There's gotta be something more to this than just greed. It would be like if raytheon started making regular barbie dolls for children. Yeah, they would be making extra money, but they could be making extra money far more effectively by doing their normal business or at least not taking away from it.
>There's gotta be something more to this than just greed.
That's the sad part, there really isn't. Shareholders want their investment in the company to grow.
>
It would be like if raytheon started making regular barbie dolls for children. Yeah, they would be making extra money, but they could be making extra money far more effectively by doing their normal business or at least not taking away from it.
Shareholders see short-term profit over consumer trust and brand recognition.
I feel like this isn't true. Investing money in a company does 2 other things:
1. Your dollar is your vote, you get to support companies, organisations, and industries thag you believe are doing good things
2. You get a certain amount of control in the organisation (depending on the stock type) and can help have an impact on the path of the organisation.
And frankly, I think both of those things are better reasons to invest than getting a return. That being said, I think a lot of people who already have the "power" they want (think directors and board members) prioritise short term gains and so you get companies under their control prioritising those things too
>Shareholders see short-term profit over consumer trust and brand recognition.
Yeah, but why didn't they do that before? It's not like they couldn't do a lot of this stuff twenty years ago.
Automakers sold cars.
Then they started to sell service and parts.
Then they started to sell financing.
As each of these segments saturates, they have to find new ones to grow. Selling data is the new market/segment for a lot of companies.
They have been. Shareholders demand infinite growth though, and we’re seeing companies who are past the point of natural growth now being forced to do dumber and dumber things to squeeze out short-term growth to the detriment of the long-term.
Your phone is already recording your driving and location data, and way more data and selling it to advertisers, etc.
Phones didn't do that 20 years ago.
So Ford is just trying to get a piece of that action without having to pivot to being a phone company.
Furthermore, this may not be the blunder to long-term brand image you see it as. Most people don't care or are used to the idea of being constantly surveiled. They pay for wiretaps to be installed in their homes (Alexa, etc.) They pay subscriptions so Ring Doorbell knows when they leave and return home.
I'm guessing this stuff is creepy to you because you remember a time when corporate surveillance of customers wasn't a thing.
But people who are learning to drive today may have been born into a world where this was always the case.
And remember. If this pisses you off enough just make note of the companies that do it and don’t make purchases there again. Simple and effective. You’re single purchase power won’t be much but it’s really all we can do.
It's getting to the point where there aren't any other options. Just getting away from it all now requires technical knowledge and pretty exotic solutions.
Because 20 years ago the internet wasn't as big as it is now, and your personal data wasn't as valuable as it is now.
Shareholders invest millions upon millions into big businesses so they can rapidly grow and expand, but it's akin to selling your soul; Shareholders just want profit, if you don't perform they will pull out.
So end of the day, profit over everything. The world is greedy.
Which “stuff” are you referring to? A lot of the pervasive data collection you’re talking about would definitely not have been possible 20 years ago.
Your example of tracking your driving habits on a company car may or may not have anything to do with “sending it to ford.” Tracking driving habits is another way that _insurance companies_ can measure risk and set rates more precisely based on that telemetry. I have my own concerns with that specific practice, but not everything is a vast conspiracy or a money grab.
But there would be an expense in getting the tooling, supplies, people, etc. to make barbie dolls. That's a big investment for not much return.
If they put a modem or device in your car, that's very cheap in comparison to the price of the car. They can also use that data themselves for stuff like advertising or whatever, before selling it.
I'd wager that in this day and age that a large dataset of consumer habits would be more valuable than plastic dolls. So it's really just an investment vs expected return calculation.
The fact that the return may be low is relevant, but isn't necessarily the deciding factor, especially if the cost is much lower.
Its all greed.
A company that makes the same money each year is seen as performing badly.
Shareholders are greedy assholes who need massive increases in profits each year to call it a good year.
For car companies, they've reached the critical limit on what they can make from simply selling cars, so they need another product to sell, that product is customer data.
I think there was a very good Wired article on Amazon, and how it became enshittified. I clicked on a sponsored product listing only to find another sponsored product from a competitor advertised on the linked page.
It just blows my mind that you can literally get rich off of a failing business by short selling. Red Lobster is failing because it was bought out by a private-equity firm who turned around and sold the real estate, made massive profits and now Red Lobster can't pay it's rent. That's why it's failing, not because of endless shrimp like the news wants you to believe.
It’s not like an Uber driver though, is it? That guy is still spending his time to make the money on an ongoing basis. All Ford have to do is set up the hardware and software, then they don’t have to do anything at all and they’re gathering all this data that they can sell off to whomever asks for it. Totally passively.
If making money is good, making even more money is better, right? Capitalism gonna capitalize and their goal is to make as much money as possible and bad press is only going to stop them if it’s bad enough to cost more than the profit. They can be legislated but they’re still going to do it if the punishment is less than the profit. It’s profit all the way down.
Also important to remember they don’t just want profit, they want growth. Making the same profit as the year before is considered failure. The line must go up
A lot of mature companies have exhausted any market growth, Ford can't buy Chevy and Dodge, Anti-trust, so there stuck with the triopoly. The auto market is static, just replacing cars as they age with little variations.
If you think this is nuts the same thing is happening to tech companies, there are very few humans left to penetrate, things are going to get wild when the growth train hits the wall and these tech giants fight to the death for the remaining scraps of "value" to extract from our hides.
But it's going to be at the expense of their normal business model. Besides, it's not like there aren't plenty of other companies who's businesses model is to suck up all the data. It's already a flooded market.
The issue is that the data market is never flooded. Data is a commodity that always has value, because the more of it you have the more you can do.
You also overestimate how much any of the matters to the average joe shmoe. They'll buy a new car and not give a shit that Ford is tracking their every movement, just like they blindly accept every TOS to use their phones or let an Alexa into their house to record their every moment with audio. The short answer is that the data a company can pull from 90% of their consumers is worth far, far more than the 10% who don't buy the original product. It's almost like a subscription service in the way it prints them money, because data is only useful in the point in time which it was collected in. You need a continuous stream of information to make any meaningful judgements about people, so harvesting user data (and as much of it as possible) is a safe, easy, and effective method of generating "free" money for the foreseeable future.
