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According to the article, “Ablhd told Global News that he wasn't briefed on the service when he purchased the vehicle, which he says he would have sprung for had it been offered.” Even if that’s no true, he still payed many thousands of dollars for a vehicle, which has GPS tracking capability, which was seemingly always active, considering they told the police they knew where the car was located, but told them to pound sand because they didn’t pay an exorbitant price for a service that likely costs Honda basically nothing to run.

I paid for my EC2 instance and Amazon has access to petabytes of RAM at no extra cost, why can't they give me another GB for free?

He paid for a car, he didn't pay for the GPS tracking. Simple as that.

You own your car, whereas you rent your servers.

You own your car but do you own every service your car is capable of? Your car is capable of picking up signals from SiriusXM radio, should that be free too? Your car has a 4G connection built in, should it allow unlimited data for free? My sister's minivan has screens in the back seats with a Netflix app, should Honda give every car a free Netflix subscription?

You own your car but you rent the GPS tracking service. This person chose not to rent that service and therefor is not entitled to the benefits of it.

Manufacturers should start implementing subscription models for functions like AC because they’ve added smart controls and those have server costs associated with them.

> likely costs Honda basically nothing to run.

Not likely, given they provide this service through another company. Lots of overhead involved here, not to mention the initial work to set up the system. They should be able to charge for this.

I think it is a bit different.

While requiring a warrant from law enforcement is likely correct, refusing to give the owner the information necessary to track a signal from their own property is wrong. The owner of property should have a right to the information necessary to access a signal emitted by their own property. A situation where an owner does not have that right is essentially claiming that the device is leased rather than owned.

(Of course Honda wouldn't want this because then they'd have to compete with other providers for connected car services. Instead they wish to maintain a monopoly over Honda owners who may only choose between their service and no service.)

"A situation where an owner does not have that right is essentially claiming that the device is leased rather than owned."

Owning the device is not the same as having a service that enables the device. Especially when it is a device that relies on third-party networks. There's a cost in that. That's like saying that Apple needs to give me data to use my iPhone just because I own the iPhone and I pay them for it. Those are separate concepts.

Honda can totally deny the customer access to the data associated with this service. The way I see it there are two possibilities here:

1) He reports that his car was stolen to law-enforcement and they, within the scope of their duties, can go and ask Honda to release this information. That's fair.

2) He contacts Honda saying that his car was stolen and that he already reported this to the police. He asks for the location data because he wants to know where is the car now. He doesn't want to wait for the police to do their job. They deny it because he doesn't pay for this service. They will, however, honor the situation described in #1. That's also fair.

No, it's like saying Apple needs to give me the information required to use a phone with a network/MVNO of my choosing, rather than Apple saying "we'll pretend your phone doesn't exist unless you buy an ATT subscription."

Edit: your comment got updated.

I agree Honda can deny access to the data, but they shouldn't be able to deny the information needed to interface with his car via a 3rd party system instead.

Says who? He was free to install his own tracking system if he didn't want to use the manufactures. This sounds more like someone being upset at not getting a payout when their house burned down after they passed on fire insurance.

You act like "the information needed to interface with his car via a 3rd party system" exists. It almost certainly doesn't, because they'd have to specifically develop their system to support that use case. And there's no reason that they would.

If honda does in fact have the location data available, then they are withholding evidence from law enforcement. They are making it more expensive and time consuming to solve crimes so they can extort money from people. This is entirely different from memory provisioning in VMs and other comparisons people in this thread are trying to draw.

A more accurate comparison would be if a hosting service logged the process of one of their customers being hacked, but then refused to turn over evidence to the FBI unless the customer paid them for "special security service."

The legality of doing this kind of thing can be debated, but i would hope people can at least recognize wrong when they see it.

They absolutely are not withholding evidence. They're just asking the police to follow the correct procedure, which is a court-issued warrant.

No one should ever be compelled to hand over data to a police officer without a warrant, especially with something as sensitive as tracking the location of your car.

