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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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.
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”
“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”
Log into your profile? On your car? Your car logs you in to a profile? What the fuck
My car does this based on which keyfob is in the driver seat.
Various things like the seat position, radio presets, the color of the ambient lighting, some various driver mode settings.
I mean, it’s weird terminology and to my knowledge doesn’t imply anything about logging into any ‘online’ profile, just changing to another person’s settings. Adding a profile just requested some label, no email address or anything. Just something to associate with the keyfob.
It also has a driver facing camera, but it doesn’t use that for detecting which driver is there.
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.
It’s creepy. And it may make me an asshole to say, but I’d never want an interior camera in the event of an accident. It makes the following court case so much more gray, since you now introduce the opportunity to say “they were on the phone, talking, listening to music, whatever” and shift what should be a clear cut case into something more.
Not sure why you included “on the phone” in that list?
If you look down at anything, they will say it’s a phone.
Are you aware that phones are a mayor source of accidents? Being distracted is one of the or the biggest reason for crashes in general. Looking down is a distraction, regardless what you are looking for.
Sure, but in the case of an accident that footage is ammunition. Maybe the other party was eating a four course dinner and cranking their hog, but unless they had an interior camera too you can’t prove a thing. These cameras seem like they would be a disadvantage in court no matter what.
Yes, but I was thinking something as simple as “I’m cold, and I want to turn the fan off,” requiring looking down long enough for court to say it’s a phone. Adjusting literally anything can make it less straightforward, regardless of actual action. But yes, I only see an interior camera as a disadvantage.
Ah yeah I got that and then kinda lost scope reading the reply. Non sequitur for a non sequitur.
I used to be on the engineering team that worked on the development of a similar camera. For what it’s worth, at the time: there was no AI involved, we only used good old image processing algorithms. And the camera (all cameras, lidars, or radars on the car BTW) does not record anything. It treats images as they come. There’s almost no storage space on the car for all the image data generated.
All this might have changed since then (especially the AI part) but I’m still relatively confident that car systems don’t have the storage for all this data.
Additionally, since this is a European brand, I think it would be quite difficult to legally retain personal information like that. It was already difficult during the development phase.
I’m not saying they wouldn’t be above ominous shenanigans, but it would be difficult.
Your concern is definitely justified. This is creepy as hell.
I don’t think you are paranoid. This technology is creepy as hell. Almost all cars are connected nowadays and send data back to the manufacturer’s server—visible or not. In the best case it’s just the service history, in the worst case live positions and more. Some cars stop working if the server is shut down *cough. Cameras equipped to unlock based on a face record biometric data. And honestly, would you trust your car manufacturer (!) to handle your biometric data?
even if they don’t explicitly send GPS coordinates, if they send anything at all repeatedly, your position can be guessed from which mobile tower you connect to
“what about the camera on your laptop?”
My personal laptop does not have a camera, and my work laptop has a physical camera blocker.
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.
You have to log your profile into your car?? Fuck everything about that!
And this is why I have 2 cars from the 80’s that I refuse to give up. They’re nearly 100% mechanical, carburated and with almost no necessary fuzes to run the two.
I’m coming to you if there’s an EMP attack.
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 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.