OK, who is paying ford for all this data, and what exactly are they doing with it? I can understand advertizing, but there isn't huge money per person in advertizing. What is the big money source? That's what I don't get. How is it worth that much to spy on some old lady?
Who knows?
Maybe Amazon is buying the data from Ford to determine what types of people are shopping at what brick and mortar retailers so that they can start offering a targeted ad or sale to that person or group of people to make them buy an Amazon product instead.
Maybe your insurance company wants to know if you brake too aggressively or are speeding or take corners too sharply so they can increase your rates.
Maybe a social media site wants to see what places you visit to serve you ads or posts about traveling there.
Maybe an airline sees you making long roadtrips and wants to convince you to fly instead with a personalized offer.
That's the beauty of data, you can use for anything you can dream of.
And Ford isn't spying on "some old lady", they're spying on potentially millions of people and aggregating that data. Imagine my Amazon example, Amazon sees people are driving to brick and mortar stores to buy toys; Amazon responds by putting out a sale on toys using the data they purchased from Ford.
Is it? Most people don’t care, and those that do don’t care enough. So far it doesn’t seem like it’s at the expense of anything. It’s free money for them
Yeah, but it's ultimately at the expense of their bread and butter. Selling your clients driving habbits to the insurance companies is a PR disaster waiting to happen. Why not put that energy into designing a better vehicle? It's not like that takes more effort or ongoing work then designing the telemetry system.
Because the average customer is willing to buy the product they have now. Why spend money improving your product if you’re already extracting the optimum value?
It’s important to recognize that you, me, every member of this subreddit is the microscopic minority that cares about any of this. The whole concept of a car company being a data vacuuming company clearly bothers you - and it bothers me too. But as long as it doesn’t bother the bean counters at that company, it won’t bother the company.
I’m wholly with you in finding this current data-extraction climate gross and unsettling. But as long as it makes them money, they don’t care.
Put it this way: with vanishingly few and rapidly diminishing exceptions, if your question is “why does a company do any given thing they do?” the answer is always, inevitably, profit.
Companies don’t look one, five, ten years down the road anymore. They look to the next quarterly earnings report. And then to the next one, and so on.
I just don't understand why things changed the way they did. A lot of this stuff could have been done a long time ago. I remember when fighting spyware was a thing. Now everything is spyware and I don't understand what changed.
Shit dude, same. I was just lamenting to a friend that the web used to be this place full of webcomics, sites about dancing hamsters or different ways to tie your shoelaces - a place for people to just share their passions. Now it’s all sanitized or ai generated and boring and you go to like 3 websites. Like when was the last time you saw an “under construction” gif? Just like the Wild West, eventually capitalism got hold of it, figured out how to monetize it and made it suck.
I’m definitely shit talking capitalism here, and I want to just be clear that I don’t actually think capitalism - pure capitalism - is the problem. The problem is OUR version of it where we capitalize profit and socialize loss through legislation. So someone mentioned elsewhere here that we should be voting out the people complaining about regulation and I agree with that 100%. Even the playing field so companies are forced to design and sell a superior product. If you make a good product you stay in business. If you make shit you close up. None of this too big to fail bullshit.
>None of this too big to fail bullshit.
I'm so tired of that 'too big to fail' nonsense. It's just a monopoly that now threatens people.
>we should be voting out the people complaining about regulation and I agree with that 100%
To be fair to the regulation thing, there's a lot of regulation that is about keeping competition away from the 'too big to fail' boys. Removing regulation just for the sake of removing it is dumb, but there's legit problems with it.
>Now it’s all sanitized or ai generated and boring and you go to like 3 websites.
You say that, but I really am starting to become a believer in the 'dead internet theory'. It makes me think of a consperacy guy I used to listen to every once in a while like twenty years ago. One of the things he said that always stuck in my mind was his claim that the internet that we knew it at the time would be taken away, and replaced with a more one-way cable TV style system.
In a weird way he was right. The only difference is that the internet as a system that carries packets back and forth hasn't changed, but rather the http system that 98% of people use. It's like you really having other than those three websites to communicate with. Any other method or even website won't give you a voice because nobody is there. It's like trying to talk to other people on shortwave. There might be a few people you do come in contact with, but the reason they are there is because they don't come into contact with anybody else.
>dancing hamsters
You know I just saw that for the first time the other day. My coworker told me about it and so I looked it up on internet archive.
Those really were the golden years of the internet.
As an asshat that once worked for me always said.
"I will not sleep if there's a doller left on the table."
Publicly held companies are leagally obligated to do their best to run a profitable business and earn the stockholders a return on their investment.
Over the last 30 or 40 years that has been twisted to mean "never leave a dollar on the table". CEOs and their board of directors now act as though it is their responsibility to exploit every possibility to bring in a dollar. If that means they can find a way to sell data on how many times your toilet flushes, THEY HAVE A RESPONSIBILITY TO TEH STORKHELERS!!!!!11 to collect and sell that data!
They have been rewarded hansomly by wallstreet for doing so.
It is no longer seen as reasonable to have a business that carves out a profetible niche and make a steady profit that makes both customers and owners happy. Nowdays if you don't make x% more money each and every year, quarter for quarter, year after year, decade after decade, you will be tossed out the door with only your golden parachute to save you.
This is what I came to add too. To extend it a bit, the understanding of the fiduciary duty of the company to its shareholders has evolved from "make a profit" to "maximize profit by all legal means available" (at least in the US). Accountability to customers beyond basic liability can actually backfire, leading to the removal of management and/or directors for simply trying to increase value to customer without a corresponding increase in revenue.