News today seems like an outrage business, an editor skill can be measured on how he or she can turn some inane happening into a blood-boiling title.

If we were talking a private eye, yes.

But is there any precedent for charging the police to collect extant evidence? (Assuming a warrant is actually presented.)

I honestly don't know.

From the article:

Honda Canada spokesperson: "Without an active subscription, the police would have to present a warrant to activate the location services on the vehicle and no such warrant was provided. At no time was Honda or its HondaLink provider aware of the location of this vehicle."

Right, but as a matter of business policy. I'm speaking as a matter of legal precedent. (Which may be applicable in this case, just not explicitly stated.)

Top level comment suggested a right to charge for costs incurred, irrespective of having a warrant.

If you interpreted my comment that way I apologize, but that's not what I said. I said the owner could pay for the service OR the police could get a warrant. In no way was I attempting to suggest the police need a warrant AND still have to pay.

Apologies, I see that now. I read it as speaking on a right to be paid for services rendered, which I don't disagree with.

Although I'm still curious as to any case law.

There are worse examples http://www.nbcnews.com/id/39516346/ns/us_news-life/t/no-pay-...

tenant -> tenet

access to car tracking is a human right

If this had been in EU then the owner could have requested the information under GDPR, as the tracking data is private information connected to the person.

Honda do not have a service where if you pay them they will track your car. Honda track car owners, and if you pay them will give you a copy of the data.

It is very questionable if user data is owned by the company that do the tracking. How would it look if Facebook withhold evidence that a victim requested in regard to information they themselves uploaded? Personally I found find it rather poor behavior if they extorted the victim before returning the victims personal information.

"Man got unknowingly data mined, company refuse to return private information to the victim of an ongoing crime." sounds like a story to me.

The key part of the article is that company is now saying that they did not track the car. If Honda never had the information then the argument that "Man didn't pay for service, company did not provide said service" make more sense.

>If this had been in EU

But it wasn't, so none of the rest matters.

Is a GDPR request the same as "Amazon refused to give me an EC2 instance with 2GB of RAM because I only paid for 1GB"?

Are they tracking these cars in the EU?

On second thought don't bother answering that because again, this didn't happen in the EU so GDPR means absolutely nothing.

Okey lets not take about GDPR and simply talk about personal data gathered by companies. Is requesting a copy of that data the same as requesting a service without paying for it?

And since we are not talking about GDPR, who owns the personal data gathered by a company. The company or the person. Is there any argument in favor of the person having a right to access that data without paying?

> If this had been in EU then the owner could have requested the information under GDPR, as the tracking data is private information connected to the person.

That's an interesting interpretation of GDPR. The car is not under the control of the owner, and so the location data isn't the owner's data.

Do you think a judge would be influenced by the distinction between tracking a person and tracking the property of a person?

I am also a bit curious of how the contract between the company and the device owner would transfer to the thief. The common way for companies to enable tracking is by having the user agree to it, but the thief clearly did not. Do a thief in EU have a GDPR case against a company if the owner track the stolen device through a service like this one?

If you're not driving the car it's not your personal data, is it? It can't be used to identify you or anything about you, and so your data rights do not apply.

I hear the argument, but I wonder if you think judge would see that distinction as a valid argument in a court. A big part of the legal system is to actually see similar thing as being similar, even if there are technical differences.

Technically you can not track a person online. You can track an IP address, or a cookie, or an ID string in a database, but the server does not have eyes on the person behind the screen. Anyone can be behind the same IP address, people share accounts, browsers and devices. A operator can never be 100% sure if a data point identify you or anything about you.

But I don't think a judge would see that technical distinction. European courts already see mobile device location data as private data. So I ask you. What do you think a judge say about location data on peoples cars. Personal data just like mobile phones, or not?

GDPR would not have applied as the location data was not being collected in the first place. The entirety of the response to request for data would have been "We don't have that data."

This was the response Honda provided even without the GDPR applying.

The police could acquire a warrant to compel generation of the data, which Honda would comply with.