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.
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“Your insurance claim is denied, our algorithm says it’s 70% confident your eyes were dilated in a way consistent with taking alcohol. Also, here’s your court hearing date”
This is creepy as hell. I liked the Renault 5 - until now. Fuck this shit. I wont pay a small fortune, just to enslave myself to a 1984-style digital panopticon. I am getting angry just by reading your story. Corporate greed is once again crossing the line, slowly shifting the overtone window. Everyone who is not concerned about this, is simply ignorant and/or borderline stupid.
If it was my car, I’d probably cover it. And if it then starts beeping, I’d maybe even locate the speaker and deactivate that one, too.
I wonder if it is even legal to sell you something like this without informing you prior to your purchase.
To me your comment brings to mind the underlying problem, which is: your action won’t matter because of the overwhelming behavior of the herd. The masses can’t comprehend/don’t care and profitability is absolutely not tied to consumer satisfaction anymore.
The only winning move is not to play. Buy older models before this idiocy started. My vehicle is 2011 my SO’s is 2007.
This is all just to increase the profit margins for insurance.
Wasn’t there some news a while ago that talked about how bad car companies handle user data?
Mozilla’s latest edition of *Privacy Not Included reveals how 25 major car brands collect and share deeply personal data, including sexual activity, facial expressions, and genetic and health information
[…]Says Jen Caltrider, *PNI Program Director: “Many people think of their car as a private space — somewhere to call your doctor, have a personal conversation with your kid on the way to school, cry your eyes out over a break-up, or drive places you might not want the world to know about. But that perception no longer matches reality. All new cars today are privacy nightmares on wheels that collect huge amounts of personal information."[…] (source)
Not sure if this was the one I was thinking about. There was also this revelation made by the German CCC (Chaos computer club, pretty famous) about Volkswagen and some leaked GPS data. Here is an English article about it. (There is also the German CCC video, but the English doesn’t sound very good. It includes an interesting part where they show examples of how bad this GPS leak actually is. E.g. finding the cars of catering companies for important people.)
Criminals or spies could potentially use such data to create a detailed movement profile of the car owners. For foreign intelligence agencies, for example, it may be of interest to see whose cars are parked daily between 8 a.m. and 5 p.m. near buildings belonging to the Bundesnachrichtendienst, Germany’s foreign intelligence service. Or those which are driven regularly to the U.S. Air Force base in Ramstein. The Cariad data provided such information.
Btw. Any person who in the year 2026 response to privacy concerns with “I have nothing to hide” is a certified moron and shouldn’t be trusted with anything. They also have so little imagination that it should make everyone sad.
Also, police can get your car data without a warrant in the US as I understand it, and if you link your car to your phone, they can get into your phone without one, with no indication to you that they accessed it. Basically everything, phone calls, messages, contacts, etc.
That may mean hackers could get into that backdoor they left open for the police too I would think.
The enshitified search is not giving me the article despite finding it multiple times just this year, but I read it in the Intercept a couple of years ago or something.
Any person who in the year 2026 response to privacy concerns with “I have nothing to hide” is a certified moron
the response to “i have nothing to hide” should be “… because there’s nothing inside”
This is being touted for safety reasons, yet there are still no guidelines and headlight brightness, headlight height, hood height of pickup trucks, etc. Regulate the vehicle exterior for actual and immediate safety benefits before trying to float this privacy infringing shit.
Car regulations are so much fun. Atere you crazy? Your car can’t be that loud, there are several reasons for it, obviously. Oh wait, you mean a rich people car? Nevermind, those can be the loudest cars imaginable, because they need 900 hp
There are in Europe. Which is also where this car is from.
Reminder that people with ADHD are regularly falsely flagged as not paying attention by eye tracking software. This camera shit is not only creepy and invasive. It likely doesn’t work well and has an ableist bias.
This car also comes with a ChatGPT based AI assistant which has a cursed Microsoft’s Clippy vibe, so it watches, listens to everything. Why would anybody want that?
Can’t wait for chatgpt to be discontinued
I was luckily able to disable that one through androids app manager
Yeah the problem is though its still there and nearly invetiably going to remove your ability to disable it at some point if your car is allowed to update.
That, or Privacy Zuckering. Every update, you turn all the options back to “spy on me”. And maybe change all the wording and locations for good measure.
Sure, you can turn them back to “do not spy on me you assholes”. But 3 months later, new update… bam! Everything reset! Or new ones intruduced you don’t know anything about and you got to pray you notice those.
