this post was submitted on 07 May 2024
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I hope people realize that the solution isn’t really to just not buy one, especially since this is the way the industry is heading. The solution is regulations, strict regulations.
Stuff like this should be a slam dunk for congress but we all know which side they are on.
Agreed. It's really hard to understate how ineffective "voting with your wallet" can be. The fact is simply that nobody honestly cares. Even if you get 100 people to boycott a company, would 100 out of millions of consumers really make a difference? Of course not.
And of course, you always have cases like this where everybody does it. Same thing goes for TVs - if everyone spies on you, the only real solution is to not have a TV. Yes, I know there are exceptions here and there, but bad practices like these force buyers into making compromises that they shouldn't have to. Capitalism should be predicated on companies offering the best product to earn their income. It should not be about companies having the least bad product and trying every terrible thing that they can get away with.
(Of course, we all know that capitalism is a farce.)
Well you are voting with your wallet, the only problem is you've been out voted. Honda makes good automotives and part of the "price" now is people giving them their data. People just don't understand/care enough to not want to buy a Honda. If this were really a big deal to people it would open a place in the market for new automotive companies like Rivian, Lucid, or Polestar to gain massive ground by not doing this.
This is an education issue. We need to inform people about the dangers of a lack of data privacy. If they still don't care, then so be it.
I'd say a little yes and a little no. I educate every new user that comes into my company on infosec awareness, with a big segment on data footprint and information leakage. I show them where their data is, how easily and with how many 'channel partners' share social, history and other data, and where they've been exposed in real time. I've done this with a few thousand people. The overwhelming majority say: "I've got nothing to hide." Or: "if I get better deals, it's fine." not getting that by being tracked they're probably getting worse deals.
For the "nothing to hide" folks, I ask to see their wallet or purse. They're all scoffs and brave mugs initially as they show how unafraid they are as I start rummaging through at the front of the class. Then I start pulling out cards and ID. And they're still OK as I glance around the room. Then I pull out my phone and tuem my back - then a lot of nervous shifting in seats starts happening as I look over my shoulder while taking pictures of the floor with the shutter sound turned on. That's the point where I ask if they truly have nothing worth protecting.
And at the end of all that - after setting up and teaching them how to use the comped corporate password manager, 80% still make passwords that they've used before. THE SAME DAMN MORNING as these exercises.
I don't think people care. And they certainly don't know. But they don't want to be bothered by the nuance of it all. It's just too much, which is why we need a congress with a goddamned backbone to pass some legislation with teeth to protect customer's data.
Did you just read the last sentence? Lol. AFTER proper education about the risks of lack of data privacy, if they still don't care then so be it.
The thing is, nobody can be educated on everything. It's impossible.
Nobody can know every part of a supply chain, how every aspect of everything they buy is made or how it works or the ramifications of all of that.
It is impossible for a person to do this stuff.
This is why regulations need to be part of the equation.
I agree that people can't learn everything about every market. But what people care to learn about and pay attention to counts for something.
Imagine your friends are trying to decide on a place to eat. You suggest a very healthy restaurant where all the food is listed with ingredients and their source farms. But then someone says, "Eh, I wanna save money. Let's do Taco Bell." You explain that that's an objectively worse decision. That food health is really important. That in the long run, eating unhealthy actually costs more in medical bills. But they decided to go to Taco Bell.
Putting your foot down and demanding the healthy option might objectively be the "right" choice. But in reality, they'll just get Taco Bell on their own time and resent you for taking their choice away. People have to be presented with the information and decide for themselves or they'll just resent the institution enforcing the choice.
But people's choice won't be taken away. Honda will still exist even if they have to abide by stricter privacy laws.
My analogy makes it clearer to highlight a point. But you're right that Honda wouldn't shut down if these regulations are passed. But It could be that the companies they're partnering with are giving them a cheaper rate on infotainment systems for a cut of the data that's collected. If we made Honda produce two Civics. One that steals your data and one that is just $200 more expensive, then we fully educate people on why the more expensive version is better. And then they STILL chose the cheap data miner. Then taking that option away with regulation is wrong. I might not agree with consumers here. But the reality is that they might just not agree with us about what's important. Enforcing a choice because we "know better" isn't right.
If the majority of people come together to push a regulation because it's something we don't even want to consider when purchasing electronics, then great. I'm just not sure that's the case. And I think we get into trouble jumping to regulation on every issue because often what people say they want, isn't really what they want.
