Below is the full-text of a Mozilla campaign email I received. Mozilla’s consumer buyer’s guide Privacy not included reviews apps and consumer electronics to help the general public choose products that better respect their privacy, and occasionally organizes petitions & campaigns to push for privacy regulation and accountability.
The bad news: major car companies say they can listen to us in our cars, collect our genetic information, track information about our sex lives, and sometimes even sell our personal information to places we don’t even know.
The good news: major car companies are also listening to our complaints about data privacy.
Last week, [Mozilla] revealed research showing that 25 global car brands are out of control when it comes to collecting, protecting, and even selling our personal information. And [Mozilla] stirred up a hornet’s nest.
Immediately, the auto industry scrambled to defend their disturbing surveillance practices: They spoke to the international press and wrote to the United States Congress, claiming that their car companies are “committed to protecting consumer privacy” and even called for regulation themselves.
As infuriating as this may be, it’s actually good news for our cause. If the auto industry is already getting so defensive, it means they are feeling the pressure from our research and all the bad press. And that means we’re making an impact.
Now is the time to use the momentum, increase public pressure and make car companies stop their intrusive data collection practices. Will you join thousands of Mozilla supporters and become part of the campaign?
Like it or not, Mozilla is among the last bastions of sound, honest software.
They spoke to the international press and wrote to the United States Congress, claiming that their car companies are “committed to protecting consumer privacy” and even called for regulation themselves.
“Gee whizz we awe vewy sowwy fow doing a pwivacy invasion” 👉👈🥺
I’m beyond sick of corporations knowing they can do whatever they want as long as they run to congress and flagrantly lie.
To be a fair here even though I dislike corporations just as much. In the past I have seen big corporations call for regulations in their own shady tactics. In those cases they felt like they needed those malicious practices to stay competetive with the other companies doing the same shit. Basically they want to stop but feel like they can’t since the competition is doing it too.
I’m not sure this is the case here. But that stuff sometimes happens.
Yeah but those supposed companies that “needed those malicious practices to stay competitive” also could have done the thing Mozilla is now doing. Could even use direct knowledge and proof of those practices in a big ad campaign about how they actively don’t want all your info. This “doing it because everyone is doing it” headspace is one of the many corpo versions of “just following orders.” I understand the point you are making, but it isn’t like any of these companies are too small to fight back. Allowing this kind of thing (beyond just this specific instance) just further gaslights us at a consumer level into continued abuse being normalized and okay. Which makes it even harder to do anything about it.
Just like with how we see that a major amount of voters literally just give up and see everything as pointless in doing anything (and that is assuming that they even know about any information at all). Or how we are trained to only see one or two day polite marches in protest of something as being the whole “fight” and just go home. But when people don’t just go home or “stay out of normal people’s ways” it is seen as those protesters being “unrealistic” or even “assholes in the way.” The whole point of protests is to literally be as in the way of “normal life” as possible to push whatever change they are fighting for.
I actually agree with all your points.
I just think regulation which outlaws the problematic or unethical behavior is one possible way to improve the situation. And I am not against a company calling for these kinds of regulations.
Even with Mozilla as an example. Banning or limiting data collection or web standard warping practices would strengthen Mozilla against their competition.
Every time a corporation or group of corporations ask for regulations to be placed on themselves, that’s a massive red flag that they are going to lobby to cut the legs off of that regulation, or they will make the regulation give them more power.
An optimistic interpretation is that they feel like they can’t stop data collection without being hurt in the marketplace by competitors who will make more money by continuing to collect data, so they want governmentregulations to level the playing field.
That’s being really charitable though…
I just sent a request to get all info they had on me and my car. Will be interesting
how do cars transmit the data they collect if they don’t have a wifi connection?
And of course disabling these modems cause the cars to throw up warnings and potentially put the car in limp mode, so you can’t even turn the damn things off without potentially bricking the car.
Depends on the car. IIRC in newer GM cars you can just pull the fuse for the cellular modem and generally just lose the connected features.
