I can't think of anyone I know who has a car that needs to phone home. But that's a very limited sample size, so you know. Also, I'm most likely in a different market to you, we've never had anything like OnStar make inroads here into domestic vehicles - some commercial operators are using telemetry on their trucks etc.
But rest assured, if all our cars were phoning home, I'd be making a massive fuss.
For example, an insurance company in my country has recently launched an app that will "measure" your driving and offer lower premiums if your driving is "safe" according to their algorithms. It's obviously opt-in, but at some point, the difference between a discount for opting in, and a penalty for opting out, becomes hard to differentiate.
You don't have any rights to review their algorithms if you feel that they got it wrong, it's a combination of Hail Corporate and Hail AI, and context is lost because it's impossible to capture that. E.g., does heavy braking indicate you were driving poorly, or did you encounter a situation where heavy braking was necessary, such as the damn cat down the road that thinks it's invincible deciding to make a sprint for it in front of you? Is acceleration in excess of their defined limit unsafe? Or were you accelerating more than you normally would, because someone gave you space to turn into the road and you didn't want to needlessly hold them up, given their courtesy?
And given what I've seen of the FAANG algorithms, I don't want algorithms from companies nowhere near FAANG level making decisions about me. A personal favourite of mine was FB removing a comment of mine, because my sister said she'd totally marry my wife, on account of how, well, pretty damn awesome my wife is, and I'd replied "Haha, I'll fight you" - and FB had flagged that as "hate speech/incitement to violence".
Anyway, thank you for coming to my TED rant.
Cars Have Your Location. This Spy Firm Wants to Sell It to the U.S. Military:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26492322
One company wants to sell the feds location data from every car on Earth:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26511649
Military Unit Conducting Drone Strikes Bought Location Data from Ordinary Apps:
- He had a mattress in his office which he slept on. This made some women avoid RMS because they considered it abnormal and creepy.
- He once told a woman he'd kill himself if he didn't date her. Note that they are not more specific about the words he used: it may have been a lighthearted "I couldn't imagine life without you" to a more serious "Life isn't worth living without you.
There was a false claim about the "Knight of Hot Women." Stallman did not write that, a vandal did and took a picture. He erased it soon after
None of us here want to enable sexual harassment.