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
We need data privacy laws.
Submitted 1 year ago by L4s@lemmy.world [bot] to technology@lemmy.world
https://www.theregister.com/2023/11/09/car_text_harvesting/
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
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.
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 whoever has the most money decides what’s right and wrong?
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?
Windows are expensive and bricks are cheap.
Eli5 me pls. The story from the article is based in the land of the free and stupid. 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 the, well, poorest fake people in the world?
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 passage 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!
rockSlayer@lemmy.world 1 year ago
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.