If educating and voting with your wallet actually worked, we wouldn't have needed laws to put seatbelts in cars.
You can't vote with your wallet when there is no choice. Companies will not willingly take the risk of reducing revenue.
A system with the goal being best or even optimal for all involved would never be called capitalism, even if capitalism didn't exist.
There's definitely an economic impact to a vehicle looking or driving like shit. And I'm sure you'll see some amount of consumer migration higher than 0.01% of the retail base.
But there's also a lot of obfuscation, deception, and outright lying in the automotive sales industry. So its less a question of "Will consumers reject this feature?" and more "Will consumers even be aware of this feature?"
What happens when the retail customers have be commodified? What happens when the product is Surveillance and the real big money clients are state actors and private mega-businesses that benefit from tracking rented vehicles?
As we move closer to a full Service Contract economic model - one in which individuals don't really own anything and have to continuously pay to access even basic features of their home devices - I can see a lot of financial incentives in the system that preclude car dealers from leaving these features out.
Imagine a bank that simply won't finance vehicles that can't be tracked. Or a rental company that won't add vehicles to their fleet without these always-on internet features. Or a car lot that uses continuous tracking to manage its inventory.
Very quickly, the individual consumer becomes a secondary concern relative to these economies of scale.
yOu ALwAyS HaVe A cHOiCe, sO It'S oKaY!
I read somewhere that the thought that you can vote with your dollars makes you feel good and empowered to make choices, but is overshadowed by the fact that doing so means that whomever has more dollars has more votes.
Regarding Congress, I was really hoping that this big fear of TicTok would result in some sort of GDPR type laws which empower the individuals to take control of our personal data, which could also be used to prevent our personal data from being used against us by foreign countries.
You made the mistake of believing TikTok was anything more than a paid hit by other Social Media corporations.
You're saying that it was a threat to the incumbents who then sent their lobbyists to demand a ban in the name of national security? It's plausible.
I'd be pretty confident that it's not. There have been lots of companies that show up in the space, and they haven't been clobbered by other companies via the regulatory process. Those haven't been owned out of China. Those companies aren't gonna care about the ownership of a competitor.
And the US went to extreme measures to ensure that China didn't control 5G infrastructure via Huawei, considered it security-critical, and the competitors there are out of Europe, Ericsson and Nokia. And the US did some local restrictions on Huawei phones (and two other state-owned Chinese phone companies) being sold to military members at bases, but not on other Chinese competitors.
And there are a number of prior restrictions that the US has placed on companies owned out of China company. For example, I know at one point a Chinese holding company bought a solar farm directly overlooking a US naval weapons testing facility and the US mandated that the owners divest.
Like, agree with them or not, I think that it's pretty safe to say that the US government has very real security concerns specifically about Chinese companies.
I mean, I can believe that Google is probably enthusiastic (is "Youtube Shorts" the closest equivalent? Maybe there's someone else who does similar things), but I don't buy that Google fabricated this. If that were the case, you'd expect to see a bunch of prior China-related restrictions, but would expect to see a lot of Google-related restrictions, but what one actually sees is the opposite.
So you think personal use carries the same weight as critical infrastructure? The government has a legitimate interest in protecting the power grid and Internet back bone. It does not have a legitimate interest in telling me what I can put on my personal devices.
TBH ending car dependency is a major part of any long term solutions. We should "regulate" this violent and planet wasting catastrophe out of existence replaced with rational and sustainable infrastructure.
I'm all for reducing the number of cars on the road but IMO this is a poor attitude to have to a problem that exists right now and is ballooning out of control, but has a very easy solution.
Moving away from cars will take a long, long time. Infrastructure doesn't come from nowhere, and some places are so sparsely populated that public transport can be a very difficult proposition, or even an impossibility. Those places in particular will be stuck with cars for a while. Banning predatory data gathering on cars can happen right now if there is the political will to do so.
I know it's easy for some to say "well I don't care, fuck anybody who drives a car, they're evil and I don't like them. Why don't they simply be rich and buy a house in a city where public transport is usable?", but I think everybody has a right to privacy, and the default shouldn't be for our tools to spy on us and report it back to the OEMs. Particularly when a lot of car drivers don't have any choice but to drive!
You can work on strengthening public transport while at the same time improving privacy laws for cars. It's not one or the other.
