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American law doesn’t generally prevent them from surveillance, so long as a shrinkwrap license provides consent and any token one-time fines are classifiable as necessary opex if they survive a decade of court appeals.

This is slowly changing, but with 50 member states and aging union leadership, there is no GDPR equivalent yet for citizens of the US.

(And, CCPA protections are only offered to citizens of California, which demonstrates the corporate incentives to keep it fractured and at the state level nicely.)

The most effective way to get this changed would be to identify the cars used by every US senator, and then write them letters pointing out that their cars have granted a sometimes-foreign corporation permission to record every conversation they have, keep a file on who they meet, and document their sexual activities. This is standard espionage tactics, and as awareness of it should be spread in Washington DC in particular.



You’re right, of course, but we shouldn’t really need a GDPR when we should already have an established reasonable expectation of privacy inside a car. Google search takes me to lawyers who agree, for what that’s worth… https://dworkenlaw.com/when-can-the-police-search-my-vehicle....


A person can give up their right to privacy to any officer of the law, and to a corporation just as easily.

US corporations now demand you give up all rights that the law permits you to give up, and they do so by shrinkwrap licenses that are “take it or leave it”, while denying the ability to deactivate a reasonable and small subset of functionality if the buyer disagrees.

This is typically where regulation steps in, and does so quite successfully in the EU but not the US, to say that consumers may not contractually give up their right to privacy without express, plainly-sought consent — so, not just shrinkwrap licenses — and that refusal or revocation of that consent shall not deny someone access to functionality that can be reasonably delivered without it. The US has its work cut out for it to catch up here.




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