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this post was submitted on 07 Jul 2026
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Chad EU does based things as always.
For all the sceptics: How would that data be send and where it would be storen and for what purpose?
1080p stream in acceptable bitrate is around 1MB/s. Assuming average driver drives 1 hour daily, that is 4GB/day/car, or more than 1TB/year/car. VW group sells around 4 millions cars per year, so assuming 10 years lifespan, that's (4 million times 10 times 1TB) 40 Exabytes of data you need to store per year. For context, that's 2% of total storage market capacity.
Okay, but that's absurd, nobody is going to store that data, I hear you say.
Let's assume no data is stored on servers. Instead, all that data is just send to them, so they can do whatever malicious shit is on agenda this week.
Maintaing 1MB/s stream is not a trivial task, especially if you want to do that for free. I might've slightly underestimated the core of the problem, it's completely impossible to do that. One may argue that they could create new infrastructure or pay existing cellular networks, but that's an absurdly expensive task.
And at last: Why would car manufacturers even consider doing that? What is the purpose?
Why would they send all the footage and not just clips on demand? Why would they constantly record or monitor all cars, rather than just ones of special interest? Why would they need a 1080p stream when for a use case like this a much lower resolution at a fraction of the bitrate will be more than sufficient?
My guy have you not heard of 4G and 5G?
AI training data, or because the government clandestinely told them to.
This data would be nearly worthless for AI training, since it's random and repetitive. You would need to record significant portion of time to avoid model poisoning. Who would be reviewing that data?
Why would government want that data?
Occam's razor: The purpose of this law is exactly what lawmakers say it is.
So you think they are hiding an undetectable iPhone in your car for free?
Hiding? Modern vehicles straight up have cell modems and advertise it, look up Toyota Connected Services for example.
They aren't giving you an eSim for free.
for the amount of money they would profit just from selling that data to insurance companies is enough to cover a fucking esim.
also, i forgot that cars are free these days and not thousands of dollars.
Are you saying they have a secret program where they illegally take your data and sell it to insurance companies?
i am suggesting that doing so would be profitable.
i don't believe this would be illegal.
Selling tracking data from your customers without disclosing it would absolutely be illegal.
You'd go to jail if you did that in Europe, likely face a huge fine in certain US states too.
They do disclose it, it's part of the paperwork when you purchase the vehicle.
https://support.toyota.com/s/article/Toyota-Insurance?language=en_US
Of course the dealers make it very easy to "opt-in" by accident.
The fact that it's out in the open, literally on the car manufacturer sites, but people still deny this behavior, is a grim omen.
lol, you think the executives would go to jail? or the engineers?
guess what was illegal before the snowden leaks, guess what's legal now.
i don't want to suggest i know the specifics of the law, especially in countries i don't even live in, but to think it's an impossibility is pretty bewildering to me.
edit: also they disclose that shit, just in a very vague way to allow a wide interpretation of what was disclosed.
In EU this would be a massive GDPR breach and cost the company €20 million or 4% of the company's total worldwide annual turnover**
In Germany you face Up to 3 years imprisonment or a fine for transferring data to a third party you weren't authorized to share.
In France Collecting data by fraudulent, unfair, or unlawful means carries up to 5 years.
In California CCPA allows fines up to $7,500 per intentional violation (e.g per customer)
Firstly misleading disclosures are not valid under both GDPR & CCPA
GDPR - Consent must be "freely given, specific, informed and unambiguous"
CPRA definies "dark patterns" as a user interface designed to subvert or impair user autonomy, decision-making, or choice and states outright: agreement obtained through use of dark patterns does not constitute consent.
Secondly do you have any evidence of said disclosures?
has anyone gone to jail through gdpr?
also, really cool stuff collecting all this info thank you.
but yeah, i don't see this conversation going any further, laws state one thing, reality is a-whole-nother. especially when the rich are involved.
i hope to God you are right about all this, i really do, I've just seen it enough times to know...
Not GDPR but the French & German laws which implement GDPR can result in jail time.
Networks aren't magic, if people are sending data from your car it's going to leave a trace, given nobody is showing any traces you might as well be claiming wizards are stalking you.
Urgh, come now. This is currently happening and yes it is likely a breach of EU laws, but it is happening now. Multiple auto companies have been caught doing it, its not a theoretical what if. Like many things if the government does not enforce (but instead gives a fine) then it does not matter what the law says.
You sound like those people saying murder can't happen since it is illegal, but they are just taking the piss.
You sound like one of their paranoid shut-ins that thinks crime rates are going up, even though every metric shows they are going down.
Data isn't magic, you don't collect data on everyone's cars without leaving a network footprint.
You sound like you are putting words in my mouth. You also sound like you have zero idea about current data collection practices to a shocking degree.
Cell companies can give those out for free if they want to... What they offer to consumers is absolutely not the same as what they might offer to a car company at bulk rates. They could even have the car store data and wait for low usage times to upload, it would cost cell providers almost nothing
They might even leverage it to use up bandwidth so they don't have to sell to secondary carriers if they wanted to one day...
Are you saying they have a secret program where they illegally take your data and to pass this data around without your permission they have a secret bulk deal with telecoms peoviders
Not exactly secret or illegal, they are actively selling driving data to insurance companies already. Stuff like speeding, hard breaking, etc.
It's not widely advertised, but it's less secret and more "hidden in the fine print". It's right there in the open though
They don't call it illegal, but yes.
That's why they're taking the video.
So they are taking a video of you and in exchange giving you $10-50/month worth of data access?
Data doesn't cost that much.
I think most of the privacy-violating and abuse-facilitating scenarios that we're all too plausibly imagining could be served by the transmission and storage of even a single photograph per drive.
All of the existing consumer-surveillance tech seems to be focused on 1) Finding ways to make your attention more valuable to advertisers and 2) Selling information on your movements and proclivities to interested governments.
Pictures from inside a car could fit right in with those priorities. They could tell car makers, advertisers, insurers, and governments a lot about who really drives the car the most, that person's demographics, taste in clothing, driving ability, distractability, fatigue levels, health issues, etc.
I should be clear: I'm absolutely speculating. But I don't know how anyone might look at the landscape that exists today, with surveillance in our phones, our televisions, our music players, and our cars, and think that such speculation is far-fetched or unrealistic.
They sell driving habits and other informatics to insurance companies at the very least, this is publicly known.
Many TVs these days form a mesh network using the TV of your neighbor, or his own neighbors until they find a device with WiFi access in order to call home.
No reason why cars can't do that now that they've been made into computers with wheels. A trend that I absolutely despise.
wtf????
Your comment literally melted my brain cells.