Oh Good, My Car Tracks Me Now Too

TVs record everything you use them for, and soon, no doubt, cars will too.

We’ve all had that feeling, bumper to bumper with thousands of other unfortunate souls, stopped dead in the middle of a 30 lane hell-trench. We want nothing more than to kick the door open, fall to our knees, throw our arms wide and scream to the heavens, “Why aren’t the mega-rich profiting more from this data?!”

Good news, bucko. Your car will soon be every bit as duplicitous as your TV.

When your kids, Ayden, Brayden, Cayden, Grayden, and Jayden are old enough to drive, they’ll ask you to help them pay the premium charge for the ad-free infotainment system, but you’ll say no. You don’t even have that in your car. Why should the kids get it?

But look on the bright side. All this garbage will make a few people who are light years beyond the generational wealth end-zone just a few inches farther beyond.

Here I am, honestly trying to bolster my self-image by going into debt to buy a gigantic truck plastered with American flags and these jacklegs are turning it into some kinda nerd shit scam.

Isn’t that just fucking great?

What Data is Available To My Car?

The simple stuff: everywhere you go, when you went, how long you stayed, how fast you drove, how hard you hit the brakes, maintenance data, what traffic was like, weather data, multidirectional video of the trip.

The creepier stuff: Who is driving, how many passengers, their identities, biometric and face recognition data, what entertainment each of you is enjoying, what web sites you looked at, candidates and causes you support or oppose, face recognition of everyone on the sidewalk or in other cars.

The stuff that is absolutely evil capitalist garbage yet is more or less certain to happen: paying a premium fee to get an ad-free infotainment system.

Some of the biometric data will be defended as necessary to detect distracted driving, but the car will doubtless collect that biometric data on everyone it can.

Mind you, this will all be legal because you will agree to it when you buy the car. There might be a checkbox buried somewhere to turn off you car’s data mining, just as TVs have buried theirs, but whether the megacorps really stop when you ask them to, especially when they can often sue you for tinkering, is another matter.

Just wait until cars use biometric data to sense which drivers are pregnant so they can flip that person’s ad feed to 100% baby stuff. Or worse, a friends car figures it out. Or worse, a car just driving by scans you on the sidewalk.

Isn’t that just fucking great?

What’s good about this?

Does some of this benefit us? Sure, the same way that guns benefit us. Someone, somewhere, is probably using one in a way that could be regarded as “good.” But there’s also a lot of not-good. A whole, whole lot.

If someone does not drive on a dangerously worn out tire because they got a notification to buy new ones, that’s a good thing. But if tire industry profits soar because everyone is bombarded with notifications to buy new tires the second their tires tick over the extremely conservative manufacturer ratings, maybe that’s not so good.

Imagine you agree to give the CEO of your company a lift in your car. You need to charge for a few quick minutes along the way. No problem, there are tons of open charging stations. Like, oddly way more than usual. And you also notice you seem to have suspiciously jumped the queue for the plug. What luck! It’s never like this.

Your car has noticed that a wealthy person is inside it and is rearranging reality to give them a better experience than you get.

Isn’t that just fucking great?

This is late capitalism

Let’s get even murkier. What happens when your car starts to slow down the older it gets? Is that a necessary safety feature to protect the battery or a nudge to get you to upgrade?

Porque no los dos?

Fine. Then what’s the answer? It depends on the question. If the question is “How the hell do I get around?” then the answer for most Americans is still going to be the car. Our country is built around, and for, the car. There’s not much the regular Joe can do about that, which is why the auto industry will be able to be so aggressive with the data mining.

If the question is “How should we do transit?” then I think there are better answers, like buses, rail, and bikes. But those are good choices and we don’t make good choices here anymore.

Isn’t that just fucking great?