Not to mention that even if everyone were to switch to public transportation, you’ve still got the issue of RFID cards that track every trip you take on the system. Far cry from subway tokens for privacy concerns.
Cars are far from the only product that is actively destroying individual privacy in the name of corporate profits
Reducing the number of cars doesn't fix the root problem.
Then your E-Bike is going to require an online sign in every time you want to use it.
Regulation by whom? Dems are already deep in bed with the automotive industry and Republicans hate the government on a purely ideological level.
Who is supposed to write (much less enforce) these regulations? Nobody in government wants the job.
The solution is -besides regulations for that - have governments push for much MUCH more bicycle roads and same for public transportation. With great public transportation and bicycle roads, most people won't need cars to begin with.
I mean, if we are imagining government doing it’s actual job, isn’t it easier to pass regulations then to change how North American cities work?
Like I support walkable cities, I’m just convinced (majority of) regular people don’t actually want it.
Well a few things there:
1: yes they want it, most people don't know what they're missing. Everyone always asks me why the Netherlands is so friggin nice when they go there. Limit cars, bignoaet odnthe answer
2: even if they don't like it, we're at the point of "do or die". Climate change keeps beating expectations in that it's always so much impressively worse than expected. Just now I read that CO2 dumping into the atmosphere actually is increasing, we're actually making it worse faster. Soon we'll be at the point of "where do we get fresh water" and "all our crops are dying". Then the wars start, not for "I want that oil of yours" but "I want that food of yours". It doesn't.need to be that bad, we still can fix it if only we wanted it.
3: bicycle infrastructure and public transportation infrastructure is so so much cheaper than all the car crap we've been building for the past 7 decades. Cheaper to build, cheaper to maintain, It's quieter, it's healthier, which lowers healthcare costs for nations, it's prettier, cleaner and solves an enormous part of climate change. If only car and oil companies could stop ~~bribing~~ pushing our politicians
They don't want it because they haven't experienced it. The Dutch used to be super car-dependent, and now they're known world-wide for good infrastructure, and it improves every year.
The problem is we keep getting half-measures, like a few lanes here and there, and maybe a cycle path for recreation that doesn't go anywhere interesting. We need a big investment into infrastructure to show people what they're missing. But when all you have is a hammer (car), everything looks like a nail (more lanes).
My area is super car-dependent, but people love our train infrastructure and want more. But we only want that because we were essentially forced to build it to host the Olympics (I'm near SLC). Before that, we paved over a lot of our tracks because cars were getting popular, and that was before we had any traffic issues. Now that everyone needs a car to get everywhere, traffic sucks.
In the USA, that boat sailed long ago... most cities are too spread out to pedal anywhere
My city is just too hilly. Cycling around is one thing, and they just put in new bike lanes (they're not good ones, but still), but doing that with a grocery run or 60lbs of cat food and litter? No thank you.
Wife and I bought e-assist bikes, it makes it so you don't really have to work much even when youre carrying groceries
Weight speeds you up downhill more than it slows you down uphill. The trick is to not coast - keep pedaling downhill, use the momentum to get up the next hill.
Wat? The law of conservation of energy tends to disagree. Commuters are generally starting and ending at the same elevation so there's no trick. We're not going to convince anyone to carry heavy loads on bikes by saying "pedal more downhill to smooth out the power requirements if you hate grinding it out on uphills", the answer is just ebikes.
I'm just relating my experience - when I was younger, I commuted 20 miles round trip every day, and I worked at a bike shop with weenies that were always trying to shave weight off their bikes, so I did whatever I could to add functional weight (so no filling the tubes with lead, that would be cheating) including building up a dually, two rims side by side on a Sachs 3x7 hub. My average speed was higher when commuting (lots of rolling hills, but overall uphill in the morning, downhill going home) than it was on days off, when I was mainly riding around town where it was flat.
And it certainly wasn't because I wanted to go to work...
I appreciate your lived experience, but at the same time the rest of us will seek answers in basic physics concepts, none of which help explain such phenomenon. Is it possible you just got stronger or subconsciously tried harder because you wanted the heavy bike to be faster? Did you add weight but also make sure your bike was well tuned? Tire pressure and a greased chain go a long way. I certainly agree that the weight weenies can go way overboard though.
Nah, it's never too late. All you need is the will, the rest will come.