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.
So, a couple of things…
For a real time warning system, there’s no need to actually record anything. Monitoring the video feed with no record capability should be fine.
Second, this sounds super easy to defeat with a printed photo card and a couple of Googley Eyes. 👀
“Super Easy to Defeat” is the now. They don’t care about that.
They just need you to accept it, and move along.
In a few years time, it will not be “super easy to defeat” but will be standard practice and accepted law.
By that stage it will likely be too late to do anything. They will have tied it in with chat control and all of our data.
Can you imagine the freedom that will be discovered 50 years from now in a trend, when people decide to ditch their personal devices and live like they used to 70, 80 years ago (maybe even 60).
I’m pretty sure I’ve seen some systems with stereoscopic cameras or Kinect-like laser grids
Soon enough, If you defeat or try to defeat the government surveillance system, it will probably be against the law
Clarkson was a step ahead of us this time.
At least tesls are easily fooled.
That’s fine, people are under the mistaken impression that there are bad drivers that would deliberately cheat this, and good drivers like them that pay 100% attention to the road, the reality is there is that 99% of drivers are good drivers ok of the time and distracted drivers some of the time, if the 1% genuinely terrible drivers actively bypass this, it’s still a major improvement for the those of us that share the road with the other 99%.