This reminds me a bit of the Airbus patent for using bike seats on airplanes to save weight.[1][2] Of course it's a "good" idea in one narrow sense, saving weight on flights, but it's a bad idea in a few other senses, including safety and comfort.
Remember folks, filing a patent doesn't ensure implementation. If Ford starts snooping on our in-car conversations and injecting ads into our Spotify streams, we can just refuse to buy Fords. They know this. The patent actually makes it less likely that other companies will copy them, so we're less likely to end up in a situation where we have no choice.
Now if the NHTSA mandates that all new vehicles come with in-car microphones and AI to listen to conversations to stop drunk driving or some other crazy reason, we're in real trouble. That's why we have touchscreens in every car now - backup cams are mandatory, and if they have to have the screen, they'll use it for everything.
> If Ford starts snooping on our in-car conversations and injecting ads into our Spotify streams, we can just refuse to buy Fords.
Well pretty much all car manufacturers today collect telemetry on driving habits, locations, and such, and more and more vehicles now have a built in cellular modem to send all that data back to the manufacturer. Their privacy policies also give them the ability to do whatever they like with that data [1], and there have been cases of them sending it to insurance companies and the like. Currently on some models you can physically remove the modem or antenna but in the future that may brick your vehicle or be prohibited by law or license agreements.
Today it's very hard to buy a car that doesn't have this tracking. I assure you that if Ford is making good money with this tech other manufacturers will follow.
>Today it's very hard to buy a car that doesn't have this tracking. I assure you that if Ford is making good money with this tech other manufacturers will follow.
Not sure about Ford, but the website you cited also has a scathing review of Toyota, but toyota claims to have an opt out[1][2]. I guess you're technically right in the sense that all cars have the functionality built-in, but it's still possible to have a car without such tracking.
And they will be cheaper if they can reduce the price of the car with ads (which they will more than makeup for on the backside).
We need a no corporate eves dropping law, either directly or inferred. I still don't understand why corporations doing adversarial sigint against customers isn't running afoul of wiretapping laws.
I don't believe in it, they will have the option to reduce prices if they need to, but all of these companies will fight tooth and nail to not have the enshittification priced in, that is where they make the most profit.
But they will use it as a weapon against the competition, driving all suppliers to the same behavior. BMW will absolutely try again with seat subscriptions.
>I don't believe in it, they will have the option to reduce prices if they need to, but all of these companies will fight tooth and nail to not have the enshittification priced in, that is where they make the most profit.
???
There's no meaningful difference between a $5k discount for opting into ads and a $5k premium to opt out of ads.
There is very very little actual innovation in the cars - previous generation can still work 10-15 years with good maintenance.
Not long term solution, I know, and ie eco regulations will push them away eventually, but this is now a wild period when we are literally fucked by car manufacturers, and there is not yet clear legal framework on how to deal with it. There will be brutal fines, at least in EU, but thats at least 5 years down the line.
TBH for an European it may be actually beneficial to have Chinese car - I couldn't care less if chinese have tons of my driving data, I don't think they will sell it so easily elsewhere (but who knows).
Suffice to say I am keeping my pretty dumb BMW F11 family wagon (2014) for a long time unless it breaks apart.
> and ie eco regulations will push them away eventually
Anything over 25 years can be registered as a classic car which grandfathers in any of those eco regulations. Things like catalytic converters, shoulder seat belts, etc are not required on a classic car. Telling someone they are no longer allowed to driver their '69 Camero will probably be met with a lot of hostility.
Because Hayek's individual choice is an illusion. It's a failed idea.
If you're a parent, you know that choice structuring is a powerful tool in coercing children to do what you want. "Do you want to do your homework before or after lunch?" isn't a choice to do one's homework or not. That decision has been made for the child.
We should not be so arrogant to assume that we're beyond that. Individual choice in the context of the market place simply isn't. Too much money is on the line. Our choices are structured for us and we are their children.
There's no alternative economic systems. They've all been exterminated. There's no one else giving out choices. There is only Moloch. That's what I mean by choice. There isn't
It's hard to buy a TV today that isn't "smart", i.e. spying on you. There's more of a barrier to entry for automobile manufacturing than for TV manufacturing, so what goes for TVs goes double for cars.
