When are we going to get a law that says this stuff is illegal? We need a second bill of rights- for digital ones.
I am still pissed off that somehow Google has the location of my house saying “you parked here” on Google Maps even though there is no way to delete it or remove it- and before ever using Google Maps I intentionally went through every Rabbit Hole of every setting I could find to disable any location history ever being saved and yet this is still the case.
Oh my god, free uplink! I just have to hash my encoded data off the driving of the chase scene opening Underground 6 (Netflix.) Gosh I wonder if it’s polite, uplinking 6 ‘cameras’ of data and dragging Chevy or whatever rank as I (bike and pretend to) drive.
Wife bought new car. Upon taking possession, a “technology expert” spent an hour with her, showing her all the tech features of the car. (I was sitting in the back seat.) During the demonstrations, the expert linked his tablet computer to the car. It mostly seemed to show him a script of what to tell her about. Upon getting home, my wife discovered four separate email messages thanking her for consenting to four different privacy policies (which were named, but we’ve not been able to find copies of). I’m 99% sure, the policies flashed by on the tech expert’s tablet and he “consented” on her behalf.
A friend of mine bought a Tesla, which was subsequently junked when a red light runner rammed into it. Months later, he got an alert that the car had been re-activated: Apparently somebody had purchased it from the junkyard, had it towed, and had turned it on. But nobody ever told Tesla the car no longer belonged to my friend, so it’s still associated with my friend’s account, and he can snoop on it. He discovered a bunch of information, including the house it’s parked at, and from that a reverse-directory lookup gave him the name of the new owner. He suspects it’s still not drivable, since it hasn’t left the house it was towed to.
In fact the thing I don’t like of the Tesla is the heavy reliance on computers.
You can have an electric vehicle without computers and a simple dashboard (like this restored 1958 trolleybus) https://www.ilgiorno.it/milano/cronaca/foto/filobus-1.4262926 And in my opinion having a touch screen is distracting.
I’ve changed car recentrly. The old car radio had a volume knob on the left, a tuning cross on the right that doubled as a CD control, six memory buttons and AM/FM selection. Newer one has a row underside of multi finction keys so the same button is skip track on playing from usb or enable manual tuning in FM mode, or in FM memory mode is a memory. You have to look at the radio to see in what mode is.
(I think emacs is way better than vi).
Fact is Is difficult to change radio because is integrated on the bezel and anyway there are still burglars that steal aftermarket radios, so I’m not willing to change it.
The screen in the Tesla I was in recently was also in the middle. All indicators were on that screen, meaning that to check speed or power level the driver constantly has to look to the right and a bit down. Unless there’s a HUD I don’t known about in front of the driver, that struck me as a bad idea.
Not only is the car gathering data about the machine and your driving style, but they are starting to gather data about the occupants of the car and what they are doing and expressing. We need some controls on this stuff before it gets impossible to put the genie back in the bottle.
