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Car is a smartphone on wheels. Here's who's listening

208 points · 139 comments · longhaul

  1. axegon_ · · focus · HN ↗
    This is part of the reason why I don't want a new car: I don't want to be involved in this directly. A guy from work got a brand new Hyundai(I think), and the first thing that popped on the navigation was "Create an account with Hyundai now". Nah. Nah. Forget it. I have 3 issues:

    1. I should not have to authenticate or have connectivity to a manufacturer unless I want to once I've paid for a physical good(cars being physical goods).

    2. I don't want my personal data to be sold off to anyone - I've been in the tech industry for long enough to know that "I don't want my data to be shared with third parties" is worth as much as the power used to light up the pixels on the screen.

    3. I don't trust anyone to have done everything carefully and by the books to prevent any potential leaks.

    1. jimmiles · · focus · HN ↗
      Is there a market for taking newer models and stripping them of their connectivity?
      1. bluGill · · focus · HN ↗
        Probably not large enough to pay for all the engineering needed to pull it off. Some of us would be interested, but it's no longer easy. There are too many useful things from connectivity too. My car for example shows me the current speed limit on all roads and when the speed limits change it gets updated because it has connectivity. That is a useful feature but it comes with all kinds of other things I don't want and so just stripping out is a complex work of stripping out just the parts I don't want while keeping the good.

        If you'd asked in 2010, well yeah, just pull the fuse for the modem and done. since all it does is a little bit of connectivity and there's nothing else useful from the, from that, I wouldn't care. But now connectivity has useful parts, that I don't want to lose.

        1. kube-system · · focus · HN ↗
          > My car for example shows me the current speed limit on all roads and when the speed limits change it gets updated because it has connectivity.

          Yours does this via data? Most cars do this with a camera.

          <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Traffic-sign_recognition" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Traffic-sign_recognition

          1. bluGill · · focus · HN ↗
            I don&#x27;t know. Perhaps it is a camera - but it should be be data because the law changed and the default when nothing is marked is wrong
            1. kube-system · · focus · HN ↗
              Both approaches are fraught with issues. Vision based systems fail to read sings properly, don&#x27;t know about default limits, struggle with or don&#x27;t evaluate conditional speed limits, etc. And map&#x2F;data based systems can struggle with locational accuracy, temporary changes to speed, conditional speed limits, etc.

              For example, my car&#x27;s vision based system always shows the limit on a school zone speed limit sign, even when it is not in effect. It also fails to read speed limits which are posted on signs it wasn&#x27;t trained on, like digital signage.

              And map based systems e.g. smartphone maps are often wrong in work zones, and areas with variable speed limits.

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