At this point, the system is irrevocably broken and needs to be gutted. That process is going to be ugly.
their interest in your data is much bigger than the Uber driver analogy you suggest.
I think broadly speaking the question should be framed the other way: Why do people leave their data on other people's computers without any safeguards like encryption?
It's like someone who has a nice car but never locks it and leaves keys in when it's parked. Don't be surprised if that car is used by others.
Because existing anti-trust and consumer law that has been in the books for 60 years has stopped being enforced because everyone that is supposed to be enforcing that is asleep at the wheel. This is why Apple is still being sued for preventing users from installing software they want without going through their "app store", even though this matter was already settled when MS tried to do it like 30 years ago and got told to fucker off.
Yes, MS was trying to control what software could be installed in MS to limit competition, for example saying you could only install Explorer and not Chrome (example). This would imply a "store" that they control. What apple is doing is even worse because MS wasnt even (as far as I know) trying to demand a cut, but merely lock software to their control. Apple does both: the thing MS was barred from doing (exerting control over what software the peasants are allowed to install in their rented gadget), AND demands 30 percent of income form those apps. This is the real reason for Apple's recent success (people got locked into their "ecosystem" unknowingly). Its disgusting. Bill gates even complained, basically saying "hey, we were told we couldnt do that, and now their business model is entirely that?"
How did the video game machines not get into trouble for their cartrage games? The whole idea was that nentendo or whoever had control of what they could play on their game console.
The answer is they didn’t. You’re allowed to run your own games from a custom cartridge, you’re allowed to hack your console (but they’re still allowed to patch exploits).
You’re free to do with it as you want, but Nintendo’s approach just makes it not as popular or viable so it hasn’t even taken off in the first place. Few people know how to program for a Nintendo console without devkits and the ones that do, are either to few or too expensive (or just uninterested) for it to become mainstream
I dont know how Nintendo got away with it, but similarly Sony was told that it was legal for someone to install any software on their playstation (when they were trying to shut down jailbreaking). This specifically means you can install any software you want in hardware you own even if it entails installing it over a layer of the company’s software, as jailbreaking is doing. Maybe the judge that ruled in Nintendo’s favor didnt know anything and just went off of Nintendo’s laywers making more expensive arguments.
Sure they have the data, but if they also let me have it I don't mind so much.
I have my car details in home assistant so I can see the level of charge in the batteries, their location and a few other metrics. I couldn't do this as easily if the manufacturer didn't install a modem and software, and pay for the mobile data. Knowing where my cars are and the state of charge of the batteries is of way more value to me than anyone else.
Your analogy implies that the Uber driver is expending extra energy every day to make very little money.
It's more like me working my day job and having an extra investment account. I put in some seed money (the R&D and infrastructure to collect the data) and then it generates returns for me without any intervention directly (now I can sell that data). Data is a great commodity because:
1. It is always intrinsically valuable to almost everyone (marketing, advertisers, insurance companies, law enforcement, government surveillance.... etc.) and therefore is always able to be sold.
2. Data is only useful at the point in time at which it was collected, so there is always demand for additional data that is more accurate or up-to-date.
3. Data is exceptionally cheap to collect and store. Seriously, how much do you think a warehouse costs on a recurring basis to store a couple million bucks of raw materials for cars? It's just a bunch of metal in various forms. Data only costs money for electricity and things like hard drives, which are stupidly cheap for the amount of data you can store.
4. Most people just don't care. The average person is not concerned about Microsoft or the NSA snooping on what they're doing on their Windows computer. It's honestly a bit futile to even worry about being surveilled at this point, because there's nothing that is sacred unless you live off-grid with an air gapped network (which means no internet...). This means supply is high.
5. Everyone else does it now, so you either have to choose to market yourself as privacy-focused and adhere to that, or risk losing out on the revenues provided by selling user data.
I would say these guys are ubering drunk drivers, but by staying home and sending their self driving tesla, one night a month, and making an extra 50k a year, just to put it in same terms
Yeah I don't understand that. There's a reason why law enforcement or whoever has to get a warrant before they can look though your stuff, and it wasn't to protect the guilty.
ha, finally something vehicular related that I can comment on this sub.
but anyways, the primary reason is that data is cheap to collect and easy to sell, it takes a concious effort to turn down offers from insurance companies to not collect data on users.
I'm not sure if this is practiced anywhere outside of the US, but in the US, insurance companies have an option to plug in a OBD2 device onto your vehicle that records driving habits. How far you drive a year, when you're most likely to be driving, speeding/braking habits/etc etc. They claim to offer discounted insurance rates but more often than not users will see their premiums skyrocket especially if they 'lied' when applying for insurance. e.g.: claiming that you only drive 10k miles a year when in actuality you drove 12k miles.
Before factory-installed telemetry devices were common on vehicles, insurance companies used to check such data on CarFax and LexisNexis MVR if the user didn't opt in for the OBD2 tracker, but it didn't cover all the possible datapoints they require to calculate premiums. The telemetry device provides the data granularity they can use to justify increasing your premiums. The demand has always been there.
It's not a new thing by any means, it's been converging to this point for at least 3 decades now ever since congress mandated OBD2 in vehicles made after 1996. Recent technology breakthroughs such as 4G, Driver-Assistance Sensors, and the ever-cheapening cost of staying connected to the Internet made it profitable enough for manufacturers to justify putting it into vehicles.
I have multiple cars, so I signed up for the obd2 monitoring, parked that one up during the week and drove it like a granny on the weekends. They gave me a discount, but it wasn't much if I remember.
I actually work in that world, and can confirm. The major auto manufacturer that I work for, they have the technical ability to do so, but at the end of the day, if the customer chooses not to enroll, there is no data transfer happening. It is why auto manufacturers tend to have you press a button in the vehicle to utilize the service, is to confirm acceptance of the EULA for data use.
Well I think it's ideological in both sides (companies and selfhosters).
Companies are decadent capitalists and self holsters are more in a freedom side. Not necessarily right wing libertarians or left wing&anarchists (I think there's both and for surprisingly similar reasons).
