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.
Driver awareness systems A.K.A. driver-facing cameras have been a thing for quite some time now, and they do in fact serve a legitimate safety purpose which is detecting if you’re falling a sleep or distracted from looking at the road. If you’re in the EU these systems are mandatory which is also why the car complains when the cameras are covered.
Unfortunately these systems can also be exploited for nefarious tracking purposes without any real way to know for sure.
Edit: they don’t use any “AI” for the detection AFAIK, just regular old ML (which maybe labelled AI for marketing purposes though).
I wonder difficult it would be to design an image of an alert driver you could tape over, or suspend in front of this camera. I remember people I knew who had breathalyzer locks on their cars would get a sober person to blow in it for them. Mislead the spytech.
Mind-boggling if true. There’s no way I would own such a car.
I mean, there is a fairly good argument to be made for safety features that actually increase road safety. The tech and legislation requiring it is not bad, it’s the unnecessary data-hoovering that can go on top of it that’s bad. This is where we sort of rely on GDPR to provide at least some guard rails, although it isn’t currently enough.
I’m sure it does save lives. That does not justify invading everyone’s privacy with a video wiretap in every car. As you and another commenter pointed out, it would be fine if it was self contained and we could trust the car wasn’t radioing to various corporations and governments. But we know for a fact that they are. As long as the car is able to transmit that data out of my control, I don’t trust GDPR to protect me from being spied on with this camera.
Thank you for the context! Interestingly, I can disable the system in settings, so Renault should be able to let me cover it or provide a cover
Legislation can sometimes be a bit weird, so they might not actually be allowed to let you cover the camera despite allowing you to disable the system in settings. Most likely this system is restored to default enabled state every time the car “starts” because this is often a requirement for safety systems that can be disabled.