I think the pendulum is swinging back on using the touch screen for everything.
My 2024 Toyota Sequoia has a touch screen but it’s only for the infotainment stuff. No essential part of the car is controlled through it. Lots of buttons and knobs in the car. I think it strikes a good balance. Even the audio has a simple knob to turn the volume up and down, and a volume control on the steering wheel. I skipped an entire decade of vehicles because I thought using a screen for everything was absolutely ridiculous.
> trying to think back to a situation where a product was shipped with something intrusive like this and customers didn't buy it
There aren’t many because most consumers don’t particularly value privacy. They presumably wouldn’t mind this. It’s only a problem for us if there is no choice in the market, or their choices have a negative externality on us.
Do you think we might see the same sort of bifurcation in the car market that we’ve seen in many other markets, as peoples’ wealth has gone more bimodal? Really cheaply made/total junk with relatively little variation, and premium priced, small volume goods marketed to the upper middle and above.
I think Google Glass and Facebook’s camera sunglasses didn’t work out over privacy concerns. Or maybe they didn’t work out because they were useless, IDK. In general, I think it is hard to think, especially off the cuff, of examples of products that didn’t work out.
IMO these glasses did not work out because of privacy concerns or lack of usefulness, but rather because many felt “dorky” and attracted unwanted attention when wearing them.
The devices I listed slightly miss the mark, they aren’t exactly what the first comment was about (products that violate the purchaser’s privacy be products that violate the privacy of everyone that happens to be around them).
Still though, I think this is part of how the general public experiences privacy violations. Not from some opsec or cryptography point of view. But because privacy violation devices are dorky and attract unwanted attention. They are dorky, because cool, fun things are often illegal or at least you don’t want them recorded and posted to Facebook for your extended family and employers to see. They attract unwanted attention because nobody wants that.
All smart-tvs are uploading your screen and what you watch constantly. Source: I worked on adding interactivity to ads on certain TVs when they used content recognition on your sceeen caps
> Remember folks, filing a patent doesn't ensure implementation.
True, but it does indicate a direction their R&D is going in, and it indicates the sorts of things they want to do. That's why these sorts of filings are big red flashing warning signs.
More realistically, employees get a small bonus for filing a patent. It might not be at all what direction my domain is interested in, but if I can convince the patents department that it’s novel and useful, I’ll push it.
A charitable stance is that by patenting this, no one else can do it. Which would be great, if you didn’t want to do it either. Then Android Auto is locked out of that feature, for example.
That would be a charitable stance, but since Ford -- like all other automakers -- is all in on collecting as much data on people as possible, I don't think that is a realistic expectation of their intent.
The EU now mandates that new cars have an interface to allow installation of devices that measure your blood alcohol.
Perhaps this is well meaning, but there are countless ways to sabotage such a system.
Another example is the break assistant and collision avoidance. It isn't a solved problem and there are quite a few cases where cars break without any reason, which presents a huge danger itself. Still, such a system is now mandatory too.
That will make cars even more expensive. I think governments around the world are quite overtaxed...
At face value, surveillance to limit drunk driving is good. Problem is, no one trusts car manufacturers or the NSA to keep their eyes off the data.
Car crashes are the leading factor for years of life lost among Americans. Obesity, cancer and heart disease don't start killing till you're 60. On the other hand, cars do not practice such ageism.
Was with you until the end. They don’t have to have touch screens (or large screens) for backup cams. Some of them just show in a tiny screen in the rear view on low end cars.
They have touch screens because drivers want touch screens.
> They have touch screens because drivers want touch screens.
Most people I know hate those touch screens, so I suspect this isn't the reason. I think they have touch screens as a cost-reduction measure, and people are willing to tolerate them because they want a newer car.
The plural of anecdote is not data. Ask anyone who was dealing cars when touchscreens started popping up.
People might not like an overreliance on touchscreens, which has definitely been a problem in the last handful of years. But people will refuse to buy cars entirely because of lack of CarPlay or the android equivalent which require a touchscreen. It’s actually a major reason I have never purchased a Tesla, and why my girlfriend, dude purchase a Tesla, will never do so again
> But people will refuse to buy cars entirely because of lack of CarPlay or the android equivalent which require a touchscreen.
