cross-posted from: https://piefed.world/c/tech/p/1247209/all-cars-sold-in-the-eu-now-require-a-camera-aimed-at-your-face-its-still-not-clear-wher
Starting July 7, 2026, every new car sold in the European Union must include a driver monitoring camera aimed at your face. Glance at your phone, your kids in the back seat, or the radio for too long, and the car will flash a warning light and sound an alert.
Automakers have known this was coming for years. What they, and EU regulators, have never spelled out is what happens to that footage after the alert goes off.
While the intention behind the new system is difficult to dispute, its implementation has raised several concerns. Early real-world testing suggests the distraction warnings can be overly sensitive and potentially distracting.
So if your teenager bangs their partner in the back seat do you sue your insurance or the automaker for recording child pornography?
Only buying pre 2018 cars from now on, I will have a Toyota collection that will run forever
Time to buy a Daimler-Benz W123 240D (OM616) with 53 kW (72 hp) and a 4-spd manual. Yep, that’s all I need.
This is for cars where everything is being put on touchscreens so you have to take your eyes off of the road to control it?
A camera that faces both the driver and front windows by default, but only stores it where the owner wants it stored would be nice. Making it a default would change how cops interact with people.
We are talking about EU, not USA.
ACAB is ACAB the world around.
Oh I know! But the gilets jaunes were not in a car. I think so far I’ve only heard of US shooting persons in car for no fucking reason.
If body cams being on didn’t change how they interact with you. Nothing will.
The footage will only be used to harm you
The terrifying thing is, body cams probably did change how cops interact with people. They were that bad before. There’s also been a few times when a cop their forgets to turn off their body cam or arrives late and got in some trouble.
If you actually owned the car and the software on the car, then you could set the feed to be stored offsite somewhere. Even if the cops knew it was being recorded, they wouldn’t be able to get it deleted. Even if they deleted the local copy, they wouldn’t be able to know how many backups there are.
And make insurance higher, just like why tye scan IDs when you buy cigs and booze.
Yes harm
What if you tape the camera ?
I’m speculating wildly, but if the regulations for road sign cameras are anything to go by, the EU will require the car to wail at you every few seconds because it thinks the speed limit on the highway is 40 km/h because it picked up a sign on the offramp you just passed.
The car won’t start.
Then some features will likely not work
Time to get to work on emulating a driver sitting in the car doing nothing to fool the computer.
Like?
Brakes
:(
Like the ignition. Apparently Meta is subsidising the storage and assessment infrastructure for clip analysis
This is garbage.
The camera works in real time and doesn’t store anything.
The car
before long people are gonna want to buy nothing but used 70s and 80s carbuerated shitboxes just to avoid all this shit.
10 bucks says all this data is being fed back to insurance companies.
Please install this rootkit on your phone for $10 off your car insurance.
This was on the news today on tv and they showed a camera filming the driver, watching his upper body.
I bought a car from 2023 without all this shit so I’m very happy. Newer electric cars also beep when you go over the speed limit, which would drive me nuts.
If anyone owns a current BMW and the speed limit beeping drives them nuts:
Hold the “set” button on you steering wheel for about 2s, the screen will inform you the Warnung has been temporarily turned off (until your next start)
I’d rather have the option for a factory installed dashcam or at least a mount for me to install one.
The mandate says nothing about cameras specifically.
I thought it did as well but it only specifies this :
Driver drowsiness and attention warning and advanced driver distraction warning systems shall be designed in such a way that those systems do not continuously record nor retain any data other than what is necessary in relation to the purposes for which they were collected or otherwise processed within the closed-loop system. Furthermore, those data shall not be accessible or made available to third parties at any time and shall be immediately deleted after processing. Those systems shall also be designed to avoid overlap and shall not prompt the driver separately and concurrently or in a confusing manner where one action triggers both systems.
Don’t get me wrong, manufacturers are going to have a fucking field day with all of the shit they’ll try and get in under this banner of “safety” and they will almost certainly work their monetisation shenanigans in around this.
It might seem like that wording prohibits data collection, but it doesn’t cover all the bases a team of well paid lawyers would be able to come up with. Or they could just do what they normally do and just ignore the “no data collection” part and pay the
cost of doing business taxfine and rake in multiples of that fine in profits.My point is , it doesn’t specify cameras, so theoretically a company could come up with a non-face-scanning way of doing this and use that instead.
will they ?..fuck no…but they could if they wanted to.
