Hello people, my family recently bought a Renault 5 e-tech. The car itself is great, but there are some aspects that creep me out, especially the driver-facing camera. We didn’t actually know that such a camera existed before we bought the car, it was only mentioned as the car was given to us.

The cameras official purpose is to see, if you are tired and paying attention to the road, by some “AI magic”, I suppose. You can also let it scan your face, so that you automatically get logged into your profile.

I personally think, that that is kinda creepy, especially as there is no visual indication if the camera is currently recording and no official way to disable the camera hardware-wise. When it is being coverd, the car immediately complains about it.

When talking to friends or family about it, I got one of two reactions: equal concern, or “nice feature actually”, “what about the camera on your laptop?”, “you are way too paranoid”, “I have noting to hide; it is only me driving being recorded”.

I have also seen such cameras in other cars, BYD for example.

What do you think, is this creepy or am I too paranoid? Does anyone know where the actual data is processed, on device or on some cloud server? Do you have any experience with such cameras? I couldn’t really find any information about it on the internet.

  • NihilsineNefas@slrpnk.net
    0·
    4 hours ago

    Never mind the surveillance state run by fascists who want nothing more than a neutered population that lets them do what they want.

    Or the fact that the world is building data centers on behalf of techbros that openly state that they want to control the entire population through limiting their access to information and rendering it a subscription

    Or the manipulation of public opinion through 24h news cycles and infinite pundits online that pick and choose their words very carefully to make people believe what the news station owners want them to think (and I quote) “He’s telling them what to think. That’s our job.”/“This is very dangerous to our democracy.”

    Or the petrochemical companies paying billions to super pacs and lobbying groups so that anti pollution laws don’t get pushed and the media circus doesn’t talk about how many spills there are, or why our air is becomic toxic, or why the things that climate scientists have been warning the world about are coming true one after another.

    It’s aaaaallll just a “conspiracy theory”

    Nothing to see. In the words of an amazon manager standing over a dying colleague instead of calling an ambulance “Lets not look, Get back to work”