don’t think it is fair to call them morons, ignorant definitely though. I imagine that so many of these people don’t understand or know, how invasive a modern car is. And it is probably something they have never thought about or looked into.

      Ignorance is bad, but can be fixed. Morons I don’t think can really be taught, and would probably ignore the evidence of how bad it is.

      • Someone8765210932@lemmy.worldEnglish
        2·
        5 hours ago

        The reason for the insult is less about not knowing how invasive modern cars are and more about the often repeated “I have nothing to hide” comment. It just shows how little they think these kinds of situations through. Unless they are very young, it also shows that any previous privacy related discussion went right by them, or they also answered the same way back than as well.