I’m pretty new to Lemmy and noticed that my post was crossposted to fuckcars and privacy@programming.dev. I have no problem with that, but I didn’t do it on purpose!

I mostly agree. But sometimes if a single jurisdiction gets regulation in place, it can be cheaper for companies to produce a single model to comply with all of them, rather than make multiple models. Even if they do make multiple models, it still means there is a supply of privacy-spec cars.

California in the USA has been more privacy friendly than most states. If California would crank up some car privacy regs, maybe work with the Europeans and Canada on a common legal standard, that is a huge foot in the door! It means people in other US states could buy a California-spec car. If the momentum builds enough, maybe companies would say screw it and sell the privacy-spec cars everywhere. That happened in the past with car safety regs. It went from auto companies whining about it, to the same companies featuring it as a selling point. Look how well our cars do in crash tests!

I agree car privacy is going to be a hard fight. Auto companies will fight dirty to avoid privacy regs. But we can push on this. A groundswell of public support can’t hurt.

They could have made it a lot cheaper as a coupe.

Maybe if it sees market success, they’ll branch out into other body styles. I want a car too, not a truck.

have joked … that if I have to buy a new vehicle I am ripping the whole dashboard out.

Desperate times call for desperate measures.

Slate seems to be the only brand currently that intends to deliver vehicles with zero connectivity required.

Do you mean these guys? That’s the first I heard of them so thank you for that! I thought it would turn out to be a European make, but they’re on my side of the pond. A zero-connectivity electric car would be the dream. I like the idea of electric cars but so far they have all been even more wrapped up in telematics than internal combustion cars.

And if you reconnect to get them, there’s no guarantee your car doesn’t suddenly dump all your personal data obtained in the meantime onto company servers.

It’s a good point. Also I wonder if OBD-II can do that. A person could disable the port, but that may make it hard / impossible to get the vehicle serviced.

For sure. We’re in a difficult place. Arguably the ultimate solution has to be regulatory, but we don’t have that yet. All we have is whatever the community can figure out on its own. The more surveillance gets integrated into complex automotive systems, the less approch-able it is for average people to yank a fuse or unscrew an antenna coupler.

is the realization that sooner than later, we won’t have the choice of not using spyware riddled device anymore, as there will not be any alternative left.

I too worry about this. Right now surveillance is so profitable that it gets built into even the lowest end models of devices. It can be difficult or impossible to disable.

What gives me a little hope is the 10% principle. If privacy minded people hold just 1% market share, we can be ignored. We are not a market force. If we can get 10% of our population to prioritize privacy and security when buying tech products, we become a market segment too big to ignore. Thereby it is important for all of us to reach out to our friends, family and neighbors, to help them understand why privacy matters. And what we all lose when we give it up.

or light bulbs

So that no one thinks you are engaging in hyperbole -> https://www.pandasecurity.com/en/mediacenter/smart-lightbulbs-spy/

Does that mean it’s the same as reddit??

No. The words you write here are available to any and all, so those are not private. They effectively can’t be. Even if lemmy was gated behind a login wall.

Yet who you are can be more private. I say more, not completely, because privacy is not black and white! It comes in shades. Reddit, facebook, and other big social media sites go to a big length to associate IRL IDs with accounts. Even when you can use a pseudonym. Their profit model is coupled to this.

Privacy aside, IMO there are plenty other advantages from Lemmy being a non-corporate system. I do not see it as perfect. I do see it as an important step away from the worst abuses of big-tech social media.

Edited to improve clarity.

Yah. And in almost no cases does that technically need to be the case. It just actually is the case. Surveillance capitalism. It’s common now the company makes more money from your data than from selling you the device. Even for big ticket devices like cars!

Companies are also very, very good at making people want it. I advise my friends against giving their new IoT shiny any internet access. I am rarely successful. You all know how it goes. “I don’t have anything to hide.”

Offline single purpose devices still work fine. I have two digital cameras, big and small, that use a USB cable to my PC. An unconnected mp3 player. An alarm clock with no connectivity that isn’t a phone app, it’s a thing with a big ole snooze button. It wakes me up fine.

there are too many frictions overall.