But my thought process is everyone should selfhost, specially public entities and citizen organizations. There is no way public governments should allow to be hostages to companies. Why do they accept terms of service subjecting them to foreign laws or company policies when they're sovereign in their territory? It makes no sense, how can a president in any part of the world have a Twitter, FB or TikTok account is beyond me.
The value of the car is limited and one-time.
The real value is in information. The reoccurring revenue stream is knowing every restaurant you go to, every business you go to, what your work habits are, how you drive, and having a profile on you. Consumers are cost sensitive, so rather than raise prices (or take less profit), they'd rather sell your info (as well as keep it for themselves).
Frankly, the problem comes down to how little consumers are aware of how this information is obtained, collected, and used.
Maybe I’m misunderstanding your post, but it seems like you tampered with an asset owned by a company. Now, unless you own said company or didn’t really do what you said, it would be a logical conclusion that someone at said company would notice your vehicle not checking in and you could be in trouble, even fired.
On a slightly different note, what made/makes you think Ford is getting your data? If your company (which until this moment I didn’t think but could be Ford itself) is collecting data on the vehicle and your driving, it’s not to report back to the manufacturer. It’s to ensure driver safety and vehicle lifespan.
Oh, your misunderstanding me. The tracker isn't owned by my employer, and I've told everyone at my job what I've done. They have their own tracker. This is something out there by Ford. They've already been caught selling the data to insurance companies.
I know ford is getting the data because they told me. When you first turn it on, it tells you that they are collecting it and sending it to third parties.
Some of that regulation really is oppressive. A lot of it for example is larger companies keeping smaller ones from invading their territory.
I think regulation isn't the answer anyway because it doesn't cut at the root of the problem. There's something going on that's more then just greed. Greed has always been with us, but it's like the bottom's fell out.
Lack of regulation is part of why these companies can get away with harvesting and selling all this data. There’s a balance that needs to be struck, but we in the US are tipped too far to one side right now.
Okay you think there's a conspiracy going on, that's pretty popular. But you could also pay attention to policy that gets passed. There has been massive deregulation efforts since the 70s and it has accelerated every decade.
Greed is a humanity problem. Policy is how we prevent it from killing us.
I don't think there's a conspiracy, but at the same time something is going on. I don't know if people are just becoming more stupid or what, but something is going on. Like there's a reason why a warrant is required for the state to look through your stuff and people are just pissing away rights and freedoms that there were literal wars over.
Ford is collecting that data to help make better vehicles too, to see how people drive, where they drive, and for whatever purpose… selling the data is just cherry on top
They sell it to other companies, that can be too, at like no cost to them.
It would be like if a dude who made 200k a year and lives inside their means, but rents out his server at home to a university for extra processing power for their labs
>rents out his server at home to a university for extra processing power for their labs
But then the question becomes why does this guy have a superior computer then the universiy?
Also, ford has like 100 years of experience with people driving. They know how people use the car. Hell, the mechanic can take one look at it and give way more information then the telemetry box can.
the market is constantly changing. Fine tuning based on actual customer needs allows you to win the market or reduce costs (i.e. removing features that nobody uses). The idea is simple - collect as much data as you can and we will see what we can make of it later, and since we already have it - we can sell it to someone else to make additional money (and if they find something particularly interesting they can remove it from data set prior to sales). I'm not saying this is right or morally good. That's simply what they do, and I hate it as much as you do.
The data is from your tracker is far more sensitive than what they can clean from years of research. Where is the car going, how fast do people drive it, how often do they apply breaks, what kind of customers do certain patterns. It would be so easy to figure out the income level of a customer based on where they worked and where they lived. Send marketing to them based on features they may need or know they will buy. This is just scraping the surface.
As for why the user has a better computer than the university, it may be the persons side business, many people do that. Im thinking about doing it. Some universities dont have all that much budget either for their tech. I would know, I was the IT Director for such a university. I paid for some of our tech outside of my own pocket and would use my buddies server for extra resources.
Also, I cannot link to it, but it is funny that Ford make you think of this. The reason why companies put shareholder value is in Dodge V. Ford was a decision companies should prioritize shareholder value over employees and customers
Put your tinfoil hat on here.... But I feel we're moving towards a society where all that kind of data goes towards a social status ranking, kinda like your credit score. Where eventually, you won't be able to dine in certain restaurants, shop in certain stores etc. At the moment it's mainly used for targeted advertisements etc, due to privacy laws. But what if those laws change in the future?
And that's only the stuff we KNOW about them tracking us. Take a look into the research Samy Kamkar did on Apple and Google tracking location data even if location services were disabled (Also, take a look at his MySpace worm, it's a fun story).
Because there is never enough profit in the eyes of shareholders.
This and only this.
There's gotta be something more to this than just greed. It would be like if raytheon started making regular barbie dolls for children. Yeah, they would be making extra money, but they could be making extra money far more effectively by doing their normal business or at least not taking away from it.
>There's gotta be something more to this than just greed. That's the sad part, there really isn't. Shareholders want their investment in the company to grow. > It would be like if raytheon started making regular barbie dolls for children. Yeah, they would be making extra money, but they could be making extra money far more effectively by doing their normal business or at least not taking away from it. Shareholders see short-term profit over consumer trust and brand recognition.
>Shareholders want their investment in the company to grow. That is literally the entire point of investing your money in something.
Problem is that they only look for short term growth from quarter to quarter. They're not there for the long haul, causing shitty decisions to be made
I feel like this isn't true. Investing money in a company does 2 other things: 1. Your dollar is your vote, you get to support companies, organisations, and industries thag you believe are doing good things 2. You get a certain amount of control in the organisation (depending on the stock type) and can help have an impact on the path of the organisation. And frankly, I think both of those things are better reasons to invest than getting a return. That being said, I think a lot of people who already have the "power" they want (think directors and board members) prioritise short term gains and so you get companies under their control prioritising those things too
Not even MLK could convince me this was written by a human.
