Perfectly legal for cars to harvest your texts, call logs::Just because they store messages in a way owners can’t access doesn’t mean it’s a privacy violation, US court rules
I think this is another case where the courts cannot proscribe laws. I’m very disappointed in this ruling, but judges only interpret existing laws. The laws need to be updated.
We need data privacy laws.
That cannot happen until the dinosaurs in power vacate the positions. Hopefully they are not replaced with new corrupt twats. D & R, they are an embarrassment and do not represent the regular citizen.
Hopefully they are not replaced with new corrupt twats.
Ron Howard narrator voice: “they were”
Vote with your money. Apparently, people WANT to have their data harvested. Which goes for anything. Just look at how many people are still using Chrome rather than Brave or Firefox. Or Gmail, Gdrive rather than Protonmail/drive.
Brave is shady as hell. Use open source firefox builds if possible.
If voting with your money is a valid way for people to collectively decide right and wrong, does that mean people with more money get more votes?
Does that mean the people with the most money get the most votes?
If that’s all true, does that mean if someone has way more money than everyone else, they get to decide what’s right and wrong?
If that’s all true, does that mean if someone has way more money than everyone else, they get to decide what’s right and wrong?
That’s indeed the mechanism that is used to get to the situation we are in.
Money, based on quantity, is worthless to us filthy commoners. But it’s fundamentally a representation of your time and attention; the only currency that matters.
Laws will not help to solve anything. Not only is it supposed to represent the same collective you just described as making bad decisions, they are administered by government, which in turn is a mechanism for business to advance.
Even chickenfeed laws to “better privacy” when corporation like Google gets out of hand won’t help in the long term.
The ONLY solution is proper education. Not in government schools (which produces mindless consumers), but by spreading this information yourself.
And nobody said it’s going to be easy when you’re up against the limitless money press big business has access to.
cough, cough Librewolf
Cuz Firefox is a snitch too.
In what way is Firefox a snitch?
Sends all your traffic to google.
Source?
bro are you trying to crash the stock market
We’ll have to fight for them since our courts have been loaded with judges who crave industrialist dick.
However the car companies are glad to abuse their power and sell your data to law enforcement and insurance companies.
If were diligant and can highlight specific examples about how this policy destroys lives, we might get the right to install our own software into our cars as well as improving right to repair.
Another reason to resort to an older shitbox without these “smart” features. Most of them have a modem always calling back home and even if you remove the fuse giving it power it’ll just put the car in limp mode or throw big error messages and yell at you to see the dealer.
I grow tired of this technological dystopia
Any video of this?
I can’t find one specifically about it, all results I find are abount people having trouble connecting their phones.
I remember reading it in a thread here about Mozilla’s privacy finding on car companies but don’t know if it was here in this Technology thread or another instance. Was somewhere in the comments.
The thumbnail shows Apple CarPlay, but in my limited understanding of all this, the car wouldn’t have access to anything in that ecosystem. Situation still sucks though, but anyone know of my understanding is right? I heard it described as the car screen is just a glorified monitor for the phone.
You are correct, but it is also the most recognisable In Car Entertainment interface. If they used a stock photo of Android Auto, it would not be recognised. If they used a stock photo of MBUX or BMW iDrive or any of the hundreds of In Car Entertainment interfaces, they wouldn’t be recognised either.
Also, Apple-bashing is the most effective clickbait, especially when it comes to violating privacy. By inferring that CarPlay was responsible for exploiting privacy, it attracts Apple Apologists, Android Apologists, both ignorant and educated technologists and the general public, especially after the amount of effort Apple put into protecting user privacy.
Any sauce to back up your words?
Straight from the horses mouth:
https://www.apple.com/legal/privacy/en-ww/
Apple has a privacy policy that is not only easy to understand, but easily organised and with links to more details/etc - often small privacy features have entire white-papers published explaining how they work in detail. And all of it is thoroughly reviewed by third parties and Apple would be screwed (especially in countries that are not the USA) if they lied in their privacy policy.
The key takeaway, though, is this (not my words - copied verbatim from the privacy policy):
You are not required to provide the personal data that we have requested.
The key is Apple always requests access to your data. And, you can simply say no when they ask.
That might mean a feature won’t be available - for example, if I leave my phone at a party… I’ll get a message on my watch alerting me to go back and get it within a minute or so of leaving. That feature requires allowing your devices to track your location. I’m willing to do that, in part because Apple goes to extra lengths to hide the identity of the people they are tracking, but if you’re not then fine with it, then don’t enable the feature. It’s disabled by default.
