A Choice investigation has found most of Australia's popular car brands collect and share "driver data", ranging from braking patterns to video footage and voice recognition information.
And then they'll just do like everyone else does, nag screens every five minutes with no "No, and don't ask me again" option, you can only say "Not now" and then it'll ask again in five minutes. Or you can have the car, but you can only use the speedometer if you agree to them monitoring your speed and you can only have headlights and windshield wipers if you agree to them recording everything you do, etc.
As long as it's not literally digitally run on one wire, and if you cut it, you have no infotainment system. Or, in some cases, no way to start your car.
Or it's not a rental. Or your friend's car. Or a taxi.
I snipped the antenna lead from the cellular modem on my Hyundai. No more built-in road assistance, remote start, or emergency unlocking, but I then never signed up to pay for those features. The car can't phone home anymore. I connect my phone to the infotainment system to allow navigation, and the phone has an Internet DNS filter that prevents connections to Hyundai's servers.
That will have to suffice until we get full digital privacy rights.
Yep, as a web developer sometimes I get panicky about new legislation until I remember that I don’t even serve CSS or JavaScript from third-party domains. I don’t track users by IP address or anything. Fuck that
I really try, but I’m starting to feel like a zombie all the time!
One thing I try to do is not go so hard on JavaScript. I don’t like when websites do that and have problems due to that, especially when it comes to forms (though I do have an awesome example with being able to paste a long string of text into a text field and having JavaScript split it into the following fields, but only if it’s in the correct format).
Yeah, it’s a long story but while working somewhere they used a terrible SaaS for their day-to-day operations and I eventually built my own that they still use (I don’t work there anymore).
The long string would be a bunch of specifications sent via email by clients (it’s an email-heavy industry) and I got tired of copying and pasting each part line by line (it was also hard because they weren’t sent as separate lines, but used a character as a separator) so I built it for myself.