Which is arguably worse.
edit : A note to say that I’m not arguing against the safety aspects of this , they might be fully valid, i’m arguing that it’ll be abused for profit in any way the companies think will give them a positive ROI.
Unless it can prove that it is running entirely locally with no outside connection, it can fuck off.
Even then… I still don’t want it.
And politicians in germany are wondering why the car industry is collapsing. Ain’t nobody can afford those european cars if there are a gajillion unnecessary regulations making cars obnoxiously expensive. And slapping massive tarrifs on Chinese cars which are a lot cheaper kills the remaining incentive to buy a new car, especially when nowadays it is necessary to reduce the amount of ICE cars and accelerate adoption of EVs. Dumb fckn politicians.
For anyone thinking they can just cover it or something…
Those cameras are for detecting distracted and tired drivers. They run special AI models that track eye movent and other queues. Covering them will obviously be detected by so will be putting a picture in front of it.
When it detects it’s disabled a warning light will light on the dashboard. For now it’s not specifically forbidden to cover it but the warning light may mean issues when passing technical revisions. In case of an accident insurance may also treat it as a proof that you were at fault. For now it’s all just speculation as the rules are new but most likely it will go this way.
A rasberry Pi with a small screen placed in front of the camera at the right distance playing a constant (lengthy) loop of you looking just fine while driving will become a necessity.
The primary purpose of AI systems is mass surveillance.
Yes.
My utv detects the seatbelt. If you don’t click in the seatbelt, it limits speed to like 10mph and limits the hp. Sometimes I’m tooling in the yard or getting it unstuck and I need full HP but also need to get in and out of the vehicle. Someone made a cute little bypass that took 5 minutes to install. Works like a charm. Now, when I’m driving on a road, I buckle up, but when I’m plowing the snowy driveway I don’t.
How do I learn to be a FOSS developer so I can start working on firmware/software replacements for vehicles?
Couldn’t you just sit on top of the buckled seat belt?
I have a John Deere skidsteer. To even start the machine you need to crawl over the loader bucket, turn around with your back to the machine, kind of fall back into the cab to sit down inside the tight cab, feet on both hydraulic peddles, buckle the shoulder/lap belt, close the front glass door to access the ignition, toggle a safety switch, then turn the ignition key to start it. A fighter cockpit has more room.
If for any reason, if you need/want to dismount from the machine you must reverse each step to shut down the machine to get out. If you do one thing out of order it immediately kills the engine and stops the machine. Imagine needing to do all that multiple times a day or even hour.
A single seatbelt to buckle ain’t no thang.
***And yes, the machine is for sale…
Shutup, nerd.
Edit: Truth is, I thought of that and tried it. I cant remember why, but for some reason it was uncomfortable. Or maybe I wanted the flexibility to buckle easily when I felt it was warranted. Something like that.
Jumping straight to vehicles might be much. But you can definitely start hacking away at small iot devices or routers. They usually have poor/no security and are a great way to get your feet wet.
There are whole youtube channels dedicated to reverse engineering small consumer devices.
Right on. Thanks. I never expected to jump straight to vehicles, nor do I think one man is out there making the FOSS operating systems, so I guess I’m just wondering where I should start to be able to contribute to the effort in the near future.
Sounds like more ways for insurance companies to a) charge you more based on behaviors they arbitrarily determine are “bad”, and b) take your payments for years/decades then never pay out because they say something you did on video makes any accident your fault based on some term buried in the 500 page contract you obviously didn’t read all of.
They already do “a” by taking vehicle blackbox info uploaded by dealers or via telemetry and increasing your rate via their risk analysis. Note, your rates never go down for good driving. Only up.
I just want to rant about how dystopian car “insurance” is.
Set aside all the justifications / propaganda you’ve heard about car insurance, and think about how it actually works. You’re legally obligated to pay a corporation for the right to use your vehicle on public roads. What do you get out of it? For the vast majority of people nothing. Even if you get in an accident they’ll do their absolute damnedest not to pay you or to pay you a pittance that you could’ve covered with a fraction of the cumulative fee. That’s basically the text-book definition of a scam. Even if you do have “good” insurance (doubt) they’ll have higher prices due to all the scammy insurance companies. It’s a legally obligate scam – insurance has effectively turned every public road into a toll road.
