this post was submitted on 23 Aug 2026
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Lane keep assist has been around since about the 00s I believe and adaptive cruise and emergency braking since the 90s. That's not the tech that's spying on you lol
Lane assist makes people complacent and inattentive. If you aren't going to pay attention to driving then don't sit behind the wheel.
When it was created, this was true. However, now cars have systems that log just about everything you do and send it to the manufacturer, who then sells it on to insurance, ICE, anyone with money.
So it started off ok, but now I would imagine that if your car has a sensor, it is reporting data back to that central telemetry unit which is sending it up up and away.
Then they'll just report to the insurance that you turned it off and also report all the sensor data anyway.
And you can just rip out the antennas for the telemetry and that won't magically make your safety systems stop working.
You can switch off the safety systems if you want to, but don't pretend you're doing it for privacy reasons.
So you are sure that no one can access the cameras used for that?
It's more "is it practical to access the cameras" than "can someone access the cameras".
Look at it this way... How are "they" going to access your cameras? Are they going to have a mobile broadband connection for your vehicle, and upload realtime video data from multiple cameras in real time? Maybe for one car, but to do it for every car, they would end up choking out all the cell towers in an area. What about storing your data in the car and accessing it later? Well, storage is relatively cheap, but when you add in the compute required to encode that video, and depending on how much you want to store, it could easily be a few hundred dollars to include all that, and let's face it, manufacturers want to cut costs, so who is going to pay for it? To top it off, if this repository of compute and storage existed, computer nerds would have found it and publicized it, so it seems unlikely to me that it exists for most cars. Finally, what data would "they" hope to get from real time-video of your car that is not already documented in other ways? The GPS unit can log your position and velocity with ease, your phone is an active listening device that follows you everywhere, so there are simpler and cheaper ways to get the same useful data as a realtime camera feed of the side of the road that don't involve some huge conspiracy.
Yes, they have a mobile broadband connection in your vehicle. Selling your data more than covers the cost for them.
Well, the cars all have modems and quite a lot of processing. They don't need to send a lot of data anywhere to check if it has seen familiar faces.
Modern cars are literally cameras with wheels.
I will admit that changing the settings on the safety tech changes nothing in this regard.
Pictures are expensive (data wise), and on-device facial identification is not very accurate, especially at a distance in a variable environment
Cameras inside the vehicle? Those might be worth mining for data. You can easily detect if there's a person in frame, and snapshot all the passengers. Insurance and law enforcement would be interested in that
Cameras outside? You could search for human faces or license plates and upload them off peak hours... But how much is that information valuable? What percent of the time is a car even driving? Is palantir even set up to ingest that kind of disparate moving data sources?
Flock cameras just yield much more useful data... They're designed to sit somewhere and capture those pictures. Even if public outcry gets them removed, they're just going to wait until the public gets bored and then put up less noticeable cameras... We really need to fight this forever
All that being said, I have a car with no cameras and I'd only budge on that if the car reliably could drive itself. I don't like having cameras pointed at me
not really. you don't want to keep frames without movement, faces or license plates. then you can throw away most frames from a 60 FPS recording. 2 frames per second is better than nothing for running a portable surveillance station. then you can encode them in some efficient format with acceptable compression, and it's not that much anymore. massive 5G rollout was explicitly happening for IoT devices, to be able to handle the load.
debatable. google picasa had pretty good on-device facial recognition more than a decade ago, on average desktop computer hardware. ente.io runs something similar in their smartphone app today, fully locally. detects faces very well even in memes.
tech that can go into a smartphone can go into any smart car too, and likely does.
plenty valuable for "partners" like clearview AI and flock, or if you want to become a competitor in that field.
that's a wrong question. the correct question is what percent of the time is a car outside of the garage. lots of cars are parked on the street all the time while not driving.
how the fuck no. It's less data than what people upload daily to youtube, funded from government money basically.
like cameras appearing nowhere any time, like camera cars.
Let's do some order of magnitude math... Let's say each car on average "sees" 100 things a day (which is very conservative since there's multiple cameras and with basic object recognition you're going to have a lot of false duplicates). Let's say each picture is cropped to a megabyte with compression, which would be pretty low res to grab identifying information from
You can't do much in the way of video compression, because this isn't a video - we're cropping pictures, too much will change frame to frame
So 100MB a day per car, that's nothing... For one car. How many cars are doing this? 10 million? 50 million?
(Oh, and btw 5G is basically just 4G or 3G outside of Metro areas in the US)
It detects faces well, that's easy enough, and it can generally label the people because you only have so many in the pool of subjects. If you want to identify people in a population? You're not doing that on a phone. Even the best systems have a big problem with false matches
Parking lots are not usually good vantage points... That's where most cars live
And as for disparate data points... Unless ever auto company is using the same system, it's going to take non negligible amounts of work to integrate different systems. Palantir is probably going after the lower hanging and more juicy fruit, like Ring doorbells and commercial security systems. Or, you know, phones
That's what it comes down to. All this for what? I'm not saying they wouldn't do it, or it couldn't be done, I'm saying there's better options that they are already using for surveillance
If they were to do it, you'd pick Tesla - they have the cameras and sell monitoring as a feature. They're reasonably widespread, so you'll get almost the same coverage as if all automakers were on board - remember, this is about tracking people and vehicles, if we're recording them we're in a whole different ballpark
Or, you know, set up 100k cameras at key intersections and get a more comprehensive system with a lot less moving pieces
to add to the image processing, first gen ryzen desktop CPUs can handle basic object classification on live camera feed. not effortlessly, but they handle it, and performance has only ever improved with time.
Considering that the gen 1 ryzen 3 1200 (the lowest end model) is more than double the performance of the automotive processor in my car from 2023 (3.1ghz quad core vs 2.4ghz dual core)...
But, the car does do some onboard image recognition to support Hands-free driving, so there is enough compute onboard to manage that. However, avoiding objects and following a line is something you can do with a Lego mindstorm from 2000, not exactly super demanding computationally.
I reiterate, I think cars certainly have the hardware to spy on other people and drivers, but the practicality of using them for that purpose is pretty limited in regards to how much useful data you would get, how hard it is to get that data, and how much easier it is to collect better data from other sources.
what architecture is the CPU in the car? my smartphone is no 3 GHz, and it too can handle image recognition.
possibly hardware accelerated with some specialized hardware. there's this thing called google coral, it can be connected through PCIe or USB, and can do the heavy lifting for multiple cameras.
Tesla employees have shared the in car camera videos they record just for fun:
https://www.reuters.com/technology/tesla-workers-shared-sensitive-images-recorded-by-customer-cars-2023-04-06/
Luckily, not all cars are made by Tesla.
but too much have internet connected cameras in them
Cameras sound like a really expensive and inefficient way to gauge distance and speed differential between yourself and another object. I doubt many cars (besides, famously, Tesla) use cameras for LKAS or ACC.
I'm not even sure if they use cameras for driver attention systems.
Cameras are always used for LKAS, even things like Waymo mix cameras with LIDAR. That’s the only way to see the lines on the road, etc.
Now for ACC that’s always radar except for newish Tesla. Same with blind spot monitoring and parking sensors unless those are ultrasonic or something, but not cameras except for Tesla.
See comma.ai how one can basically do LKAS and adaptive cruise with one camera, but IME it typically uses the radar based ACC built into the car already.
They are used, not exclusively except by Tesla, but yeah. Lane keep is legit hard to do without a camera, acc is OK but using a multi sensor system is a lot more reliable.