this post was submitted on 21 Jul 2023
889 points (98.7% liked)

Technology

59646 readers
2609 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.


Our Rules


  1. Follow the lemmy.world rules.
  2. Only tech related content.
  3. Be excellent to each another!
  4. Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
  5. Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
  6. Politics threads may be removed.
  7. No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
  8. Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
  9. Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots


founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

People are getting fed up with all the useless tech in their cars — For the first time in 28 years of JD Power’s car owner survey, there is a consecutive year-over-year decline in satisfaction, wit...::People are dissatisfied with the technology in their cars, according to a new survey from JD Power. They especially don’t like the native infotainment systems.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 31 points 1 year ago (1 children)

...useless tech

Oh, it is "useful"; to the real 'owners' of "your" car...

[–] [email protected] 24 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Yup. I'm in Automotive, I work for a company that makes software for basically any car brand you can think of. I just recently left an internally developed project that aimed to create a personal assistant in the car. It was terribly ran and will go nowhere, but other departments in other companies will probably have more success, especially since the rise of chatgpt.

To add to your point though - the main idea on how to sell this assistant to car makers was the features, but the driving force behind developing the project was customer data. Collect a huge amount of info from customers, info that is shared with the car brand, but also accessible to us. To give some credit, discussions were never about using it for evil purposes - imagine a secretary knowing their boss' schedule, our software would make suggestions like "you can't make your 1 PM luch appointment with the client, would you like to reschedule it" and "I see you're headed to Chicago and will arrive in 2 hours, should I make a reservation at that restaurant you like?" or some shit like that. But we all know that it's not the engineers who decide what the company does with the data once access to that data exists. And knowing where a user eats, having access to their calendar, having access to their phone... This shit can get out of hand so easily when a budget-oriented executive type decides it's time for this project to be even more profitable by selling the data to advertisers.

Last I heard before I left, the plan was to "get consent" to process this data through a disclaimer when booting the car's infotainment system, saying that attached devices share data with our servers etc. Read the manuals, ToS and pop-ups and don't connect your devices to systems that do this. You're already the client when buying a car worth thousands of dollars. Don't also be the product.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

such bullshit. how can engineers not let this happen?

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Unfortunately I think engineers, as employees of a company, don't have a lot of power. You aren't typically the one making feature decisions. You can always try to talk product people out of bad ideas, but at some point if you refuse to do what you've been told to, you lose your job. Some engineers are in a financial position to take that high road, but a lot aren't. And then even if you do quit, there will always be someone else willing to do what you aren't.

I think as long as there is money in doing unethical (but legal) things, those things will continue to happen

[–] [email protected] -2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

so this is why i think that reasonable engineers (and most actual engineers are reasonable, hence being an "engineer") should get together and make good stuff. stuff that is not corrupted by perverse incentives. an engineer is capable of understanding the flaws of an economy and how that can be detrimental to the functionality of some tool or system.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

unfortunately as long as they're still subject to the whims of global capitalism, they will never be free from perverse incentives

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

subject to the whims of global capitalism

so how can we make that not be the case? this is what engineers and innovators are thinking about. we are thinking about what the next system will be and planning how to get there.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

systemic change is required, that's for sure. as to the how of that? fucked if i know tbh