Sure. Let me clarify -- it's not the existence of a touchscreen that's the problem. It's that often used and important controls have shifted from using actual physical knobs and buttons to the touchscreen. Screens for things like the backup camera or entertainment systems aren't a problem for pretty much anybody.
> If Ford starts snooping on our in-car conversations and injecting ads into our Spotify streams, we can just refuse to buy Fords.
If Ford does this, every other car company will find ways to license or come up with competing patents then do the same.
There is every incentive for informal collusion here and regulatory bodies are meant to express public sentiment that things like this are something that we, as a society, do not want.
> In his desk drawer he found the contract; since signing it he had found it necessary to refer to the document many times. Sure enough; payment to his door for opening and shutting constituted a mandatory fee. Not a tip.
> "You discover I'm right," the door said. It sounded smug.
> From the drawer beside the sink Joe Chip got a stainless steel knife; with it he began systematically to unscrew the bolt assembly of his apt's money-gulping door.
> "I'll sue you," the door said as the first screw fell out.
I also recommend "The Merchants' War" from Frederik Pohl. Its satirical description of a word dominated by advertisement companies resembles ours painfully.
Cannot find quotes of it, it is not a very popular book as it seems.
<you didn't glance at the ad screen for two whole minutes. Your seat heating credits streak was lost. Do you want double or nothing on your steering wheel heating credits?>
Only for a while, after that they'll have to pay if they want it to warm up at a reasonable pace, then they'll have to pay for warm seats when the temperature is above freezing - all to save the environment of course - and then they'll just have to pay no matter what upon which a new cycle starts: camera's recording facial expressions which are used to detect susceptibility to coercion so ads can be launched at the most vulnerable moments but in return you get a premium seat heating subscription at the low, low price of ${lotsomoolah}.
Really they should charge more when it is colder out. What's the point of a free market if it can't respond to consumer demand? Our ChargeTooshie seat warmer uses our comprehensive 5g wiretapping network and innovative AI to provide drivers the absolute maximum value that they can afford. With ChargeTooshie, drivers can be assured that they will not freeze to death, because we now accept credit!
Charging more when it is colder does not exclude charging more when it is just chilly. For even higher profit^Wcustomer satisfaction seat heat rates can be made dynamic based on a number of different inputs like temperature, demand, car occupation, driver stress, fuel/energy price, road congestion, time of day, length of trip and customer status. How about a tiered pricing schedule with a Basic, Bronze, Silver, Gold and Platinum level? Basic is free, good for who only occasionally expects to use seat heating but offers no discounts. Bronze is for those who use seat heating a bit more often, say 1 to 2 hours per week with a discount of 10% on basic rates. Bronze membership is only €10/month, buy NOW! Silver and gold offer steeper discounts for a monthly fee of €25/€50 while Platinum is for the discerning user who wants to pay more for QUALITY. With custom-designed heating profiles and a subscription to our weekly magazine where you'll read about the latest trends, with great deals from out partners. Buy NOW for only €75/month!
I expect their plan is to deploy this in rental car fleets. You won’t earn a discount but the rental car company will get a kickback from Ford for their fleet purchase. Think RyanAir but cars.
It'll probably be baked into the price and therefore not directly visible to you, similar to how video game consoles are priced cheaply relative to their manufacturing cost with the expectation that they'll make up for it on royalties/connected services. It makes no sense to give some feature for "free" to make up for it, because the feature could still be used for product segmentation purposes. For instance heated seats is still useful as a differentiator for a premium trim, so it'd make no sense to give it to everyone for free.
I do, but how does what you said invalidate anything in my previous comment? I explicitly said that they'll keep such features as an upgrade, rather than making it free, which is totally consistent with what BMW is doing.
Patent application filing fees and the time you spend preparing the applications, primarily. Also the loss of privacy (name, etc. in application) in applying for the patent.
Edit: Also the risk that your application is rejected so that you don't get a blocking patent, which would mean anyone else can use the invention or even patent an improvement. An improver might even cite your rejected application in their applications for more draconian inventions, which could be demoralizing.
> “The ideas described within a patent application should not be viewed as an indication of our business or product plans,” the statement added. In a followup statement, Ford said it "will always put the customer first in the decision-making behind the development and marketing of new products and services."
