cross-posted from: https://piefed.world/c/tech/p/1247209/all-cars-sold-in-the-eu-now-require-a-camera-aimed-at-your-face-its-still-not-clear-wher
Starting July 7, 2026, every new car sold in the European Union must include a driver monitoring camera aimed at your face. Glance at your phone, your kids in the back seat, or the radio for too long, and the car will flash a warning light and sound an alert.
Automakers have known this was coming for years. What they, and EU regulators, have never spelled out is what happens to that footage after the alert goes off.
While the intention behind the new system is difficult to dispute, its implementation has raised several concerns. Early real-world testing suggests the distraction warnings can be overly sensitive and potentially distracting.
You must log in or register to comment.
Im sorry, but this is just silly.
If a camera rocords your face, it can be used to identity you. Thus it falls under GDPR regulations as PII. That requires that the footage is kept no longer than needed for its purpose and that what happens to the data is spelled out exactly. My car already comes with a privacy policy that you can read.
So the answer is: Anything that can be used to identify you will deleted - or rather it will never get stored.
And the reason this regulation doesn’t spell out what happens to the data is that it doesn’t need to because GDPR covers ALL data already.
The EU is guilty of many things, but this is solely about increasing driver awareness and preventing deaths and injury - and it’s working, with each generation of requirements, less people die.
What sucks is you know the US is going to put it in their cars “to simplify production” and we dont have GDPR to protect us, so you know that data is going somewhere.
The data destination should be mandatory disclosure, not a mystery.
You guys are hilarious with your “I’d just keep/buy an old car.” The EU is also making it illegal to repair older vehicles and forcing people to replace “outdated” models with more environmentally friendly ones. China did the same thing with a buyback and destroy of all their outdated vehicles. Their aren’t going to be any old vehicles. The only way to address this is to demand privacy rights and protection NOW.
So if your teenager bangs their partner in the back seat do you sue your insurance or the automaker for recording child pornography?
Depending on the locals laws, the very act of transmitting such images over the internet qualifies as “distribution of CSAM”.
The only option to avoid this is to agree to the “Crotch Cam” as a secondary feature, when purchasing. No salesman will visit your home. /s
This is for cars where everything is being put on touchscreens so you have to take your eyes off of the road to control it?
A camera that faces both the driver and front windows by default, but only stores it where the owner wants it stored would be nice. Making it a default would change how cops interact with people.
If body cams being on didn’t change how they interact with you. Nothing will.
The footage will only be used to harm you
The terrifying thing is, body cams probably did change how cops interact with people. They were that bad before. There’s also been a few times when a cop their forgets to turn off their body cam or arrives late and got in some trouble.
If you actually owned the car and the software on the car, then you could set the feed to be stored offsite somewhere. Even if the cops knew it was being recorded, they wouldn’t be able to get it deleted. Even if they deleted the local copy, they wouldn’t be able to know how many backups there are.
And make insurance higher, just like why tye scan IDs when you buy cigs and booze.
Yes harm
We are talking about EU, not USA.
ACAB is ACAB the world around.
Only buying pre 2018 cars from now on, I will have a Toyota collection that will run forever
before long people are gonna want to buy nothing but used 70s and 80s carbuerated shitboxes just to avoid all this shit.
10 bucks says all this data is being fed back to insurance companies.
Please install this rootkit on your phone for $10 off your car insurance.
What if you tape the camera ?
Just need a really tiny picture of your face to trick the camera.
I’m speculating wildly, but if the regulations for road sign cameras are anything to go by, the EU will require the car to wail at you every few seconds because it thinks the speed limit on the highway is 40 km/h because it picked up a sign on the offramp you just passed.
I bet before long someone will have a design for a little device to place over the camera with an image that looks like the interior of a car with a random person’s face visible. Doesn’t even need to be a screen, just a backlit photo.
Then some features will likely not work
Time to get to work on emulating a driver sitting in the car doing nothing to fool the computer.
Like?
