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.
Chad EU does based things as always.
For all the sceptics: How would that data be send and where it would be storen and for what purpose?
1080p stream in acceptable bitrate is around 1MB/s. Assuming average driver drives 1 hour daily, that is 4GB/day/car, or more than 1TB/year/car. VW group sells around 4 millions cars per year, so assuming 10 years lifespan, that’s (4 million times 10 times 1TB) 40 Exabytes of data you need to store per year. For context, that’s 2% of total storage market capacity.
Okay, but that’s absurd, nobody is going to store that data, I hear you say.
Let’s assume no data is stored on servers. Instead, all that data is just send to them, so they can do whatever malicious shit is on agenda this week.
Maintaing 1MB/s stream is not a trivial task, especially if you want to do that for free. I might’ve slightly underestimated the core of the problem, it’s completely impossible to do that. One may argue that they could create new infrastructure or pay existing cellular networks, but that’s an absurdly expensive task.
And at last: Why would car manufacturers even consider doing that? What is the purpose?
Have the car store its own data. You can fit 500GB on a micro SD card, think of the storage you could fit in an entire car.
Lower the framrate. 1080p at 60fps, but anything above 30 looks smooth, and you can go all the way down to 12-14 frames and still have pretty good video.
Run local event detection on the car, and only have it upload small segments of video when it detects certain events.
Allow a control device to request video that are stored on the car the next time the car checks in.
I think limiting the data collection in this way would allow full surveillance when desired, but not require a lot of overhead on the network.
Ultimately, the “limiting factor” for these kinds of systems is the human element. You can only hire so many people to review so much video in a given time period. AI is changing this, but even then, you can only hire so many people to review events flagged by AI in a given time period too.
Why would they send all the footage and not just clips on demand? Why would they constantly record or monitor all cars, rather than just ones of special interest? Why would they need a 1080p stream when for a use case like this a much lower resolution at a fraction of the bitrate will be more than sufficient?
My guy have you not heard of 4G and 5G?
AI training data, or because the government clandestinely told them to.
Good thing I live where cell service is extremely spotty and has no coverage.
This data would be nearly worthless for AI training, since it’s random and repetitive. You would need to record significant portion of time to avoid model poisoning. Who would be reviewing that data?
Why would government want that data?
Occam’s razor: The purpose of this law is exactly what lawmakers say it is.
So you think they are hiding an undetectable iPhone in your car for free?
The actual mobile broadband hardware for your phone is like the size of a dime. Also, if you have a little “Shark Fin” on the top of your car, you might consider looking in there…
and who is going to pay for petabytes of data storage very week?
Hiding? Modern vehicles straight up have cell modems and advertise it, look up Toyota Connected Services for example.
They aren’t giving you an eSim for free.
for the amount of money they would profit just from selling that data to insurance companies is enough to cover a fucking esim.
also, i forgot that cars are free these days and not thousands of dollars.
Are you saying they have a secret program where they illegally take your data and sell it to insurance companies?
i am suggesting that doing so would be profitable.
i don’t believe this would be illegal.
Selling tracking data from your customers without disclosing it would absolutely be illegal.
You’d go to jail if you did that in Europe, likely face a huge fine in certain US states too.
it’s run by aliens and lizard people.
That’s why they’re taking the video.
So they are taking a video of you and in exchange giving you $10-50/month worth of data access?
Data doesn’t cost that much.
I think most of the privacy-violating and abuse-facilitating scenarios that we’re all too plausibly imagining could be served by the transmission and storage of even a single photograph per drive.
All of the existing consumer-surveillance tech seems to be focused on 1) Finding ways to make your attention more valuable to advertisers and 2) Selling information on your movements and proclivities to interested governments.
Pictures from inside a car could fit right in with those priorities. They could tell car makers, advertisers, insurers, and governments a lot about who really drives the car the most, that person’s demographics, taste in clothing, driving ability, distractability, fatigue levels, health issues, etc.
I should be clear: I’m absolutely speculating. But I don’t know how anyone might look at the landscape that exists today, with surveillance in our phones, our televisions, our music players, and our cars, and think that such speculation is far-fetched or unrealistic.
They sell driving habits and other informatics to insurance companies at the very least, this is publicly known.
Many TVs these days form a mesh network using the TV of your neighbor, or his own neighbors until they find a device with WiFi access in order to call home.
No reason why cars can’t do that now that they’ve been made into computers with wheels. A trend that I absolutely despise.
wtf???
All these fears and conjecture typically comes from paranoid Americans. In non shitholes, they have General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the EU AI Act. Essentially a HIPAA for personal data identification.
In Europe, the goal is to reduce:
Intoxicated driving
Distracted driving
Auto theft.
But Americans want to believe they are so important there is a committee of people in government watching their fascinating daily lives.
Homeland Security takes in petabytes of data every month and does nothing with it.
Your comment literally melted my brain cells.