That depends on the person. I refuse to ever buy a Tesla because it’s filled with smart technology insanity and then they charge a subscription for this punishment they force on you.
All I need is a stick shift and radio smart enough to parse and navigate mp3 files. The car doesn’t even have to come with that radio as it’s a trivial aftermarket upgrade.
Feature phones are not old-school mobile phones. They're crippled smartphones. As near as I can tell, nobody actually makes good old, dumb, cellphones anymore.
I'm not sure that is correct. Granted, there doesn't seem to be a lot of them anymore, but they're not all gone. Here's a list of dumb phones made in 2021-2024 running an "unnamed OS": https://www.prisjakt.nu/c/mobiltelefoner?197=2024%7C2021&438... (sorry, Swedish product comparison site, but the phones should be possible to search for elsewhere on the web) I don't get the impression they are crippled smartphones.
We’re starting to see this. For instance, some cars have absurdly overactive VESS (engine tone) systems.
Some are so loud they wake up neighbors. Others don’t shut off at the NHTSA recommended 30kph, and sound like distant ambulances on the freeway.
Even if it is legal to disable them, many insurance policies include a carve out that invalidates your coverage if you do so. So, you could lose your house as punishment without ever getting to defend yourself in front of a jury.
The idea that my personal data could be used to manipulate my thoughts and actions is deeply unsettling. It makes me question the very nature of free will in a world where every click, like, and share is analyzed and used to predict my next move. I long for a future where privacy is respected and where I can navigate the digital world without feeling like a target for relentless advertising campaigns.
"Such systems and methods further further provide the opposite force to a user's natural inclination to seek minimal or no ads. These systems and methods may intelligently schedule variable duration of ads, with playing time seeking to maximize company revenue while minimizing the impact on user experience."
They know users don't like it. They just don't care.
Or just rip out the circuitry and hook up the wires to a power source with something like an ESP8266 or - for the real Luddites - a rheostat.
Then again walking is quite healthy and if you have a train station nearby, why not. Writing this from a train going between the Netherlands and Sweden, a trip I make regularly. Quicker and cheaper than driving and I get to hack away while going places.
I certainly lowered my usage, removed ie all Meta apps (or linkedin) long before it became Meta, and no looking back.
Happy to remove any app that I don't like, fuck usability and convenience, I have some good respect towards myself and I know how to live well without phone. Are we really that retarded that threat to keep away from the phone is supposed to be something scary? When quality life happens often exactly due to lack of it in our hands.
At a certain point they are going to run into wiretap laws, right?
Not a lawyer, but my understanding is that everywhere in North America is at least single party consent, and many places are all party consent for recording.
Ford can say that by buying a car I have agreed to the terms and conditions (although, I would argue that simply buying a product should be separate from terms and conditions), but my passengers haven't, and they certainly have an expectation that their conversations are private in my vehicle.
At a certain point, ad tech is going to run into an ambitious prosecutor or government attorney, and I can't wait.
"You promise to educate and inform all users and occupants of your Vehicle about the Services and System features and limitations, the terms of the Agreement, including terms concerning data collection and use and privacy, and the Nissan Privacy Policy."
In addition some vehicles will display a notice on their navigation screens every time the car is started indicating that continued use of this vehicle implies consent to the agreements below. It's sort of like those banners appearing on some websites stating that all users are automatically subject to their legal agreements.
That might work in a one-party consent state but the passenger who never interacts with the touch screen in a two-party consent state would have a stronger case. Though, even then, gathering the evidence that they're violating such laws would probably be a pretty big hurdle.
Two party consent is for wire tapping, eg, monitoring electronic communications. If they're monitoring meat-space communications, it's possible that wire tapping laws don't apply in the first place in most jurisdictions. Like an Alexa device.
Some two party laws don't specify that it has to be over the wire. They refers to recording a conversation where there is an expectation of privacy. The cabin of a private car certainly falls under that.
It's a weird presentation in my personal opinion. They could have presented it as providing information to vehicle users and only broken out the adverts in the later claims.
I would be more worried if I didn't have personal experience with digital marketers, and the businesses that hire them. They (ad tech) sell amazing, sometimes very scary, intrusive, tech but the implementation is almost always comically bad. The privacy concern is legitimate, but there are only a handful of brands smart/evil enough to use it as intended. The most common terrible example is Amazon ads: "No I don't want to buy another toilet because I JUST bought one". If Amazon can't figure this out, who is?
