this post was submitted on 24 Apr 2026
800 points (98.0% liked)
Technology
84143 readers
2286 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Why are govts like this suddenly? All in a arms race against privacy?
Because the people vote for such governments.
Because late stage capitalism, lobbyists pushed legislators to allow data collection so that it can be sold to insurance companies who also lobbied so that they can charge more for premiums.
Every company makes more profit.
We don't live in a democracy anymore.
Guillotine insurance companies. They're just scummy middle-men that seek profit at the cost of everyone else
The commodification of life itself.
Once you understand that we are just livestock to those in charge, a lot of their behavior starts to make more sense.
This was mandated by the 2021 infrastructure bill. I was hoping it got scrapped but apparently not.
Not suddenly. It's been going on at least as far back as 2001. Probably more. It's generally not the gov't either as the gov't is mostly driven by moneyed private interests like large corporations. They always push in different ways to get more power to make profit. Get rid of a regulation, make new regulation, get a subsidy, limit rights to resist some abuse, etc. Sometimes it's just more obvious that others in general, or it's in an are we personally pay attention to, and we're like WTAF.
There are valid concerns about crazy surveillance bills, but this specific one is overreaction.
Basically the 2021 infrastructure bill asks NHTSA to come with a standard to detect impaired driving (it doesn't say how it should be implemented, the camera watching us is author's imagination how it would be implemented) and if there is no technology available then they should publish a yearly report describing current state of things.
Because of the yearly report requirement I've been reading similar article saying that this will happen in 2026. That's how I learned about first.
You can find the reports here: https://www.nhtsa.gov/reports-to-congress
I think those overreacting articles are doing disservice because they distract us from actually dangerous things like for example bills like the one trying to incorporate age verification into OS requiring for example Microsoft verifying our identity before we can use their OS.
Not many people realized that bill like this already sneaked and was signed into law in California for example. It mandates this starting 2027.
Its been like this my entire life. When I was in high school in the 90s one of my teachers said the greatest battle your generation will fight will be for privacy. Little did they know there would be no fight. The general public doesn't seem interested in caring about things and voting with their wallet. Now we've reached this point where the game is up and companies have realized the masses will buy their products because people perceive that they "need" them and can't do without which gives them free reign to do whatever they want.
I am deeply frustrated that people aren't getting more involved. I link them to groups, I show them the consumer rights wiki, I talk to people about getting involved politically at the local level... So few people care. Things are going to have to get much worse before they take action, best thing we can do is have the framework in place for when they finally wake up.
They're scared of the likes of Luigi and paper Mario. More and more people are getting fed up
Control, why else?
Well in part it’s just being perceived that way. The car will decide if you’re drunk somehow becomes government surveillance. The App Store will ask for proof of age: government surveillance. And so on.
I’m not saying that this is a false interpretation but certainly it’s leaned on extremely hard in the way people report on and talk about these things. Hence why you get the sense that everyone everywhere is suddenly completely about government surveillance.
I think we could have a whole conversation about drunk driving and the efficacy and fairness of this kind of measure without even cracking the lid on government surveillance. But no one wants that. Nope, if it isn’t a direct descent straight into Fascism, it doesn’t get clicked on.
It's almost like dozens of major companies are going on a blitz of heavy public surveillance projects that are very publicly selling that data directly to the government... So when yet another of those companies already doing those things Congress up with a new surveillance method, people can do the math