California Passes Bill Requiring New Cars To Beep At You When You're Speeding

jeffw@lemmy.worldmod to News@lemmy.world – 306 points –
California Passes Bill Requiring New Cars To Beep At You When You're Speeding
jalopnik.com
158

You are viewing a single comment

What I’m reading is that every car will have to be equipped with functioning GPS that’s going to check against a database of speed limits.

—Speed limits that can change and be out of date. —GPS data that could be stored and extracted from the dealership and sold or given to the government, insurance companies, and law enforcement. —GPS data that could be sent in real time if the car has a cellular connection or hijacks the cellular connection in your phone when you connect it to the car.

This is bad. Really really bad.

…GPS data that could will be stored and extracted…

GPS data that could will be sent in real time

FTFY!

I agree with your first point, but the latter two:

—GPS data that could be stored and extracted from the dealership and sold or given to the government, insurance companies, and law enforcement. —GPS data that could be sent in real time if the car has a cellular connection or hijacks the cellular connection in your phone when you connect it to the car.

Why do you think this is more likely to happen with this new regulation, when most modern cars already have a functioning GPS module for navigation and cellular connection for software updates?

It's the standardizing that worries me. When it's required, people probably aren't going to be able to truly turn off their GPS (maybe this is already a thing, I don't know).

Edit: And when it's classified as a safety feature, it will [most likely] be illegal to disable, making car owners criminals if they refuse to be tracked.

Using GPS is not tracking.

To calculate a speed, you need 2 different locations at some time delta (2 different times). How is recording locations, even just 2 over the span of some time delta, not "tracking"?

The car is only tracking itself. No information needs to leave the car. I assume that's not what people are talking about when they say "tracking".

-hijacks the cellular connection in your phone when you connect it to the car.

How would it do this without the user triggering it? I don't own a newer car, is this a real thing some of them can do?

I know in my phone I have to turn on sharing the mobile connection via USB, it's not something that just happens.

To be clear, I do not think this is currently happening, but with an update to Android Auto or Apple Carplay, it could happen when you connect, say, your iphone to your car via usb, or possibility even bluetooth.

Tech companies are plowing forward with making your own devices work against you, so I consider it a very real possibility.

It's entirely unnecessary, your car is already registered to your name and address via title and registration and already reports GPS data back to home on nearly every car made after 2016, and your phone is always where you are and reporting back unless you have all your data connections turned off. You don't need to sync them up at all. It's already happening.

This will get people to pay for and/or disable this. Let’s just give you more distractions!

The GPS data can't be out of date if it becomes the authoritative source of speed limit data.