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.

  • Matt@lemmy.ml
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    13 hours ago

    So it’ll be possible to root the car through an OBD2 port, theoretically.

    • locahosr443@lemmy.world
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      11 hours ago

      Maybe but I don’t see you doing that over can us so it would need other connection to the ICE. I’d guess all those updates are OTA now.

      I’m guessing though, 2014 is my newest car

      • Matt@lemmy.ml
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        9 hours ago

        If you have access to the port, you can do some really cool stuff, like installing Magisk (app for generating rooted version of the Android ROM based on your filesystem), unlocking bootloader and flashing the image, since some manufacturers don’t know that less is more.

        Spoiler

        See the Security issues part of the article.