CarPlay is essentially a HDMI connection. Your car doesn’t get anything except a raw video signal and Apple forces car manufacturers to have their systems audited by a trusted third party which, among other things, will check to make sure the car isn’t doing anything else with the data (such as OCR on the video signal).
When you use CarPlay - it’s your phone that has your texts, contacts, call log, etc. The car doesn’t get any of that. You phone does.
And if you don’t want your phone to know where you are, it’s disabled by default. You don’t have to do turn by turn navigation in CarPlay - turn by turn is disabled by default (because enabling it requires tracking you) and you can just listen to podcasts and you can use a third party podcast app if you don’t want apple to know what podcasts you listen to.
Regarding Apple and privacy? It’s well documented. Bing it. If you don’t want to, you didn’t feel like knowing more lol.
Except you made the claim, the burden of proof is on you. From my research, Apple doesn’t give a shit about your privacy. They care just enough to pretend they do
But it’s well documented! Just like they chose not to undo the encryption over text messages looking for child porn.
Totally. They totally didn’t, and totally won’t start spying on you now.
You have “done your own research”. It would be interesting to see your list of unverified anecdotes.
My list of unverified anecdotes shows that Apple have engineered privacy into the core of all their systems, almost to a fault.
If you don’t have backups of your data and have not disabled their default security features, you have no chance of restoring your data in the case of device failure. If you die and don’t give permission for your loved ones to access your data, that data is lost.
https://www.apple.com/legal/privacy/en-ww/
Here, we can be on the same page. No unverified anecdotes. Reading through this, I stand by my claim. Apple goes out of its way to say they care about your privacy, even in their privacy agreement over and over again. But the terms they list are pretty much exactly what you’ll find in any legal document from any corporation that handles your data. It’s up to them what they do with it, and they said it themselves.
No. It’s made up rambling.
Windows are expensive and bricks are cheap.
Eli5 me pls. The story from the article is based in the land of the free and fake materialism. Does that mean these manufacture cant do that in the rest of the world yet? Or is it exclusively the go to country for testing out ways to further exploit money out of… well, one of the significantly poorest (financial inequality) poputional in the world (cost of living credit debt).
Edit: fixed grammar, some words changed/added/replace. Was sounding rude and only realized that after rereading much later.
This lawsuit was based on a US-only privacy law so it says nothing about what they can do in other countries. Maybe they are, maybe they aren’t. I assume and hope most other nations actually protect their citizens from stuff like this, but cannot say based on this.
If you read the terms and conditions on manufactures websites you’ll notice that in the US based sites they will mention merely being a passenger is consent for harvesting your data, though in other countries terms and conditions these crazy privacy clauses are not present. In the end the hardware is usually the same so I don’t trust that it can’t happen elsewhere but it’d be nice if governments made laws for the good of the people and not for corporate greed. EU seems to be doing things right but others aren’t able to easily follow their lead.
Much obliged for your clarification. I understand this better now.
Oh, hey! Look it this car! It was made in 1984.
Good thing my car’s too old for this to apply
thanks
This is the best summary I could come up with:
In response to five class-action lawsuits, a Washington appeals court has decided that Honda and several other automakers did nothing wrong by storing text messages and call records from connected smartphones.
Honda, Toyota, Volkswagen, and General Motors were all facing charges in separate but related class-action suits that all claimed they violated Washington state privacy laws.
“To succeed at the pleading stage of a WPA claim, a plaintiff must allege an injury to ‘his or her business, his or her person, or his or her reputation,’” the judges ruled.
In other words, it’s A-OK for your car to “automatically and without authorization, instantaneously intercept, record, download, store, and [be] capable of transmitting” text messages and call logs since the privacy violation is potential, but the injury not necessarily actual.
Per the first amended complaint [PDF] filed in the Honda case, Honda infotainment systems in vehicles manufactured from 2014 onward “store each intercepted, recorded, and downloaded copy of text messages in non-temporary computer memory in such a manner that the vehicle owner cannot access it or delete it,” plaintiffs argued.
Plaintiffs accusing Honda of WPA violations pointed to Maryland-based Berla Corporation, which manufactures equipment “capable of extracting stored text messages from infotainment systems” as a reason for owners to consider the data harvesting a privacy concern.
The original article contains 532 words, the summary contains 215 words. Saved 60%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
