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.
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.