I remember saying video on youtube, a guy said his Toyota doesn’t recognize his face in sunglasses and shows persistent warning message on the screen. I don’t remember details, but possible that adaptive cc won’t work, or you can’t use infotainment due to the persistent message.
Brakes
:(
The car
Like the ignition. Apparently Meta is subsidising the storage and assessment infrastructure for clip analysis
This is garbage.
The camera works in real time and doesn’t store anything.
Unless it can prove that it is running entirely locally with no outside connection, it can fuck off.
Even then… I still don’t want it.
This was on the news today on tv and they showed a camera filming the driver, watching his upper body.
I bought a car from 2023 without all this shit so I’m very happy. Newer electric cars also beep when you go over the speed limit, which would drive me nuts.
My car shortly beeps 3x every time I go over speed limit. So I’m punished when I try to maintain speed limit and going 2kmph over triggers the beep. So I just constantly go 10kmph over now and I get those 3 beeps just for the first time I cross over the speed limit.
The beep is tied to the road sign monitoring setting so I have to turn off both, not just beeping. So then I don’t get signs displayed on my dash board which can be actually useful sometimes.
I think its horrible and should be illegal. It’s a massive annoyance and could cause accidents since your attention is on that and not the traffic.
So tired of all the bullshit people never asked for.
May I suggest adaptive speed control.
I use it a lot. I set it 10kmph above the speed limit as well. It’s not perfect in a lot of city conditions and it can behave unexpectedly as well in these condition. Unless I want to fiddle with a spacing distance all the time and avoid sudden breaking for no reason I have to use it sparingly depending on time of day and location. Outside of cities it tends to work quite well for the most part. Some sharper bends trigger breaks too soon for no reason as well even though I’ve set sensitivity to the lowest.
Also during heavy rain it just tends to ignore everything in front of me and starts accelerating to the max set speed.
Don’t you know how roads work? Different speeds, situations, city traffic? Any of this rings a bell?
If anyone owns a current BMW and the speed limit beeping drives them nuts:
Hold the “set” button on you steering wheel for about 2s, the screen will inform you the Warnung has been temporarily turned off (until your next start)
The mandate says nothing about cameras specifically.
I thought it did as well but it only specifies this :
Driver drowsiness and attention warning and advanced driver distraction warning systems shall be designed in such a way that those systems do not continuously record nor retain any data other than what is necessary in relation to the purposes for which they were collected or otherwise processed within the closed-loop system. Furthermore, those data shall not be accessible or made available to third parties at any time and shall be immediately deleted after processing. Those systems shall also be designed to avoid overlap and shall not prompt the driver separately and concurrently or in a confusing manner where one action triggers both systems.
Don’t get me wrong, manufacturers are going to have a fucking field day with all of the shit they’ll try and get in under this banner of “safety” and they will almost certainly work their monetisation shenanigans in around this.
It might seem like that wording prohibits data collection, but it doesn’t cover all the bases a team of well paid lawyers would be able to come up with. Or they could just do what they normally do and just ignore the “no data collection” part and pay the
cost of doing business taxfine and rake in multiples of that fine in profits.My point is , it doesn’t specify cameras, so theoretically a company could come up with a non-face-scanning way of doing this and use that instead.
will they ?..fuck no…but they could if they wanted to.
Which is arguably worse.
edit : A note to say that I’m not arguing against the safety aspects of this , they might be fully valid, i’m arguing that it’ll be abused for profit in any way the companies think will give them a positive ROI.
My car has this… Hilariously the sleepy alert only kicks in when I decide to go slower than normal. The “keep hands on wheel” alert kicks off very frequently… Because roads are straight enough for no “input” to be detected
I’ve been in a car that lightly shook the steering wheel and pedals when you approached the speed limit.
That was super disconcerting because I didn’t know it existed until my steering wheel started moving on it’s own.
The primary purpose of AI systems is mass surveillance.
Yes.