I was listening to a podcast today where the speaker wanted to fight against the way that entrepreneurs and business people were portrayed in the media. In many movies and TV shows the bad guy is often an evil billionaire.
This guy's argument was that in fact, entrepreneurs are the ones who can really change and improve the world, and while I don't disagree completely, corporations and executives have earned the way they're portrayed.
I'm all for well-targeted, useful ads, but this sounds like a horrible intrusion of privacy.
Just as an aside, I think the bad guy should always be rich / powerful, because how boring would a story be if the bad guy is easy to defeat? Imagine a Bond villain with no advantage over the protagonist. There would be nothing for the forces of good to overcome, and thus no drama.
In reality society needs a healthy crop of entrepreneurs vigorously innovating every which way, with a minimal amount of common-sense regulation to prevent obvious abuses like this. Easier said than done.
Another step towards the future where we do not own our cars. I'm not entirely opposed to the idea, depending on how it's implemented (and priced) but I wish they'd be up-front about it.
I don't like the idea that my car comes with a bug installed in it. By bug I mean the spy device.
While I can think of certain things that you might want to be able to do hands-free, these are mostly activities that don't have anything to do with the car itself. Hands-free radio controls, hands-free mobile calling etc. And I'd prefer that these features not be integrated into the car in a way that I can't choose to buy a car with, say, a different radio that doesn't have those features.
In other words, I can't think of a reason that a car should necessarily come pre-installed with any sort of microphone what-so-ever.
But the idea that there is not only a microphone, but that it is sending what it picks up to some remote server, is a notion that I am deeply uncomfortable with.
Most people view the inside of their car as being somewhat akin to the inside of their home. While people might expect less privacy in a car than in their homes, there is still an expectation of privacy to a degree. And that privacy expectation is typically more auditory than visual (of course you can get tinted windows but people expect you might be able to see inside of a car, but not necessary hear what two people are saying to one another).
Many people willingly install Alexa or similar devices in their homes, and have always-listening assistants running on their phones. For these people, I don't think they will suddenly be concerned about privacy in their cars.
I can imagine a future where fully autonomous cars are available everywhere and from multiple providers, so that competition drives the price down to close to cost. I would not mind not having to deal with insurance, maintenance, repairs, parking, fueling, charging, and everything else that comes with owning a car. I'm not opposed to that, but I also think it's nothing more than a fantasy.
More likely that if we ever have cars that are safely autonomous, they will be kept scarce by a monopoly or oligopoly of companies who will have one-sided insight into the costs and demands and extract maximum prices from users. Similar to the games we're witnessing being played by large rental property owners.
I'm in the same boat. I think that the fight for reasonable cars is long lost, and that's why I expect that I'll just be driving older used cars for the remainder of my life.
But perhaps the day will come where some upstart company will begin producing cars that don't spy on you. You never know.
Beyond the privacy invasion this represents, isn’t there some limit to how obvious a concept is? People have been recording conversations surreptitiously since the first audio recorder was invented, how can you patent something so obvious? I mean I taped my parents having an argument in the back seat with my humongous cassette recorder deck when I was young while sitting in the back seat? Was some kind of child genius? Can I claim prior art?
Techbro sociopath business leaders (and those of us henchpersons who wrote the code) were the ones who really pushed the surveillance capitalism envelope.
Now, Ford -- purveyor of pickup trucks to the salt-of-the-earth rural and working classes -- don't need to roll down the Overton Window, to reach out and grab their share of that money pile.
Remember folks, filing a patent doesn't ensure implementation. If Ford starts snooping on our in-car conversations and injecting ads into our Spotify streams, we can just refuse to buy Fords. They know this. The patent actually makes it less likely that other companies will copy them, so we're less likely to end up in a situation where we have no choice.
Now if the NHTSA mandates that all new vehicles come with in-car microphones and AI to listen to conversations to stop drunk driving or some other crazy reason, we're in real trouble. That's why we have touchscreens in every car now - backup cams are mandatory, and if they have to have the screen, they'll use it for everything.
1: https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/airbus-s-retractable-bicycle-s...
2: https://patents.google.com/patent/US20140159444A1/en