There is a discussion on Hacker News, but feel free to comment here as well.
mmmm taste that free market. im sure that consumer will use their money to buy elsewhere, thereby telling volkswagon exactly how that behavior will be tolerated!
yep. the invisible hand of the market will surely correct for this and everything will become just and good… as long as pesky regulations don’t stick their noses in it…
No doubt exactly how Volkswagen went under when people stopped buying them because they maliciously tampered with emissions computers, literally poisoning people around their cars to make them look more efficient. Justice will no doubt be swift for these large organisations.
I see. A cop can call up VW and get your car’s location whenever they want, even if you’ve cancelled any sort of tracking service.
If the owner of the car is consenting to have it tracked, I don’t see the problem here. Why do you make it sound like the police overreached?
I seriously doubt vw cares if the owner consents.
In this case, they absolutely did, and it didn’t matter . I would bet that the reverse is true and that if they absolutely don’t consent, it still doesn’t matter.
I guess I’d like to believe car telemetry is governed like any other resource police have access to. Investigators can ask email services for logs, phone providers for location data, banks for transaction records, but would all require a warrant.
Owner consent changes the discussion significantly, especially with something this time sensitive. If my kid is kidnapped I absolutely want them to get access as quickly as possible, not waste time waiting on a judge. That should include cooperation and reactivating an expired subscription as part of supporting the investigation.
VW gave all owners access to free car-net for 5 years because of this screw up.
There used to a joke that those OnStar systems would call the cops on you for DUI and every day that is closer to being reality. I don’t condone drinking and driving but the government invasion of privacy is pretty scary too.
Didn’t they help the nazis too? It never stops with those guys