Sounds like more ways for insurance companies to a) charge you more based on behaviors they arbitrarily determine are “bad”, and b) take your payments for years/decades then never pay out because they say something you did on video makes any accident your fault based on some term buried in the 500 page contract you obviously didn’t read all of.
They already do “a” by taking vehicle blackbox info uploaded by dealers or via telemetry and increasing your rate via their risk analysis. Note, your rates never go down for good driving. Only up.
I just want to rant about how dystopian car “insurance” is.
Set aside all the justifications / propaganda you’ve heard about car insurance, and thing about how it actually works. You’re legally obligated to pay a corporation for the right to use your vehicle on public roads. What do you get out of it? For the vast majority of people nothing. Even if you get in an accident they’ll do their absolute damnedest not to pay you or to pay you a pittance that you could’ve covered with a fraction of the cumulative fee. That’s basically the text-book definition of a scam. Even if you do have “good” insurance (doubt) they’ll have higher prices due to all the scammy insurance companies. It’s a legally obligate scam – insurance has effectively turned every public road into a toll road.
Frankly, I feel this way about all forms of insurance, so I doubt anyone will take me seriously (It’s not hard to save and invest money, with that the entire notion of insurance kinda falls apart). Still legally obligatory insurance is a particularly disgusting form of oligarchical capture.
Should read up on the history of medical insurance, e.g. blue cross blue shield. The idea was that expensive payouts can happen early on during someone’s coverage, before they have a chance to build up savings. No one wants that to happen to them, so if everybody is in the pool of people who will pay for coverage, that risk is mitigated by being spread over a large group who only need to pay in a little at any time.
Rich people or institutions who can afford to self-insure don’t need insurance.
This original insurance was non-profit. The capitalist insurances are the ones realizing they can choose to only cover people who aren’t likely to need payouts, and profit off of the difference between pay ins and pay outs. I also agree this is a morally dubious system.
This particular example makes me uncomfortable because it implies there’s some circumstance where someone who couldn’t pay the monthly insurance bill would be turned away when they need serious medical attention. Like, I understand the logic of insurance being better than dying here, but it doesn’t really change the underlying logic of the situation being ‘oh they can’t pay we’ll just let them die’.
The government should just cover that with standard taxes. It shouldn’t even be government insurance where everyone is paying in an equal amount to make it ‘fair’. If we have to take more money from rich people than poor people to prevent deaths, just do it. The working class betters us all. We should treat them well.
The scam in this case where you can’t wait / go without / buy cheaper is more rich people trying to find an excuse to not acknowledge how much the rest of society does for them.
That makes sense today; insurance was invented in a different time, by community members self-organizing.
I used to think like you do. “How does this benefit me?”
But as a pedestrian who was hit by an uninsured driver, I can firmly tell you that you have no idea what you are talking about. Driving is not a constitutional right. It’s a privilege that the state gives to you. It’s extremely dangerous for those around you, so limiting the ability to drive very dangerous vehicles to people who are financially responsible isn’t the worst idea. You might even say, “but you can just sue the person who hit you if they don’t have insurance.” The response is to think about the kind of person who can’t afford $100/mo and how much you might be able to squeeze out of them in a lawsuit over $20,000 in repair bills.
as a pedestrian who was hit by an uninsured driver
Sorry that happened to you, that’s genuinely terrible.
That said, I think you should be angry at the cost of medicine and medical care rather than being angry at all poor people because one acted terribly. We should do everything we can to prevent people from being hit by cars, but I don’t think exploiting poor people for needing to get from one location to another is going to help lower incidence of pedestrian collisions. In my personal experience it’s usually the wealthier cars who drive more recklessly, but there’s certainly no mechanistic relation between being poor and being a bad driver. The poors aren’t inherently less capable of driving. (Unless, you know of a way to get insurance for free…)
$20,000 in repair bills
Just buy a new car. If your car repairs costs more than a year of my rent you need a cheaper car - or a better mechanic. I’m very sympathetic to people hit by cars - I think that’s terrible. I’m not at all sympathetic to rich (or “middle class”) people complaining about damage to their $100k+ vehicles. You can buy an used electric fleet van for ~$40k, and that’s just about as fancy as you could practically need. Anything beyond that is a show of status (many things below that are still a show of status), and I’d rather not pay a second tax to an oligarch so people with more money than sense can show off how much money they can waste.