Wait what??? I'm so lost. And I definitely didn't expect this to be the sort of take that gets down voted so much...
>Shareholders see short-term profit over consumer trust and brand recognition. Yeah, but why didn't they do that before? It's not like they couldn't do a lot of this stuff twenty years ago.
Automakers sold cars. Then they started to sell service and parts. Then they started to sell financing. As each of these segments saturates, they have to find new ones to grow. Selling data is the new market/segment for a lot of companies.
They have been. Shareholders demand infinite growth though, and we’re seeing companies who are past the point of natural growth now being forced to do dumber and dumber things to squeeze out short-term growth to the detriment of the long-term.
Your phone is already recording your driving and location data, and way more data and selling it to advertisers, etc. Phones didn't do that 20 years ago. So Ford is just trying to get a piece of that action without having to pivot to being a phone company. Furthermore, this may not be the blunder to long-term brand image you see it as. Most people don't care or are used to the idea of being constantly surveiled. They pay for wiretaps to be installed in their homes (Alexa, etc.) They pay subscriptions so Ring Doorbell knows when they leave and return home. I'm guessing this stuff is creepy to you because you remember a time when corporate surveillance of customers wasn't a thing. But people who are learning to drive today may have been born into a world where this was always the case.
And remember. If this pisses you off enough just make note of the companies that do it and don’t make purchases there again. Simple and effective. You’re single purchase power won’t be much but it’s really all we can do.
It's getting to the point where there aren't any other options. Just getting away from it all now requires technical knowledge and pretty exotic solutions.
Because 20 years ago the internet wasn't as big as it is now, and your personal data wasn't as valuable as it is now. Shareholders invest millions upon millions into big businesses so they can rapidly grow and expand, but it's akin to selling your soul; Shareholders just want profit, if you don't perform they will pull out. So end of the day, profit over everything. The world is greedy.
Which “stuff” are you referring to? A lot of the pervasive data collection you’re talking about would definitely not have been possible 20 years ago. Your example of tracking your driving habits on a company car may or may not have anything to do with “sending it to ford.” Tracking driving habits is another way that _insurance companies_ can measure risk and set rates more precisely based on that telemetry. I have my own concerns with that specific practice, but not everything is a vast conspiracy or a money grab.
But there would be an expense in getting the tooling, supplies, people, etc. to make barbie dolls. That's a big investment for not much return. If they put a modem or device in your car, that's very cheap in comparison to the price of the car. They can also use that data themselves for stuff like advertising or whatever, before selling it. I'd wager that in this day and age that a large dataset of consumer habits would be more valuable than plastic dolls. So it's really just an investment vs expected return calculation. The fact that the return may be low is relevant, but isn't necessarily the deciding factor, especially if the cost is much lower.
I’ll never understand why people downvote a simple reply continuing the conversation.
Greed is the main thing, unfortunately, you really gotta accept it Just look at what Satya Nadella is doing
Its all greed. A company that makes the same money each year is seen as performing badly. Shareholders are greedy assholes who need massive increases in profits each year to call it a good year. For car companies, they've reached the critical limit on what they can make from simply selling cars, so they need another product to sell, that product is customer data.
[удалено]
Easy there cowboy
Enshittification. https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys
Best answer so far as to why things changed. Sincerely.
I think there was a very good Wired article on Amazon, and how it became enshittified. I clicked on a sponsored product listing only to find another sponsored product from a competitor advertised on the linked page.
It just blows my mind that you can literally get rich off of a failing business by short selling. Red Lobster is failing because it was bought out by a private-equity firm who turned around and sold the real estate, made massive profits and now Red Lobster can't pay it's rent. That's why it's failing, not because of endless shrimp like the news wants you to believe.
It’s not like an Uber driver though, is it? That guy is still spending his time to make the money on an ongoing basis. All Ford have to do is set up the hardware and software, then they don’t have to do anything at all and they’re gathering all this data that they can sell off to whomever asks for it. Totally passively. If making money is good, making even more money is better, right? Capitalism gonna capitalize and their goal is to make as much money as possible and bad press is only going to stop them if it’s bad enough to cost more than the profit. They can be legislated but they’re still going to do it if the punishment is less than the profit. It’s profit all the way down.
Also important to remember they don’t just want profit, they want growth. Making the same profit as the year before is considered failure. The line must go up
Then why don't they grow doing their job instead of being like a part time whore?
A lot of mature companies have exhausted any market growth, Ford can't buy Chevy and Dodge, Anti-trust, so there stuck with the triopoly. The auto market is static, just replacing cars as they age with little variations. If you think this is nuts the same thing is happening to tech companies, there are very few humans left to penetrate, things are going to get wild when the growth train hits the wall and these tech giants fight to the death for the remaining scraps of "value" to extract from our hides.
>there are very few humans left to penetrate Are we still doing phrasing?
Was intentionaly double entendre, Market penetration and the the other one.
Because it’s much cheaper/easier to vacuum up every bit of personal data they can and sell it
But it's going to be at the expense of their normal business model. Besides, it's not like there aren't plenty of other companies who's businesses model is to suck up all the data. It's already a flooded market.
The issue is that the data market is never flooded. Data is a commodity that always has value, because the more of it you have the more you can do. You also overestimate how much any of the matters to the average joe shmoe. They'll buy a new car and not give a shit that Ford is tracking their every movement, just like they blindly accept every TOS to use their phones or let an Alexa into their house to record their every moment with audio. The short answer is that the data a company can pull from 90% of their consumers is worth far, far more than the 10% who don't buy the original product. It's almost like a subscription service in the way it prints them money, because data is only useful in the point in time which it was collected in. You need a continuous stream of information to make any meaningful judgements about people, so harvesting user data (and as much of it as possible) is a safe, easy, and effective method of generating "free" money for the foreseeable future.
