Not to mention OpenAI/Anthropic’s newly found appetite for keeping data (made public with Fable but we don’t know what actually happens there anyway).

There is so much role play going on for people to convince themselves that any of this is fine.

> continued use of this … implies acceptance

One of the biggest crimes in tech world

So Apple built a feature that’s not good enough to use in a “competitive market” and now wants to wiggle their way out by blaming the very laws designed to protect people from shady corps.

I think the DMA is working just fine. It’s not like Apple had no idea this will happen.

All it takes is one announcement that the US is cutting on efforts to understand future climate disasters for that “influence” to disappear.

You’re right that it’s all policy making and that’s why you’re supposed to elect competent politicians and administrators.

Regardless of your stance on AI, we shouldn’t normalise tracking of this magnitude at all. Some safety guardrails for security and IP protection - fine, most tools have that builtin. Anything beyond that is abuse, plain and simple.

It was totally predictable, unfortunately.

At least in the EU it’s quite illegal and even if a car maker slips something in, GDPR is always there so one can request a copy and have it deleted. Wish the regulation was even stricter though.

At the same time, EU mandates that new cars must have a system able to call help if it detects a crash with the driver not responding... And I suspect most manufacturers will argue that telemetry data are not PIIs until taken to court, so since they have to put a cellular connection anyway, why not use it?

You actually don’t need any data plan to call emergency services, 112 is literally baked into the GSM standard. As long as the phone (or car) can connect to a network, it can call 112. It doesn’t even need a SIM card.

A side note, though. This SIM-less emergency calls are blocked in some countries because there were a lot of fake calls. Some other countries put such calls on a less important list of calls. Many countries in EU do allow them, though.

So, car manufacturers could just put in the cellular capabilities without connecting to any network. They just don’t want to.

When Cariad had a data leak, they were really quick to point out that no payment information had been leaked. That really shows how little they understand about PII. Screw the payment information, I'll just cancelled that card and get any abused funds refunded by my bank, that's not neither my problem nor my concern.

For some strange reason most companies do not understand the inherent danger of having e.g. location data and behavioural patterns leaked. That's much much worse than you stupid debit card number.

There is a very clear definition of PII so I don’t see this being a problem

The GDPR is a joke. It does not prevent the real problem (data collection). Tech companies can in principle be fined for misusing your data, but most companies won't get caught or will simply pay the fine.

GDPR is useful because it defines what must be protected (or avoided). It’s straightforward to do the right thing as a company.

To make it stricter or pack a bigger punch, there needs to be stronger mandate for such legislation. And we live in interesting times… wars, previously democratic allies disintegrating, useless right wing or russia-aligned governments and MEPs, etc…

So yeah, could be better but all you and I can do is talk to our MEPs, help inform people outside tech, vote this way and hope enough people share the concerns

How does this work with Europeans who are not based in GDPR regions? As far as I know, they still count, are these systems collecting data about them illegally?

There is:

a) Zero trust in the car manufacturers to really respect GDPR

b) Zero repercussions for actually stealing my PII. Okay, maybe VW will pay a minuscule fine, but they won't

> likely a non-political procurement

How can this be true - the only reason humans still need military equipment of any sort is politics.

We are not fighting aliens, just stupid politicians that suddenly choose to throw people at a problem instead of using words.

This was very difficult to read. We really need to snap out of letting LLMs write posts. Even if there is some added value in this post, the feeling of chewing sand is just distracting and unnecessary.

Agreed. I don't get how this article has almost 400 points.. There must be bots upvoting this slop..

Oh I didn't know Dropox still exists.

> You could say the same thing about any always online software suite

But this is the reason "serious shops" do not use always online software and tools in critical parts of the SDLC. There is a difference between influencers/people on socials promoting things vs. reality where the expectation is that things don't just stop working because there is an internet outage or some 3rd party disruption

I would argue that it's really only toy projects that can continue in an Internet outage. "Serious shops" will be using cloud based version control, cloud based testing workflows, and most likely cloud based distribution of the software. isn't it only the little side projects you can get away with not needing the Internet for? Software long ago stopped being something one person on a computer did, today the professional SDLC includes many tools that are hosted.

Do farmers still plough fields with a Horse just in case their tractor runs out of diesel? Of course not, as technology moves on we all have to accept the inherent risks in exchange for the huge benefits, otherwise the work you do will be too slow and your job taken by someone willing to leverage the tools available today.