Hello people, my family recently bought a Renault 5 e-tech. The car itself is great, but there are some aspects that creep me out, especially the driver-facing camera. We didn’t actually know that such a camera existed before we bought the car, it was only mentioned as the car was given to us.
The cameras official purpose is to see, if you are tired and paying attention to the road, by some “AI magic”, I suppose. You can also let it scan your face, so that you automatically get logged into your profile.
I personally think, that that is kinda creepy, especially as there is no visual indication if the camera is currently recording and no official way to disable the camera hardware-wise. When it is being coverd, the car immediately complains about it.
When talking to friends or family about it, I got one of two reactions: equal concern, or “nice feature actually”, “what about the camera on your laptop?”, “you are way too paranoid”, “I have noting to hide; it is only me driving being recorded”.
I have also seen such cameras in other cars, BYD for example.
What do you think, is this creepy or am I too paranoid? Does anyone know where the actual data is processed, on device or on some cloud server? Do you have any experience with such cameras? I couldn’t really find any information about it on the internet.
Log into your profile? On your car? Your car logs you in to a profile? What the fuck
“what about the camera on your laptop”
God I hate these people. That camera has been covered by duct tape for years for very good reasons. A lot of them actually apply to a driver-facing camera in my car, coincidentally.
Btw OP, I think Renault has a contract with Palantir
Disassemble that fucking thing. Why do people tolerate this kind of shit?
Destroy the ccd with a high powered laser pointer
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It IS a cool feature but the privacy concerns kinda override any positivity I might have toward it. If it was completely offline with available source code, I’d be on board.
Thank god for duct tape
This car also comes with a ChatGPT based AI assistant which has a cursed Microsoft’s Clippy vibe, so it watches, listens to everything. Why would anybody want that?
It’s creepy. And it may make me an asshole to say, but I’d never want an interior camera in the event of an accident. It makes the following court case so much more gray, since you now introduce the opportunity to say “they were on the phone, talking, listening to music, whatever” and shift what should be a clear cut case into something more.
And this is why I have 2 cars from the 80’s that I refuse to give up. They’re nearly 100% mechanical, carburated and with almost no necessary fuzes to run the two.
I have a BYD Han, and the camera has a sliding cover, which has never been opened. Its crazy that you can’t cover it without the car complaining.
must be possible to disable the mobile chip? or at least wrap the antenna in some alufoil 😅
You might be able to remove the corresponding fuse
I don’t know the purpose of this camera but sadly I have seen numerous driver battling against falling asleep, including on highways, so going faster than 100km/h on a 1ton machine.
You all might be excellent conscientious drivers who are horrified that the car might check on your ability to drive but I can tell you with 100% certainty that not all drivers, including otherwise very kind and caring people, are not always able to drive, yet still do so.
To be clear I am not advocating for any data to leave the car at any point. I’m only point that some usages of cameras pointing to the driver might be both beneficial to everybody and not be a privacy problem. How? Well detect the presence of eyes and if there is not, demand a conscious action (e.g. pressing a button) and if this does not work, increase stimulus, etc. This does NOT require any data from being sent to anybody.
Unrelated but I’m also for speed limiters for cars. I also do not think it’s a privacy issue.
Still, to clarify, safety MUST be improved WITHOUT hindering on privacy of anybody involved.
Wasn’t there some news a while ago that talked about how bad car companies handle user data?
Mozilla’s latest edition of *Privacy Not Included reveals how 25 major car brands collect and share deeply personal data, including sexual activity, facial expressions, and genetic and health information
[…]Says Jen Caltrider, *PNI Program Director: “Many people think of their car as a private space — somewhere to call your doctor, have a personal conversation with your kid on the way to school, cry your eyes out over a break-up, or drive places you might not want the world to know about. But that perception no longer matches reality. All new cars today are privacy nightmares on wheels that collect huge amounts of personal information."[…] (source)
Not sure if this was the one I was thinking about. There was also this revelation made by the German CCC (Chaos computer club, pretty famous) about Volkswagen and some leaked GPS data. Here is an English article about it. (There is also the German CCC video, but the English doesn’t sound very good. It includes an interesting part where they show examples of how bad this GPS leak actually is. E.g. finding the cars of catering companies for important people.)
Criminals or spies could potentially use such data to create a detailed movement profile of the car owners. For foreign intelligence agencies, for example, it may be of interest to see whose cars are parked daily between 8 a.m. and 5 p.m. near buildings belonging to the Bundesnachrichtendienst, Germany’s foreign intelligence service. Or those which are driven regularly to the U.S. Air Force base in Ramstein. The Cariad data provided such information.
Btw. Any person who in the year 2026 response to privacy concerns with “I have nothing to hide” is a certified moron and shouldn’t be trusted with anything. They also have so little imagination that it should make everyone sad.