Frankly, I feel this way about all forms of insurance, so I doubt anyone will take me seriously (It’s not hard to save and invest money, with that the entire notion of insurance kinda falls apart). Still legally obligatory insurance is a particularly disgusting form of oligarchical capture.
Should read up on the history of medical insurance, e.g. blue cross blue shield. The idea was that expensive payouts can happen early on during someone’s coverage, before they have a chance to build up savings. No one wants that to happen to them, so if everybody is in the pool of people who will pay for coverage, that risk is mitigated by being spread over a large group who only need to pay in a little at any time.
Rich people or institutions who can afford to self-insure don’t need insurance.
This original insurance was non-profit. The capitalist insurances are the ones realizing they can choose to only cover people who aren’t likely to need payouts, and profit off of the difference between pay ins and pay outs. I also agree this is a morally dubious system.
This particular example makes me uncomfortable because it implies there’s some circumstance where someone who couldn’t pay the monthly insurance bill would be turned away when they need serious medical attention. Like, I understand the logic of insurance being better than dying here, but it doesn’t really change the underlying logic of the situation being ‘oh they can’t pay we’ll just let them die’.
The government should just cover that with standard taxes. It shouldn’t even be government insurance where everyone is paying in an equal amount to make it ‘fair’. If we have to take more money from rich people than poor people to prevent deaths, just do it. The working class betters everyone. We should be treated well.
The scam in this case where you can’t wait / go without / buy cheaper is more rich people trying to find an excuse to not acknowledge how much the rest of society does for them.
That makes sense today; insurance was invented in a different time, by community members self-organizing.
I used to think like you do. “How does this benefit me?”
But as a pedestrian who was hit by an uninsured driver, I can firmly tell you that you have no idea what you are talking about. Driving is not a constitutional right. It’s a privilege that the state gives to you. It’s extremely dangerous for those around you, so limiting the ability to drive very dangerous vehicles to people who are financially responsible isn’t the worst idea. You might even say, “but you can just sue the person who hit you if they don’t have insurance.” The response is to think about the kind of person who can’t afford $100/mo and how much you might be able to squeeze out of them in a lawsuit over $20,000 in repair bills.
as a pedestrian who was hit by an uninsured driver
Sorry that happened to you, that’s genuinely terrible.
That said, I think you should be angry at the cost of medicine and medical care rather than being angry at all poor people because one acted terribly. We should do everything we can to prevent people from being hit by cars, but I don’t think exploiting poor people for needing to get from one location to another is going to help lower incidence of pedestrian collisions. In my personal experience it’s usually the wealthier cars who drive more recklessly, but there’s certainly no mechanistic relation between being poor and being a bad driver. The poors aren’t inherently less capable of driving. (Unless, you know of a way to get insurance for free…)
$20,000 in repair bills
Just buy a new car. If your car repairs costs more than a year of my rent you need a cheaper car - or a better mechanic. I’m very sympathetic to people hit by cars - I think that’s terrible. I’m not at all sympathetic to rich (or “middle class”) people complaining about damage to their $100k+ vehicles. You can buy an used electric fleet van for ~$40k, and that’s just about as fancy as you could practically need. Anything beyond that is a show of status (many things below that are still a show of status), and I’d rather not pay a second tax to an oligarch so people with more money than sense can show off how much money they can waste.
Maybe 16 wheelers should have insurance, but it’s exploitation of the poor elsewhere.
It’s not a $20k repair bill I’m worried about, it’s the potential of $100k+ in medical liability that I’m really buying insurance for.
In my area there’s plenty of expensive cars driving around too, I somehow doubt the minimum $25k insurance would cover even half the cost of a totaled car + everything involved.
I didn’t mention the medical liability, since a modern civilized society shouldn’t need to have me worried about medical liability. I was lucky to have good insurance when I was a pedestrian hit by an uninsured driver. I wasn’t on the hook for my $60,000 in medical bills, because I had insurance. In a good society, I shouldn’t need private medical insurance to protect me if I get hit by an uninsured driver.
Now, if my new car gets totaled by a shitbox '88 Cutlass Cierra driven by a person who can barely even afford THAT car, then that’s where requiring insurance comes into play.
