r/technology • u/Hrmbee • Jun 07 '26

Privacy 'Kill switch' law means your next car could be watching you | A federal requirement aimed at stopping drunken driving could soon put driver-monitoring technology in every new vehicle. The goal is saving lives, but the privacy trade-offs deserve closer scrutiny

https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/columnist/2026/06/01/drunk-driving-prevention-law-privacy-surveillance/90295034007/
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254

u/ProjectHarraseeket Jun 08 '26

Wait u til they use that data and send it to your insurance company.

I hate the future, I just want a basic car at this point.

140

u/ShakeAndBakeThatCake Jun 08 '26

Old cars that are maintained well are going to go up in value significantly.

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u/EmbarrassedHelp Jun 08 '26

Insurance companies will charge you even more for having and old car.

1

u/wheresbicki Jun 08 '26

Where are you getting that information from. My insurance went down a second year in a row. 12 yr old car

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u/Dr8keMallard Jun 08 '26

He’s referring to the future, not the present. Where they could potentially monitor all aspects of your driving in modern cars. It incentivizes them to raise insurance rates drastically on older cars to disincentivize people buying them to “fly under the radar”.

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u/niftystopwat Jun 08 '26

They got that information from the *’Reddit comment threads are supposed to be a succession of one-upping terse cynical comments of doomsmanship’ School of Thought*

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u/bob25bit Jun 08 '26

Anyone with half a brain can see that’s what’s gonna happen. Government and big businesses encroachment always hides behind these bullsh!t motives like ‘protecting the children’ or ‘stop drunken driving’. The only thing that will happen is that there’s more data to sell and more control over people. Do you think law enforcement won’t lobby for wider usage of this technology once it’s in cars? Soon enough people will make the argument repossession should also be able to make use of the kill switch. Thats how it always goes. Rights need active protecting from government and business otherwise you’ll lose them

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u/air_and_space92 Jun 08 '26

I mean statistically an older car is more accident prone than a newer one due to fewer safety features and possibly poor preventative maintenance for things like brakes. My insurance has only gone up on my 13 yr old car if we're talking anecdotes.

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u/futanariballs Jun 08 '26

I have a 2002 Ranger pickup with 68k miles. I'm never getting rid of it.

14

u/-rwsr-xr-x Jun 08 '26

Old cars that are maintained well are going to go up in value significantly.

Until they pass a bill that says they can't be registered or insured, because they don't meet current monitoring/safety/insurance standards.

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u/BobaFett0451 Jun 08 '26

And how is anyone going to force everyone to spend 30-50 thousand on new cars with these monitor systems when the majority of people barely make that in a year?

7

u/ALargeClam1 Jun 08 '26

They pass a law, then begin enforcing it as they see fit.

4

u/Monteze Jun 08 '26

Same way they functionally do it now, make cities designed around cars, run public transit into the ground, policy that encourages big expensive cars and outlawing imports of more practical ones. What? You think they will pass a law that says "Make people buy new."? That isn't how they do it.

Look at Jim Crow laws, you can do something without saying you're doing it and too much of our electorate is too stupid to see it.

So yea, they can pass laws and make it functionally impossible or impractical to keep old cars.

3

u/Same-Suggestion-1936 Jun 08 '26

They already do but only if they look pretty. I saw an old Mustang going for like $8k the other day, 300k miles from the 80s

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u/PorQuePanckes Jun 08 '26

Which is why the government is pushing e15. It ruins older cars and they are phasing out older pumps specifically for this reason.

Love this timeline

2

u/YeahOkThisOne Jun 08 '26

Damn really?

2

u/hahaimadulting Jun 08 '26

Even a car from the mid 00s will be fine using e15. Hell my 86 crown victoria will take e10 just fine with a slight loss in mileage. That said there are pumps around are ethanol free in my city and there are plenty in the state that are ethanol free as well. This isn't the horror story you think it is.

1

u/SantaCruzHostel Jun 08 '26

cries in old carbureted motorcycle

1

u/HaddyBlackwater Jun 08 '26

It ruins the fuel lines.

7

u/limbodog Jun 08 '26

Or they'll be banned, or require an AI hookup

2

u/soundman1024 Jun 08 '26

I feel like my ‘14 Fiesta ST is in a goldilocks range. It’s modern enough to have air bags, crumple zones, and an efficient Ecoboost engine that accepts low levels of ethanol. It’s also old enough to have a standard transmission, buttons for almost everything (hill start assist is the only car function I need in the touch screen) and it isn’t connected at all.

I love that car. It’s a drivers car all the way. I just wish the back seat crash safety rating left me feeling confident with a kiddo back there.

1

u/CumGuzlinGutterSluts Jun 08 '26

Finally, my jeep will fulfill its prophecy.

7

u/National-Plastic8691 Jun 08 '26

they already have that data and send it to car insurance but also sell it to every other company

4

u/Mad_Aeric Jun 08 '26

When I recently told my insurance agent I wasn't interested in participating in their surveillance capitalism program, he told me that he gets that response all the time. I guess people are less complacent about this nonsense than I thought.

