this post was submitted on 12 Nov 2023
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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

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[–] rockSlayer 73 points 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.

[–] TenderfootGungi 66 points 1 year ago (4 children)

We need data privacy laws.

[–] grayman 16 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

Hopefully they are not replaced with new corrupt twats.

Ron Howard narrator voice: "they were"

[–] Tranquilizer 9 points 1 year ago (3 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 year ago

Brave is shady as hell. Use open source firefox builds if possible.

[–] NAXLAB 12 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

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?

[–] Tranquilizer 1 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] [email protected] -5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

cough, cough Librewolf

Cuz Firefox is a snitch too.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

In what way is Firefox a snitch?

[–] [email protected] -1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Sends all your traffic to google.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago
[–] nutsack 8 points 1 year ago

bro are you trying to crash the stock market

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] BigDaddySlim 49 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)
[–] BigDaddySlim 3 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] haulyard 34 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[–] Mango 16 points 1 year ago

Windows are expensive and bricks are cheap.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago

Oh, hey! Look it this car! It was made in 1984.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Good thing my car's too old for this to apply

[–] nutsack -1 points 1 year ago
[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] Khanzarate 14 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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.

[–] itsathursday 5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Much obliged for your clarification. I understand this better now.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

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.


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