Perfectly legal for cars to harvest your texts, call logs::Just because they store messages in a way owners can’t access doesn’t mean it’s a privacy violation, US court rules

  • rockSlayer@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    I think this is another case where the courts cannot proscribe laws. I’m very disappointed in this ruling, but judges only interpret existing laws. The laws need to be updated.

  • BigDaddySlim@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Another reason to resort to an older shitbox without these “smart” features. Most of them have a modem always calling back home and even if you remove the fuse giving it power it’ll just put the car in limp mode or throw big error messages and yell at you to see the dealer.

    I grow tired of this technological dystopia

  • haulyard@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    The thumbnail shows Apple CarPlay, but in my limited understanding of all this, the car wouldn’t have access to anything in that ecosystem. Situation still sucks though, but anyone know of my understanding is right? I heard it described as the car screen is just a glorified monitor for the phone.

  • Denatured@lemm.ee
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    1 year ago

    Eli5 me pls. The story from the article is based in the land of the free and fake materialism. Does that mean these manufacture cant do that in the rest of the world yet? Or is it exclusively the go to country for testing out ways to further exploit money out of… well, one of the significantly poorest (financial inequality) poputional in the world (cost of living credit debt).

    Edit: fixed grammar, some words changed/added/replace. Was sounding rude and only realized that after rereading much later.

  • AutoTL;DR@lemmings.worldB
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    1 year ago

    This is the best summary I could come up with:


    In response to five class-action lawsuits, a Washington appeals court has decided that Honda and several other automakers did nothing wrong by storing text messages and call records from connected smartphones.

    Honda, Toyota, Volkswagen, and General Motors were all facing charges in separate but related class-action suits that all claimed they violated Washington state privacy laws.

    “To succeed at the pleading stage of a WPA claim, a plaintiff must allege an injury to ‘his or her business, his or her person, or his or her reputation,’” the judges ruled.

    In other words, it’s A-OK for your car to “automatically and without authorization, instantaneously intercept, record, download, store, and [be] capable of transmitting” text messages and call logs since the privacy violation is potential, but the injury not necessarily actual.

    Per the first amended complaint [PDF] filed in the Honda case, Honda infotainment systems in vehicles manufactured from 2014 onward “store each intercepted, recorded, and downloaded copy of text messages in non-temporary computer memory in such a manner that the vehicle owner cannot access it or delete it,” plaintiffs argued.

    Plaintiffs accusing Honda of WPA violations pointed to Maryland-based Berla Corporation, which manufactures equipment “capable of extracting stored text messages from infotainment systems” as a reason for owners to consider the data harvesting a privacy concern.


    The original article contains 532 words, the summary contains 215 words. Saved 60%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!