My favorite part of all this is that motorbikes are excluded. Cars now have mandatory automated breaking and some other features like adaptive cruise control (not sure). Motorbikes have none. Why? Because bikers and bike manufacturers are pushing back saying that it will make bikes more expensive and (paraphrasing) it will ruin the fun. And so far EU is buying this. 25% of deadly accidents are bikers and most of those accidents happen during fun rides on the weekend but those accidents are fine apparently. Nothing they can do about it.
So easiest way to avoid it? Buy a motorbike. You will immediately gain protected status.
I feel like automatic breaking on a bike would be dangerous since there is balance involved?
Would it be illegal to cover the camera with electrical tape?
It stops the car.
I’m thinking of a lensed device with an LCD screen behind it, something small you can put in front of the camera.
It would need a special LCD screen, but I think my privacy is worth it.
It does not stop the car, don’t be silly. It will be reported as a malfunction on the dashboard.
On the newer Ford vehicles with Adaptive Cruise Control has a driver-facing camera. If you obscure your image or otherwise hamper the camera, the ACC stops working.
Its not a full stop of the vehicle, but it prevents the user from using the thing that they paid for.
It’s even possible for the car to sound alarm constantly while ADDW camera is covered making driving unbearable but it’s still has nothing to do with stopping the car.
I hate this
Source on this?
I heard this through the grapevine, but haven’t seen a real article about it yet.
This https://commission.europa.eu/news-and-media/news/safer-cars-safer-roads-new-rules-take-effect-2026-07-08_en does not explicitly mention “camera”, like most news articles does, but I guess the points
Advanced driver distraction warning system to keep drivers focused
and
Better forward vision
are a bit hard to implement without camera + computer vision.
But there is no requirement to send that data anywhere
Automakers collect and store all data by default. If there’s no law saying they CAN’T collect it then they’re gonna collect it.
And why would they do that?
Money mostly. I hear companies like making money.
Data is a valuable commodity. I think one car company filed a patent not long ago for a system that listens to conversations in the car and then serves advertisements on the central console based on those.
To follow drivers jerking off to gay porn. The biggest fear of America.
I recently watched a few videos about people taking the modems/WiFi boxes out of their new cars to stop the constant data collection.
On one of the videos there’s a warning that if you attach your phone to your car then the car will almost certainly start to contact through the BT to ‘phone home’ again to send data that way.I’ve got no idea if any of it is all true, but with today’s data collection companies mining everything they can then I can easily believe it.
And without consent is against EU law with a €20M fine.
You’ll just sign the consent by getting in the car. They already do that for the microphones.
Will it hold up in court? We’ll only know once someone sues.
I can’t give you a source but the whole point of The Internet of Things and every product that it includes is to give data on you to someone. It’s kind of safe to assume that if one of your devices can connect to WiFi and you live in a location with representatives who are too old to even vaguely understand why that should be regulated, then you are being reported on. It’s just kind of the whole purpose of the tech in the first place. At least until the device in question has a screen, then the purpose will be to also show you an ad.
Look at the Street! (Did you by chance just watch tech news?)
shh… be a bit more vague before the “L’s bad” crowd shows up




