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Comment by jqpabc123 | Hacker News Reader

Is anyone outside of Meta really disturbed by this?

Nike will be, they're also requiring you to consent or get out (and also set lots of cookies without consent, but I guess it's fine if you're not a social media company).

I am guilty of this myself, but people should really vote with their money against companies with horrible practices.

I agree, but the reality is that the most egregious offenders of consumer rights tend to control the markets they exist in, and the diligence required to effectively "vote with your dollar" is enough to overwhelm even the most staunch among us.

I've always found Ivy Lee's essay "Mr. Jones' Dilemma" to be a great summation of this problem. I'm having a hard time finding it online, but I'll link to it if I find it.

Edit: can't find the essay anywhere, but it's the intro to this book: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/36077624-mr-lee-s-public...

I suspect some car companies may be.

I'm not completely sure but I think we had to allow Skoda to track us when we paid them to turn on the Apple connection stuff in the car. I'm sorry I can't be more specific or technical than that, but I've never had a drivers license and drive a cargo bike, so the car is sort of my wife's domain that I know very little about.

If it was an option, I don't see why anyone would allow their car company to track them.

GM did that to us and sold the telemetry stream to Facebook (without an opt in/out opportunity).

The car location thing is an actual issue that needs to be legislated away. Companies like bmw do this with irremovable sim cards and location data

Why the fuck does my car need an internet connection when nav isn't being used? Why are the sim cards irremovable? Why is an internet connection necessary for heated seats?

Principle of least privilege. These automakers can fuck off out of the data brokering industry with their ""automobile as a service"" business model

> Why the fuck does my car need an internet connection when nav isn't being used?

So they can update the firmware to fix (recall) issues instead of having you go into the dealership and pay someone to hook up a device to your car to do the same. This counts as 1-4 hours of labor--depending on how much of a pain in the ass it is to access all the car's ECUs/MCUs/systems.

I think it's important to note that the car only needs to be online for this to work. The automotive manufacturer does not need to know a damned thing about its location or regularly track your car's movements for this to work. A simple wifi connection to the Internet would work for the same purpose.

You should also know that newer electric vehicles have built-in Wifi for communicating with charging stations so they can keep track of various data fields about the batteries (e.g. temperature, charge state, etc). No reason why they couldn't also use that to download firmware updates when necessary.

I think it's important to note that the car only needs to be online for this to work.

I think it's important to note that what the manufacturer *needs* to know and what they have access to from your car's computer may be very different things.

Your car's computer system is most likely tracking a great deal of information about your driving history including speed, distance, acceleration, braking and *location* if a GPS is installed. All of this is most likely available to the manufacturer through an online connection if one is available.

And such a connection may still exist even if you don't know about it.

I can't imagine anybody without a paycheck-based motivation would be concerned by this. The fact that so many people in this comment section are whining about it is simply a reflection of the number of techies who work for Facebook or a company like it.

I am disturbed, because it took so long to come to this realization.

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