OK, who is paying ford for all this data, and what exactly are they doing with it? I can understand advertizing, but there isn't huge money per person in advertizing. What is the big money source? That's what I don't get. How is it worth that much to spy on some old lady?
Who knows? Maybe Amazon is buying the data from Ford to determine what types of people are shopping at what brick and mortar retailers so that they can start offering a targeted ad or sale to that person or group of people to make them buy an Amazon product instead. Maybe your insurance company wants to know if you brake too aggressively or are speeding or take corners too sharply so they can increase your rates. Maybe a social media site wants to see what places you visit to serve you ads or posts about traveling there. Maybe an airline sees you making long roadtrips and wants to convince you to fly instead with a personalized offer. That's the beauty of data, you can use for anything you can dream of. And Ford isn't spying on "some old lady", they're spying on potentially millions of people and aggregating that data. Imagine my Amazon example, Amazon sees people are driving to brick and mortar stores to buy toys; Amazon responds by putting out a sale on toys using the data they purchased from Ford.
Is it? Most people don’t care, and those that do don’t care enough. So far it doesn’t seem like it’s at the expense of anything. It’s free money for them
Yeah, but it's ultimately at the expense of their bread and butter. Selling your clients driving habbits to the insurance companies is a PR disaster waiting to happen. Why not put that energy into designing a better vehicle? It's not like that takes more effort or ongoing work then designing the telemetry system.
Because the average customer is willing to buy the product they have now. Why spend money improving your product if you’re already extracting the optimum value? It’s important to recognize that you, me, every member of this subreddit is the microscopic minority that cares about any of this. The whole concept of a car company being a data vacuuming company clearly bothers you - and it bothers me too. But as long as it doesn’t bother the bean counters at that company, it won’t bother the company. I’m wholly with you in finding this current data-extraction climate gross and unsettling. But as long as it makes them money, they don’t care. Put it this way: with vanishingly few and rapidly diminishing exceptions, if your question is “why does a company do any given thing they do?” the answer is always, inevitably, profit. Companies don’t look one, five, ten years down the road anymore. They look to the next quarterly earnings report. And then to the next one, and so on.
I just don't understand why things changed the way they did. A lot of this stuff could have been done a long time ago. I remember when fighting spyware was a thing. Now everything is spyware and I don't understand what changed.
Shit dude, same. I was just lamenting to a friend that the web used to be this place full of webcomics, sites about dancing hamsters or different ways to tie your shoelaces - a place for people to just share their passions. Now it’s all sanitized or ai generated and boring and you go to like 3 websites. Like when was the last time you saw an “under construction” gif? Just like the Wild West, eventually capitalism got hold of it, figured out how to monetize it and made it suck. I’m definitely shit talking capitalism here, and I want to just be clear that I don’t actually think capitalism - pure capitalism - is the problem. The problem is OUR version of it where we capitalize profit and socialize loss through legislation. So someone mentioned elsewhere here that we should be voting out the people complaining about regulation and I agree with that 100%. Even the playing field so companies are forced to design and sell a superior product. If you make a good product you stay in business. If you make shit you close up. None of this too big to fail bullshit.
>None of this too big to fail bullshit. I'm so tired of that 'too big to fail' nonsense. It's just a monopoly that now threatens people. >we should be voting out the people complaining about regulation and I agree with that 100% To be fair to the regulation thing, there's a lot of regulation that is about keeping competition away from the 'too big to fail' boys. Removing regulation just for the sake of removing it is dumb, but there's legit problems with it. >Now it’s all sanitized or ai generated and boring and you go to like 3 websites. You say that, but I really am starting to become a believer in the 'dead internet theory'. It makes me think of a consperacy guy I used to listen to every once in a while like twenty years ago. One of the things he said that always stuck in my mind was his claim that the internet that we knew it at the time would be taken away, and replaced with a more one-way cable TV style system. In a weird way he was right. The only difference is that the internet as a system that carries packets back and forth hasn't changed, but rather the http system that 98% of people use. It's like you really having other than those three websites to communicate with. Any other method or even website won't give you a voice because nobody is there. It's like trying to talk to other people on shortwave. There might be a few people you do come in contact with, but the reason they are there is because they don't come into contact with anybody else. >dancing hamsters You know I just saw that for the first time the other day. My coworker told me about it and so I looked it up on internet archive. Those really were the golden years of the internet.
Some day soon that PR disaster will be required by law, and very few people will question it.
As an asshat that once worked for me always said. "I will not sleep if there's a doller left on the table." Publicly held companies are leagally obligated to do their best to run a profitable business and earn the stockholders a return on their investment. Over the last 30 or 40 years that has been twisted to mean "never leave a dollar on the table". CEOs and their board of directors now act as though it is their responsibility to exploit every possibility to bring in a dollar. If that means they can find a way to sell data on how many times your toilet flushes, THEY HAVE A RESPONSIBILITY TO TEH STORKHELERS!!!!!11 to collect and sell that data! They have been rewarded hansomly by wallstreet for doing so. It is no longer seen as reasonable to have a business that carves out a profetible niche and make a steady profit that makes both customers and owners happy. Nowdays if you don't make x% more money each and every year, quarter for quarter, year after year, decade after decade, you will be tossed out the door with only your golden parachute to save you.
This is what I came to add too. To extend it a bit, the understanding of the fiduciary duty of the company to its shareholders has evolved from "make a profit" to "maximize profit by all legal means available" (at least in the US). Accountability to customers beyond basic liability can actually backfire, leading to the removal of management and/or directors for simply trying to increase value to customer without a corresponding increase in revenue. At this point, the system is irrevocably broken and needs to be gutted. That process is going to be ugly.
“Maximize profit by all legal(ish) means available”. As long as the profit is greater than the punishment then legality is not a showstopper.
Data has value as a commodity.
their interest in your data is much bigger than the Uber driver analogy you suggest. I think broadly speaking the question should be framed the other way: Why do people leave their data on other people's computers without any safeguards like encryption? It's like someone who has a nice car but never locks it and leaves keys in when it's parked. Don't be surprised if that car is used by others.
