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’ve been covering my laptop user facing cameras with something since I first got a laptop with one a long time ago. The phone one I haven’t though, although others do scratch the lens and just use the outward one. Idk how to cover the phone one without blocking part of the screen.
This is one of the things I love about my Thinkpad. It has a little sliding cover for the camera.
My case has a sliding cover for the outside one.
Paint marker? Paint?
I need something I can remove and put back as needed, although I rarely ever use it anyway maybe I should just paint it. The screen actually just got fucked and I need a new phone and am getting on graphene so hopefully it’s a little less of a concern if I learn the security aspects of all this in this crash course I will be taking. Hopefully can switch laptop to linux next.