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Comment by DonHopkins | Hacker News Reader

The car should immediately pull over and shut down if it detects any activity on the driver's Twitter or Facebook feeds: Social Media Strike Out!

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...then fashion a start-up based on "Ownership" of the vehicle and code and sell devices to Tesla owners to over-ride any part of the system they don't like, then profit!

Then sell the customers list to law enforcement to make side money! What a fantastic time to live in SV!

Sell the list of those using social media in the car to existing advertisers too. Extra high levels of engagement!

Then post a joke thread about it on HN. Maximum Reddit!

[Seriously, though. I don't want to downvote everyone in a chain but there's probably a more HN/SNR-friendly way to comment on potential abuses of automaker access to social media feeds.]

>Then sell the customers list to law enforcement to make side money! What a fantastic time to live in SV!

implying that law enforcement won't work with homeland security to subpoena your data at cost under a gag order :)

Are you telling me my car should have pulled over on the highway and potentially caused an accident when my wife used my phone last week?

  immediately pull over and shut down

That could be more dangerous than allowing the trip to proceed in many situations (e.g. high-speed, narrow roadway). Fellow drivers assume a certain degree of predictability of other drivers' behavior when no surprise hazards are present.

Would require you to link your social media accounts to your car so easily avoided.

Oh, I think the car would be able to learn your social media accounts after a while, just looking for any geotagged posts that tend to match the car's position

How many driving seats does this car have?!

What if you have none?

"The only winning move is not to play the game." - Wargames

Entice drivers to link to their social media accounts by offering features like automatically tweeting a photo of anyone you honk your horn at, and updating an online leader board of top speeds driven along every section of road.

>top speeds driven along every section of road

If your goal is to make things safer I don't think this will help.

Yeah, when I worked for TomTom and suggested that idea, they weren't very enthusiastic about it.

And my other suggestion about a TomTomagotchi that you have to regularly drive around to different places to keep happy didn't go over very well, either. Maybe a petroleum company would be more receptive to that idea, though.

The tomagotchi idea is sort of like Waze. You get littlrle "candies" the more you drive. That one worked out for them.

Ford is doing something similar[1], by trying to take the best photos for you while driving, presumably to avoid you from using your phone.

Its such an odd patent, perhaps its a high quality signal about their ability to execute on self driving.

[1] https://techcrunch.com/2017/01/18/ford-patents-a-car-camera-...

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