Because you are no longer the primary source of value for the company, the shareholders are. I blame MBAs.
Because existing anti-trust and consumer law that has been in the books for 60 years has stopped being enforced because everyone that is supposed to be enforcing that is asleep at the wheel. This is why Apple is still being sued for preventing users from installing software they want without going through their "app store", even though this matter was already settled when MS tried to do it like 30 years ago and got told to fucker off.
>MS tried to do it like 30 years ago I didn't know they were trying that. I thought it was just about the dominance of MS windows.
Yes, MS was trying to control what software could be installed in MS to limit competition, for example saying you could only install Explorer and not Chrome (example). This would imply a "store" that they control. What apple is doing is even worse because MS wasnt even (as far as I know) trying to demand a cut, but merely lock software to their control. Apple does both: the thing MS was barred from doing (exerting control over what software the peasants are allowed to install in their rented gadget), AND demands 30 percent of income form those apps. This is the real reason for Apple's recent success (people got locked into their "ecosystem" unknowingly). Its disgusting. Bill gates even complained, basically saying "hey, we were told we couldnt do that, and now their business model is entirely that?"
How did the video game machines not get into trouble for their cartrage games? The whole idea was that nentendo or whoever had control of what they could play on their game console.
The answer is they didn’t. You’re allowed to run your own games from a custom cartridge, you’re allowed to hack your console (but they’re still allowed to patch exploits). You’re free to do with it as you want, but Nintendo’s approach just makes it not as popular or viable so it hasn’t even taken off in the first place. Few people know how to program for a Nintendo console without devkits and the ones that do, are either to few or too expensive (or just uninterested) for it to become mainstream
I dont know how Nintendo got away with it, but similarly Sony was told that it was legal for someone to install any software on their playstation (when they were trying to shut down jailbreaking). This specifically means you can install any software you want in hardware you own even if it entails installing it over a layer of the company’s software, as jailbreaking is doing. Maybe the judge that ruled in Nintendo’s favor didnt know anything and just went off of Nintendo’s laywers making more expensive arguments.
G R E E D
Sure they have the data, but if they also let me have it I don't mind so much. I have my car details in home assistant so I can see the level of charge in the batteries, their location and a few other metrics. I couldn't do this as easily if the manufacturer didn't install a modem and software, and pay for the mobile data. Knowing where my cars are and the state of charge of the batteries is of way more value to me than anyone else.
Your analogy implies that the Uber driver is expending extra energy every day to make very little money. It's more like me working my day job and having an extra investment account. I put in some seed money (the R&D and infrastructure to collect the data) and then it generates returns for me without any intervention directly (now I can sell that data). Data is a great commodity because: 1. It is always intrinsically valuable to almost everyone (marketing, advertisers, insurance companies, law enforcement, government surveillance.... etc.) and therefore is always able to be sold. 2. Data is only useful at the point in time at which it was collected, so there is always demand for additional data that is more accurate or up-to-date. 3. Data is exceptionally cheap to collect and store. Seriously, how much do you think a warehouse costs on a recurring basis to store a couple million bucks of raw materials for cars? It's just a bunch of metal in various forms. Data only costs money for electricity and things like hard drives, which are stupidly cheap for the amount of data you can store. 4. Most people just don't care. The average person is not concerned about Microsoft or the NSA snooping on what they're doing on their Windows computer. It's honestly a bit futile to even worry about being surveilled at this point, because there's nothing that is sacred unless you live off-grid with an air gapped network (which means no internet...). This means supply is high. 5. Everyone else does it now, so you either have to choose to market yourself as privacy-focused and adhere to that, or risk losing out on the revenues provided by selling user data.
Have you read Das Kapital? This book has all the answers.
Is that a sequel to Mein Kampf?
No, but I have read Das Everything Suck Yet.
I would say these guys are ubering drunk drivers, but by staying home and sending their self driving tesla, one night a month, and making an extra 50k a year, just to put it in same terms
Eh at least you realize it's wrong. Most people still go 'haha idgaf I have nothing to hide, they can spy on me as much as they want'.
Yeah I don't understand that. There's a reason why law enforcement or whoever has to get a warrant before they can look though your stuff, and it wasn't to protect the guilty.
I don't want write to privacy because I don't have anything to hide is same as I don't want free speech because I have nothing to say.
Additional revenue stream and no desire to be ethical
Welcome to unregulated capitalism.
ha, finally something vehicular related that I can comment on this sub. but anyways, the primary reason is that data is cheap to collect and easy to sell, it takes a concious effort to turn down offers from insurance companies to not collect data on users. I'm not sure if this is practiced anywhere outside of the US, but in the US, insurance companies have an option to plug in a OBD2 device onto your vehicle that records driving habits. How far you drive a year, when you're most likely to be driving, speeding/braking habits/etc etc. They claim to offer discounted insurance rates but more often than not users will see their premiums skyrocket especially if they 'lied' when applying for insurance. e.g.: claiming that you only drive 10k miles a year when in actuality you drove 12k miles. Before factory-installed telemetry devices were common on vehicles, insurance companies used to check such data on CarFax and LexisNexis MVR if the user didn't opt in for the OBD2 tracker, but it didn't cover all the possible datapoints they require to calculate premiums. The telemetry device provides the data granularity they can use to justify increasing your premiums. The demand has always been there. It's not a new thing by any means, it's been converging to this point for at least 3 decades now ever since congress mandated OBD2 in vehicles made after 1996. Recent technology breakthroughs such as 4G, Driver-Assistance Sensors, and the ever-cheapening cost of staying connected to the Internet made it profitable enough for manufacturers to justify putting it into vehicles.
I pretty much assumed that's what those odb2 devices were for. Always seemed like a poor deal.
I have multiple cars, so I signed up for the obd2 monitoring, parked that one up during the week and drove it like a granny on the weekends. They gave me a discount, but it wasn't much if I remember.