Maybe 16 wheelers should have insurance, but it’s exploitation of the poor elsewhere.
Got it, so you think it is punishing to poor people to make them pay $60-$100/mo for the privilege of driving a dangerous vehicle that can cause many thousands of dollars in damage to both cars and people, but your response to high car repair bills is for poor people to “just buy a new car.” I don’t think you have thought your cunning plan all the way through. Notice how I never brought up medical bills, only car repair bills? That’s because I agree that health insurance should be covered by the state, not private insurance. Health care is a basic human right. Driving a car is not. You talk about exploitation of poor people through making them have insurance, but you ignore that poor people can also be the victim of bad drivers. If a poor person with a $5000 car who badly needs that car to drive to work gets their car totaled by a driver without insurance, your solution is for them to “just buy a new car.” Do you have any idea how dumb that sounds? Your main argument is that this poor person should not be expected to pay $100/mo for insurance, but you think it is totally fine to ask them to pay $5000 to get a new car that they need to get to work to pay off that car?
And if you think only the wealthier drivers drive more recklessly, you should drive in a really poor part of town. You know who doesn’t give a shit whether they crash their cars? The people who drive really shitty cars. The statistics back that up, too. Wealthy areas have lower serious traffic accidents per capita than lower income areas. They also have far lower traffic fatalities per capita, but that can be down to the safety of their expensive cars. People in sports cars do tend to drive faster, but rich moms in expensive SUVs do not.
When poor people have a car accident it’s already fix it themselves, tolerate it, or replace it the vast majority of the time. When they do replace it what do you think the odds are the cheap insurance companies pay out more than they paid in? 3-4k is a lot of money when you’re broke, but I think the only real change would be one less pointless bill.
Poor people are capable of saving money. Poor people are capable of driving. I’m sure the statistics are very interesting, but I don’t think any of the mechanisms you propose suggest an inherent inability to drive or an inherent inability to save money. It is the burdens placed upon them that make it difficult to get ahead, not some inherent lack of ability deprives them of your privileges. I cannot support systems that increase that burden for the sake of others’ luxuries.
Clearly, you’ve had situations where you’ve found value in the insurance system, and good for you I suppose, but I cannot see a justification for forcing everyone into the system.
When poor people have a car accident it’s already fix it themselves, tolerate it, or replace it the vast majority of the time.
So your solution to exploiting poor people is to force the burden on the victim to just deal with it when someone else is at fault?
“I’m sorry the person who just totaled the most important part of your livelihood chose not to have insurance. Guess you just have to fix it yourself with all that free time and money you have, tolerate it, or buy a new one with all that money you have. Sucks you are poor!”
Great solution.
They already have to deal with it. My solution is not scamming them.
Idk, why you’re so in love with a system that seems obviously oppressive to me, but whatever man I’m clearly not going to convince you.
It’s not a $20k repair bill I’m worried about, it’s the potential of $100k+ in medical liability that I’m really buying insurance for.
In my area there’s plenty of expensive cars driving around too, I somehow doubt the minimum $25k insurance would cover even half the cost of a totaled car + everything involved.
I didn’t mention the medical liability, since a modern civilized society shouldn’t need to have me worried about medical liability. I was lucky to have good insurance when I was a pedestrian hit by an uninsured driver. I wasn’t on the hook for my $60,000 in medical bills, because I had insurance. In a good society, I shouldn’t need private medical insurance to protect me if I get hit by an uninsured driver.
Now, if my new car gets totaled by a shitbox '88 Cutlass Cierra driven by a person who can barely even afford THAT car, then that’s where requiring insurance comes into play.