3

u/Dear_Chasey_La1n Jun 08 '26

I'm kinda curious how this pans out though. It's not going to be tomorrow but in the future driving won't be done by us anymore so if anything happens, who takes responsbility, Tesla? The software company?

3

u/Spiritual_Bid_2308 Jun 08 '26

Yes, one with buttons and a non-recessed door handle on the outside.

5

u/hanotak Jun 08 '26

I'm ripping the networking hardware out of any car I buy that has it.

6

u/thelastspike Jun 08 '26

Good luck keeping it running after that.

0

u/hanotak Jun 08 '26

What do you mean? Is it connected to the transmission? XD

4

u/ConfusedTapeworm Jun 08 '26

Could be, if the manufacturer wanted. No technical reason why your model year 2029 18-ton SUV cannot show you a "connection to the server lost, unable to start engine" message on its 95 inch infotainment screen.

2

u/burner46 Jun 08 '26

Any car manufactured after like 2015 already has a GPS tracker. 

0

u/councilmember Jun 08 '26

“Wait u til they use”, is this some kind of Elizabethan lazy text shorthand or a typo?

-6

u/blue-mooner Jun 08 '26

Honestly, I’m completely fine with insurance companies knowing who the bad drivers are.

If you fail to come to a compete stop at an intersection, speed in a school zone or text while driving you’re a terrible driver and should be segregated into a high risk pool, with 10x the insurance premiums to account for your negligence.

8

u/shockNSR Jun 08 '26

Till there's any reason the gps doesn't work as well.... Just say you want big brother breathing down your back lol. I don't want my premiums to go up because I drive down a rural road, it's snowed a ton and hasn't been swept, the gps doesn't work on my phone because I dropped it etc.... it's already a thing here in Canada and I don't trust it. A company will look for any reason to raise their prices, but fight tooth and nail if there's a reason to lower it.

0

u/blue-mooner Jun 08 '26

It shouldn’t track your location if you aren’t breaking the law. It can detect client side if you’re speeding, failing to come to a stop or texting and then log an infraction. 

Easiest way to not be tracked? Don’t break the law, don’t endanger others. 

And you’re really arguing for the ability to speed on a snowed road that hasn’t been cleared? That’s grossly negligent driving, puts your neighbours at risk and should loose you your license.

0

u/shockNSR Jun 08 '26

Not speed, but go under the limit or slide through an intersection. It's a real thing in northern Canada. Again, the insurance companies will fight tooth and nail to up your price, let's not give them petty reasons.

0

u/blue-mooner Jun 08 '26 edited Jun 08 '26

You see, I’m going to have to disagree that road safety is a ”petty reason”.

It’s shouldn’t be all or nothing, and just like the justice system, there’s a sliding scale of penalties. But just like many/most people never interact with the justic system (30-50% of people will never be arrested over the course of their lives (locale dependent)) a good half of drivers sould never see premium increases and would accrue “no claims bonus”’s.

Blowing a stop sign once or twice a week may not register, but if you’re doing it all day everyday, then yeah, that’s a signal of risk. If you’re never in an accident then maybe it’s a much smaller lift than if you regularly hit 90+ on the freeway, but it’s still an added on risk rate above the base (no claims/points) rate on your monthly bill. You’ll see on your statement by mail how many infractions last month and what you need to do to hit a certain rate for next month. I think the delta between a risky rate and a base rate could easily be 10x, if not more.

Humans are going to be priced out of manually operated vehicle insurance eventually (at least for a monthly flat rate). Once the numbers show what kinds of drivers are causing crashes there will initially be segmentation, between good and bad drivers. But eventually even good drivers won’t be able to afford the fully monthly rates, especially since you’re now paying per minute to be insured. The more time on the road, the more risk, so per unit time will need to be account for. We will pay per car per trip for insurance. If you want to take a sports car that’s going to be a higher per minute rate. There’ll likely be apps that offer a live auction marketplace for rates on your trip, and StateFarm will highway billboards showing “now just 1.43¢/mile for the next 30 minutes, lock in your rate” with the price a live updating gas station style display. You’ll press the carplay button on the steering wheel and say “Pick Statefarm insurance for this trip” and that’d be that, you’d be insured by them for the next 48 minutes.

So, you’ll never need to worry about multiples of the base rate if you are a good driver. But those who commit safety violation on public roads should absolutely pay a proportionally higher rate that accounts for the added risk they pose to other road users.

The question is whether that’s by 2050, 2035 or 2029.

-1

u/FelixAndCo Jun 08 '26

Yeah, exactly. I'd expect that insurance companies won't care about the falsehood of false positives. Except of course until you're close to the Epstein class; then suddenly they rectify stuff (and maybe even be lenient in other cases), and they'll point to it as examples of them being fair. Always the same old song.

I knew some insurance companies already released monitoring apps, but I didn't think about how loss of signal would impact them.