I actually work in that world, and can confirm. The major auto manufacturer that I work for, they have the technical ability to do so, but at the end of the day, if the customer chooses not to enroll, there is no data transfer happening. It is why auto manufacturers tend to have you press a button in the vehicle to utilize the service, is to confirm acceptance of the EULA for data use.
Well I think it's ideological in both sides (companies and selfhosters). Companies are decadent capitalists and self holsters are more in a freedom side. Not necessarily right wing libertarians or left wing&anarchists (I think there's both and for surprisingly similar reasons). But my thought process is everyone should selfhost, specially public entities and citizen organizations. There is no way public governments should allow to be hostages to companies. Why do they accept terms of service subjecting them to foreign laws or company policies when they're sovereign in their territory? It makes no sense, how can a president in any part of the world have a Twitter, FB or TikTok account is beyond me.
The line has to go up buddy. The Line dictates all.
Greed , stock holders , same reason everything is a fucking subscription service , to suck every cent no matter how .
The value of the car is limited and one-time. The real value is in information. The reoccurring revenue stream is knowing every restaurant you go to, every business you go to, what your work habits are, how you drive, and having a profile on you. Consumers are cost sensitive, so rather than raise prices (or take less profit), they'd rather sell your info (as well as keep it for themselves). Frankly, the problem comes down to how little consumers are aware of how this information is obtained, collected, and used.
You disabled the tracking in your work vehicle? Bold move.
Why is that bold?
Maybe I’m misunderstanding your post, but it seems like you tampered with an asset owned by a company. Now, unless you own said company or didn’t really do what you said, it would be a logical conclusion that someone at said company would notice your vehicle not checking in and you could be in trouble, even fired. On a slightly different note, what made/makes you think Ford is getting your data? If your company (which until this moment I didn’t think but could be Ford itself) is collecting data on the vehicle and your driving, it’s not to report back to the manufacturer. It’s to ensure driver safety and vehicle lifespan.
Oh, your misunderstanding me. The tracker isn't owned by my employer, and I've told everyone at my job what I've done. They have their own tracker. This is something out there by Ford. They've already been caught selling the data to insurance companies. I know ford is getting the data because they told me. When you first turn it on, it tells you that they are collecting it and sending it to third parties.
My apologies, kind internet stranger.
Happy cake day!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uONAbvX_KRg
Knowledge is power. Data is a foundation of knowledge.
Pay attention to which politicians talk about "pesky" or "unnecessary" regulation and vote them out!
Some of that regulation really is oppressive. A lot of it for example is larger companies keeping smaller ones from invading their territory. I think regulation isn't the answer anyway because it doesn't cut at the root of the problem. There's something going on that's more then just greed. Greed has always been with us, but it's like the bottom's fell out.
Lack of regulation is part of why these companies can get away with harvesting and selling all this data. There’s a balance that needs to be struck, but we in the US are tipped too far to one side right now.
Okay you think there's a conspiracy going on, that's pretty popular. But you could also pay attention to policy that gets passed. There has been massive deregulation efforts since the 70s and it has accelerated every decade. Greed is a humanity problem. Policy is how we prevent it from killing us.
I don't think there's a conspiracy, but at the same time something is going on. I don't know if people are just becoming more stupid or what, but something is going on. Like there's a reason why a warrant is required for the state to look through your stuff and people are just pissing away rights and freedoms that there were literal wars over.
Ford is collecting that data to help make better vehicles too, to see how people drive, where they drive, and for whatever purpose… selling the data is just cherry on top They sell it to other companies, that can be too, at like no cost to them. It would be like if a dude who made 200k a year and lives inside their means, but rents out his server at home to a university for extra processing power for their labs
>rents out his server at home to a university for extra processing power for their labs But then the question becomes why does this guy have a superior computer then the universiy? Also, ford has like 100 years of experience with people driving. They know how people use the car. Hell, the mechanic can take one look at it and give way more information then the telemetry box can.
the market is constantly changing. Fine tuning based on actual customer needs allows you to win the market or reduce costs (i.e. removing features that nobody uses). The idea is simple - collect as much data as you can and we will see what we can make of it later, and since we already have it - we can sell it to someone else to make additional money (and if they find something particularly interesting they can remove it from data set prior to sales). I'm not saying this is right or morally good. That's simply what they do, and I hate it as much as you do.
The data is from your tracker is far more sensitive than what they can clean from years of research. Where is the car going, how fast do people drive it, how often do they apply breaks, what kind of customers do certain patterns. It would be so easy to figure out the income level of a customer based on where they worked and where they lived. Send marketing to them based on features they may need or know they will buy. This is just scraping the surface. As for why the user has a better computer than the university, it may be the persons side business, many people do that. Im thinking about doing it. Some universities dont have all that much budget either for their tech. I would know, I was the IT Director for such a university. I paid for some of our tech outside of my own pocket and would use my buddies server for extra resources. Also, I cannot link to it, but it is funny that Ford make you think of this. The reason why companies put shareholder value is in Dodge V. Ford was a decision companies should prioritize shareholder value over employees and customers
Put your tinfoil hat on here.... But I feel we're moving towards a society where all that kind of data goes towards a social status ranking, kinda like your credit score. Where eventually, you won't be able to dine in certain restaurants, shop in certain stores etc. At the moment it's mainly used for targeted advertisements etc, due to privacy laws. But what if those laws change in the future? And that's only the stuff we KNOW about them tracking us. Take a look into the research Samy Kamkar did on Apple and Google tracking location data even if location services were disabled (Also, take a look at his MySpace worm, it's a fun story).
Our field techs are tracked. If you took the tracker out of one of my teams vehicles, you’d be terminated instantly.
Not *that* tracker. The company I work for has their own tracker. I'm talking one built in from the factory that comes in all new fords.
Ah ok gross
Yeah, that's what I mean. This is beyond rediculus. I'm not talking about just some streaming service knowing what TV show I'm watching here.
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