That was my experience too. I can’t remember now what my objections were, but I tried it and did not like it or want to use it.

I am now self hosting XMPP + encryption server which I have got some of my friends to install clients for. Oh, they bitch nonstop about how it isn’t as nice as whatever big tech app they are used to. But they use it, because I am not going to talk to them on $TrendingSurveillanceApp.

That reminds me of a quote I heard once. Probably from Cory Doctorow but I cannot remember now.

“Everyone wants you to have privacy… just not from them.”

I think I need to buy a graphene phone for that though, my android I don’t think is capable of loading a different OS,

I have no experience with it, but they have page here which lists compatible devices, and recommended devices. The recommended ones are a subset, because apparently some older devices lack hardware security features.

Agreed. I don’t carry a phone today, but I am considering getting a dumbphone + Faraday pouch for emergencies.

And yah, “smart bikes”… eww.

100%. If you can bike, that’s both good for your health, AND reduces surveillance.

We need to push for better bikability especially here in North America. Fortunately my city is good, but so many others are not. Especially for older people who may not be comfortable mixing it up with cars if they bike.

Of course also now Flock cameras are everywhere, who watch bikes as well as cars. There is no plate on a bicycle, but I have seen allegations they can perform biometric ID of pedestrians and cyclists.

at least I don’t have to worry about my car’s radio system being a little snitch

I feel your pain. It’s nearly impossible now to buy a disconnected car, and over time, pre-connectivity cars will become old and less reliable.

I need to look out the windows/windshields to back up.

Which is getting harder on some models of hatchback where it’s difficult to see out the rear window. My car is like that. My old car was a 4 dr sedan and you could easily see behind. In my new car I would not feel safe backing up without the camera due to how bad the rear visibility is. Especially in parking lots with the risk that a child below window level had run out from somewhere into my blind spot. That’s what keeps me tethered to my backup camera - the fear of hitting another person I couldn’t see. Otherwise I would do exactly what you are doing.

I bike whenever I can, but sometimes, I must drive.

Another problem is that on some newer cars, the “little snitch” part of the car is the same subsystem as other features of the car you need, like the directional blinkers. You rip out the snitching part, and you also lose safety features you need legally and ethically.

I hate this. All of this. I hate that the default for so many devices now, not just cars, is surveillance.

I rarely speak my full mind, especially online,

I agree with you that caution is good. Yet at the same time, this is exactly the “chilling effect” of mass surveillance, right? People start to self-police.

From the article, the subpoenas went to Google, Meta, Reddit, and Discord, and are targeting accounts that “lack real names”.

Even if someone has signed up with fake names, I hold tremendous suspicion they can ID people anyway. Of course their accuracy is going to depend on many things. For example, did someone use their own IP, or a VPN? Did they use the app, or a web interface? But some of those sites won’t even allow signups through VPNs.

There is a big industry built around browser and device fingerprinting for “identity resolution”. This tech was driven by the advertising industry, after their ability to use cookies for identification was curtailed. I have no way to prove this, nor evidence for this, but I would eat my hiking boots if the big social media sites did NOT use that sorta tech.

KeyPassXC is the way to go, IMO. It is wonderful. The password db is stored locally on your disk. It integrates nicely with firefox and probably other browsers too. Open source, no spyware, “just works”.

Absolutely. Couldn’t agree more.

I just run everything possible locally which helps a lot. Nearly everything my friends do in “the cloud” I do on my own computer. Even stuff like spreadsheets they want to do in the cloud. It flummoxes me, how willing they are to share everything with big tech.

If you have a mid range or better GPU, you can even run a local LLM. I have used one for language translation. I cannot speak German but I was talking to a German speaker who did not speak English about a hobby. We could talk to each other despite not sharing a language. That’s practically sci-fi to me! I used a sandboxed LLM disallowed from any network access, to do that.

Even so, I am skeptical about most of what I see people use LLMs for. I am afraid of what they will allow bad actors to do. I am afraid of even worse corruption of the information space. I doubt the horse will re-enter the barn tho.