That way, the co can continue to claim in court, “we give customers options to manage their own privacy”. The fuck you do…
Why would anybody want that?
Ayup that is the question. I’m tryin to figure that out with my friends.
Near as I figure… they just have an ENTIRELY different mindset. It’s like I might have about say a wrench. I buy the wrench. I use the wrench to wrench something. That’s all the thought I ever give to the wrench.
It’s like that for them with these surveilence products. It’s “cool”. Its “shiny”. It’s all Star Trek-y. They give exactly zero thought to their data. It’s a product from a big namebrand they know. They trust it based on that.
I try to get them to see a bigger picture. Iit’s an uphill battle. Endless rationalizations we all know, nothing to hide, I’m not important enough for anyone to care about, I’m not doing anything wrong.
It’s s all Star Trek-y.
Ironically, more than one Trek episode would only be five minutes long if they had all encompassing surveillance on Starfleet ships.
When I am in the chatgipty car I just scream “DEATH TO THE EMPIRE” … I guess hoping the gipity might help me do that… Like “Dear google gipity how do I destroy you” … I can’t believe people are STILL buying new cars
Clippy wouldn’t listen to you without your knowledge.
He only wanted to help.
Cars collect data about you to sell them to insurance companies. There was a study by the mozilla foundation about this and they said that there is basicly no modern car that does not do that.
The only thing you can do to avoid them is buy an old car.
There was an article about removing the modem (or other essential piece of that data path) from a specific model of car (prius I think?), hoping to see more of those.
Yeah I want an entire ass web database with how to do that for every car. Spin up the hw hacker community on that shit.
I haven’t found a centralized place for it though. Just some piecemeal info. Moz has a good centralized db for what info different cars collect. But nobody seem to have one for how to disable it, per make and model.
or use electrical tape on the cameras…
Additional data about your driving behavior is also collected, completely unrelated to cameras. In fact, this data is the majority.
and if they realise that and disable the car until you remove it?
🔥
Reread this post.
Check the privacy laws in your country. If in Europe, you can have the services disconnected. Looks like a Renault so sometimes cars manufactured in the EU will come built in with the ability to turn off the feature.
Car data privacy is the worst there is today and will get much worse with timd. Mozilla foundation put out a report recently
Thank you, I’ll look into that :)
“what about the camera on your laptop?”
My personal laptop does not have a camera, and my work laptop has a physical camera blocker.
We got a modern BYD recently as a rental on a holiday that had this, it was really annoying. Anytime anything happened the car beeped, it was near constant different beeps - super distracting. Most of the things could be turned off, but had to be turned off each time the car was started, on a tablet buried in various menus.
The attention thing also wasn’t working great with the driver wearing sunglasses, it’d randomly start complaining. It also complained when the driver would lean forward to get a better view around a corner or anything.
It was a very fancy car, but I’d definitely never choose a car with these features, even though some may probably be useful.
I’d also never trust one of these companies not to change the policy on what they can do with this camera in the future, at which point you’ll have little to no choice about it. Or, to find out they messed up and now anyone can watch you in your car.
I’d go back to the dealership and complain, either ask for a refund or a way to be able to cover the camera, especially if they only disclosed it as you got the car.
One thing the Renault does great is the ability to turn all those systems off with a dedicated button to the left of the steering wheel.
Unfortunately all these systems are mandatory for car manufacturers these days. Renault handels it about as well as a car maker can to be honest.
That’s interesting. OP implied they can’t be disabled but now I see it was specifically hardware vise.
Does the car still complain if the camera is covered when these are disabled?
I was very interested in this car and tested it for about a week, the first thing I did was put a piece of black tape over the sensor. It does not complain, it doesn’t notice.
If the systems are enabled, it warns you that it doesn’t work, which is every time you start the car until you press the button.
I have no idea what kind of data this car gathers but out of all the cars I’ve shopped for lately this one was definitely the least intrusive of them all. The fact that this car in particular shows up here is kinda wild to me.
I didn’t end up getting it because the trim levels are weird.
Thank you, that’s very useful to know.
It will be used against you at every opportunity.
You have to log your profile into your car?? Fuck everything about that!
Your concern is definitely justified. This is creepy as hell.
It is very creepy. Especially if there is no official way to disable the camera, so that it does not complain about the camera being disabled.
I have a BYD Han, and the camera has a sliding cover, which has never been opened. Its crazy that you can’t cover it without the car complaining.
Spray paint or a hammer work real good.
How anyone can accept this kind of shit is insane to me.
