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.
Im sorry, but this is just silly.
If a camera rocords your face, it can be used to identity you. Thus it falls under GDPR regulations as PII. That requires that the footage is kept no longer than needed for its purpose and that what happens to the data is spelled out exactly. My car already comes with a privacy policy that you can read.
So the answer is: Anything that can be used to identify you will deleted - or rather it will never get stored.
And the reason this regulation doesn’t spell out what happens to the data is that it doesn’t need to because GDPR covers ALL data already.
The EU is guilty of many things, but this is solely about increasing driver awareness and preventing deaths and injury - and it’s working, with each generation of requirements, less people die.
You guys are hilarious with your “I’d just keep/buy an old car.” The EU is also making it illegal to repair older vehicles and forcing people to replace “outdated” models with more environmentally friendly ones. China did the same thing with a buyback and destroy of all their outdated vehicles. Their aren’t going to be any old vehicles. The only way to address this is to demand privacy rights and protection NOW.
The data destination should be mandatory disclosure, not a mystery.
So if your teenager bangs their partner in the back seat do you sue your insurance or the automaker for recording child pornography?
Depending on the locals laws, the very act of transmitting such images over the internet qualifies as “distribution of CSAM”.
Only buying pre 2018 cars from now on, I will have a Toyota collection that will run forever
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
I bet before long someone will have a design for a little device to place over the camera with an image that looks like the interior of a car with a random person’s face visible. Doesn’t even need to be a screen, just a backlit photo.
Then some features will likely not work
I’d rather have the option for a factory installed dashcam or at least a mount for me to install one.
Every new car. So congrats on further destroying the new car market, good job.
Time to stock up on old cars?
Sweet my problem has just become a massive opportunity!
How many more years before me never owning a car and never driving is enough to put me on a list?
I won’t own anything made after 2015… That’s when LTE chips started becoming standard in cars…
I told my wife, my next car will have a carbuerator.
A carburetor is a step too far, you invite misery, do you hate yourself? Take care, lol.
But yep would love to see more folks keeping old cars running, I won’t be taking the plunge into “~mortgage and routinely operate my own bubble of dystopian hellscape”, think I’ma pretty much lifetime “pass” on that flavor of nastiness.
I want my next car to be an ev… but with manual window winders
Get an old car that doesn’t run and an EV conversion kit.
Spend $40,000 to end up with a $5000 car.
You drama queens need to learn about black electrical tape.
I want my next car to be an ev… but with manual window winders
Then Slate has an EV for you!
Eh better then throttle body fuel injection. I drive carb, direct injection and throttle body. Never had much issues with carbs other then my fucking rototiller.
Carbs waste 30% more fuel.
Glad my 2018 car only had 3G which I had removed at the dealership due to it causing battery drain so I’m good!
I’m 42, living in the united states, never had a drivers liscense.
If they tried this over here, people would die. Because they’d force me to be behind the wheel of an automobile.
And thus, people would die.
The US does have this law. It’s just not enacted yet because there’s so much they’re demanding in the law and automakers say it’s not possible. But it doesn’t force someone who doesn’t drive to drive.
So, a couple of things…
For a real time warning system, there’s no need to actually record anything. Monitoring the video feed with no record capability should be fine.
Second, this sounds super easy to defeat with a printed photo card and a couple of Googley Eyes. 👀
“Super Easy to Defeat” is the now. They don’t care about that.
They just need you to accept it, and move along.
In a few years time, it will not be “super easy to defeat” but will be standard practice and accepted law.
By that stage it will likely be too late to do anything. They will have tied it in with chat control and all of our data.
Can you imagine the freedom that will be discovered 50 years from now in a trend, when people decide to ditch their personal devices and live like they used to 70, 80 years ago (maybe even 60).
Clarkson was a step ahead of us this time.
Soon enough, If you defeat or try to defeat the government surveillance system, it will probably be against the law
At least tesls are easily fooled.
I’m pretty sure I’ve seen some systems with stereoscopic cameras or Kinect-like laser grids
Second, this sounds super easy to defeat with a printed photo card and a couple of Googley Eyes. 👀
That’s fine, people are under the mistaken impression that there are bad drivers that would deliberately cheat this, and good drivers like them that pay 100% attention to the road, the reality is there is that 99% of drivers are good drivers ok of the time and distracted drivers some of the time, if the 1% genuinely terrible drivers actively bypass this, it’s still a major improvement for the those of us that share the road with the other 99%.
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.
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.
Got it, so you think it is punishing to poor people to make them pay $60-$100/mo for the privilege of driving a dangerous vehicle that can cause many thousands of dollars in damage to both cars and people, but your response to high car repair bills is for poor people to “just buy a new car.” I don’t think you have thought your cunning plan all the way through. Notice how I never brought up medical bills, only car repair bills? That’s because I agree that health insurance should be covered by the state, not private insurance. Health care is a basic human right. Driving a car is not. You talk about exploitation of poor people through making them have insurance, but you ignore that poor people can also be the victim of bad drivers. If a poor person with a $5000 car who badly needs that car to drive to work gets their car totaled by a driver without insurance, your solution is for them to “just buy a new car.” Do you have any idea how dumb that sounds? Your main argument is that this poor person should not be expected to pay $100/mo for insurance, but you think it is totally fine to ask them to pay $5000 to get a new car that they need to get to work to pay off that car?
And if you think only the wealthier drivers drive more recklessly, you should drive in a really poor part of town. You know who doesn’t give a shit whether they crash their cars? The people who drive really shitty cars. The statistics back that up, too. Wealthy areas have lower serious traffic accidents per capita than lower income areas. They also have far lower traffic fatalities per capita, but that can be down to the safety of their expensive cars. People in sports cars do tend to drive faster, but rich moms in expensive SUVs do not.
When poor people have a car accident it’s already fix it themselves, tolerate it, or replace it the vast majority of the time. When they do replace it what do you think the odds are the cheap insurance companies pay out more than they paid in? 3-4k is a lot of money when you’re broke, but I think the only real change would be one less pointless bill.
Poor people are capable of saving money. Poor people are capable of driving. I’m sure the statistics are very interesting, but I don’t think any of the mechanisms you propose suggest an inherent inability to drive or an inherent inability to save money. It is the burdens placed upon them that make it difficult to get ahead, not some inherent lack of ability deprives them of your privileges. I cannot support systems that increase that burden for the sake of others’ luxuries.
Clearly, you’ve had situations where you’ve found value in the insurance system, and good for you I suppose, but I cannot see a justification for forcing everyone into the system.
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.
No way in hell I’m buying a car with that BS. I’ll ride a bike first.
No way in hell I would buy a new car at all, lol!
No way in hell I could buy a new car. They cost more than my house.
My first used car was like $1000, lol!
