When I read the headline I briefly imagined a world where people who bought new cars were statutorily required to honk at other drivers for their driving.
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—Speed limits that can change and be out of date.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.
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.
-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.
The GPS data can’t be out of date if it becomes the authoritative source of speed limit data.
There are definitely areas of California where going less than 10 miles over the speed limit will put you well under the flow of traffic in every lane. If you’re not going 80 on 80, you’re gonna have a bad time.
I don’t really care about the honking so much as I do the fact that this mandates that the car track its position.
“[an] integrated vehicle system that uses, at minimum, the GPS location of the vehicle compared with a database of posted speed limits, to determine the speed limit, and utilizes a brief, one-time visual and audio signal to alert the driver each time they exceed the speed limit by more than 10 miles per hour.”
Honestly the only part of this that is unreasonable is that it isn’t immediately followed with “the database updates will be maintained and provided in an open, unencrypted format for free for the life of the vehicle, and the tracking data cannot be used for any other purpose”. GPS is a one-way, triangulation-based signal. It doesn’t inherently track or leak anything. I think we would be a lot safer if we all could agree what speed to go.
I think we would all be safer if we recognized individual competence and attention as the key ingredient in safety, and stopped trying to replace human attention with an ever-expanding set of sensors and woefully inadequate algorithms for determining whether the driver is being safe.
Like, if they have to model the driver as someone who’s not paying attention, then the whole design philosophy of the car is fucked, and we’re designing for failure.
I agree. And the whole design philosophy of the car was fucked when manufacturers were allowed to build SUVs and oversized trucks that weigh 2+ tons and don’t require any additional certification or licensure.
The whole design philosophy of the car is fucked and we have designed for failure.
“Individual competence” leads to over a million annual road traffic fatalities globally. Every. Year.
Na, relying on individuals to be competent and not distracted is not the logical way to make the system safer. There’s a well established hierarchy of how to design safe systems, and relying on individual expertise is at the bottom right above asking pedestrians to wear helmets to cross the street. We need safer streets, fewer, smaller, slower cars that have automated braking features. We need enforcement of speeding and distracted driving. It’s fucking absurd how many drivers are on their phones. Making folks take a competency test does nothing for this (although I’m also for stricter licensing, but we also need alternatives to driving so people can live normal loves when we take their driving privileges away).
https://www.osha.gov/sites/default/files/Hierarchy_of_Controls_02.01.23_form_508_2.pdf
People don’t speed because they are distracted. People speed because they think they are better than average drivers; every damn one of them.
The GPS isn’t the issue, the speed limit database is. How does the car know what the limit is, and how does that database get updated when limits are changed or new roads are built? What is the mandate on the updating of that database?
hence the omission I suggested unreasonable. That database needs to be updatable by the end user, trivially. IMHO could/should be done ad-hoc by a hobbyist or as part of a standard oil change every ~6mo.
the database updates will be maintained and provided in an open, unencrypted format for free
the tracking data cannot be used for any other purpose
These are mutually exclusive. If the data is open, unencrypted and freely accessible, it will be used for other purposes, by anyone who wants to.
Also, tracking every vehicle location and storing that in a centralized database is a privacy nightmare, no matter how well it’s secured.
It already does, and auto manufacturers already share or sell this data.
Heck, because there’s a massive loophole in consumer privacy around the government buying data, any government agency can just go directly to a vehicle manufacturer and ask to buy the data.
There was a big flap about this regarding car insurance recently, but as pointed out by the EFF (How to Figure Out What Your Car Knows About You), industry folks have been looking at monetizing this data for a while for all sorts of purposes, including advertising, consumer data sales, and even behavior analysis to understand how to better force consumers to pay for vehicle-based subscriptions.
We own nothing, not even our privacy.
Our GPS often shows the incorrect speed limit.
New cars now read speed signs as you pass them. It’s a bit of a gimmick and sometimes misses them.
I know of at least one stretch of road near me that’s missing a speed limit sign. It drops down to 25 mph around some curves, then increases to 45 as it straightens back out. The sign for 45 is missing, so cars that read signs would be driving too slow at that point. GPS apps like Waze get it right…
