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posted by Fnord666 on Wednesday January 17 2018, @01:39PM   Printer-friendly
from the new-1984-models dept.

Now that automobile manufacturers are almost more about software than hardware, your car company may know more about you than your spouse based on all the sensors in your car. The incentive to collect driver and passenger data is great. Every piece of data is used to increase revenue, especially if sold onward to third-parties.

Dunn may consider his everyday driving habits mundane, but auto and privacy experts suspect that big automakers like Honda see them as anything but. By monitoring his everyday movements, an automaker can vacuum up a massive amount of personal information about someone like Dunn, everything from how fast he drives and how hard he brakes to how much fuel his car uses and the entertainment he prefers. The company can determine where he shops, the weather on his street, how often he wears his seat belt, what he was doing moments before a wreck — even where he likes to eat and how much he weighs.

Though drivers may not realize it, tens of millions of American cars are being monitored like Dunn's, experts say, and the number increases with nearly every new vehicle that is leased or sold.

The result is that carmakers have turned on a powerful spigot of precious personal data, often without owners' knowledge, transforming the automobile from a machine that helps us travel to a sophisticated computer on wheels that offers even more access to our personal habits and behaviors than smartphones do.


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  • (Score: 3, Touché) by maxwell demon on Wednesday January 17 2018, @09:48PM (2 children)

    by maxwell demon (1608) on Wednesday January 17 2018, @09:48PM (#623830) Journal

    Of course the only reason your warranty is not voided with the older vehicle is that you don't have one. If you don't mind not having one, why care about voiding it?

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    The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
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  • (Score: 2) by Virindi on Wednesday January 17 2018, @11:39PM (1 child)

    by Virindi (3484) on Wednesday January 17 2018, @11:39PM (#623906)

    When a warranty is transferable, it means you are not decreasing the resale value by voiding it.

    • (Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Thursday January 18 2018, @06:58AM

      by maxwell demon (1608) on Thursday January 18 2018, @06:58AM (#624045) Journal

      Don't you already affect the resale value if you modify the car? I certainly would prefer to buy a car that has not been meddled with by some random person I don't know. That person may know their shit and made the car much better, but as far as I know, that person might also be a total moron that made a stupid mistake which makes the car break one year in the future.

      So I certainly would not pay the same for a car where the owner has done "cool shit" as I would for a car where this didn't happen.

      --
      The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.