Auto Industry Pushes Bullshit Claim That 'Right To Repair' Laws Aid Sexual Predators

Overhype

from the fear-mongering-ahoy dept

A few years back, frustration at John Deere’s draconian tractor DRM culminated in a grassroots tech movement dubbed “right to repair.” The company’s crackdown on “unauthorized repairs” turned countless ordinary citizens into technology policy activists, after DRM (and the company’s EULA) prohibited the lion’s share of repair or modification of tractors customers thought they owned. These restrictions only worked to drive up costs for owners, who faced either paying significantly more money for “authorized” repair, or toying around with pirated firmware just to ensure the products they owned actually worked.

Of course the problem isn’t just restricted to John Deere. Apple, Microsoft, Sony, and countless other tech giants eager to monopolize repair have made a habit of suing and bullying independent repair shops and demonizing consumers who simply want to reduce waste and repair devices they own. This, in turn, has resulted in a growing push for right to repair legislation in countless states.

To thwart these bills, companies have been ramping up the use of idiotic, fear mongering arguments. Usually these arguments involve false claims that these bills will somehow imperil consumer privacy, safety, and security. Apple, for example, tried to thwart one such bill in Nebraska by claiming it would turn the state into a “mecca for hackers.”

While there’s been no shortage of bad faith arguments like this, the auto industry in Massachusetts has taken things to the next level. The state is contemplating the expansion of an existing state law that lets users get their vehicles repaired anywhere they’d like. In a bid to kill these efforts, the Alliance for Automotive Innovation, which represents most major automakers, has taken to running ads in the state falsely claiming that the legislation would aid sexual predators:

The primary message of the ads is that if we allow people to more easily repair their vehicles, data from said vehicles will somehow find itself in the hands of rapists, stalkers, and other menaces. Granted actual experts have made it abundantly clear that this is utterly unfounded. The existing law requires that automakers use a non-proprietary diagnostic interface so any repair shop can access vehicle data using an ordinary OBD reader. It also makes sure that important repair information is openly accessible. The update to said law simply attempts to close a few loopholes in the existing law:

“Question 1 seeks to close a loophole in that earlier law, which exempted cars that transmitted this data wirelessly. As cars become even more computerized, independent repair shops are worried that manufacturers will do away with the OBD port and will store this data wirelessly, exempting them from the earlier law. The new initiative simply guarantees that car owners and independent repair companies can access this data wirelessly without “authorization by the manufacturer,” and requires car manufacturers to store this data in a secure, “standardized, open-access platform.”

One local ABC affiliate in Massachusetts thoroughly debunked the ads’ claims. Experts told Matthew Gault at Motherboard that the real goal of the auto industry here is to simply shift all of this diagnostic tech to wireless to wiggle around the law. In part to maintain a monopoly on repair (letting them drive up the cost of taking your vehicle to the dealership), but also to further obscure all the driving, location, and other data automakers are collecting and selling to a long list of companies:

“My guess is what automakers really don’t want to talk about is all of the data that they are collecting from connected vehicles that they’re not telling us about,? Paul F Roberts, founder of Securerepairs?a group of security and repair professionals who advocate for security and repair issues?told Motherboard on the phone.

?The backup safety cameras that go on every time you put your car in reverse, are those on all the time and are they observing your surroundings and inferring data about your whereabouts and preferences?? Roberts said. ?The in-cabin cameras that we know Tesla has on their cars, are those just monitoring you all the time? are they monitoring your GPS data and mining that or selling that? We don?t know.”

Of course they’re collecting and selling that data with minimal oversight. The United States still lacks any meaningful privacy laws for the modern era, in part because many of these same companies have opposed such legislation. Because it’s hard for the auto industry to honestly admit it wants to monopolize repair, drive up consumer costs, and obfuscate the wholesale hoovering up and sale of your data, they’ve apparently concocted a grotesque bullshit narrative that the legislative updates will somehow aid sexual predators. Stay classy, Alliance for Automotive Innovation!

Filed Under: auto industry, cards, drm, freedom to tinker, independent repair shops, massachusetts, predators, right to repair
Companies: alliance for automotive innovation

Working Futures: The Cards Behind The Stories

Predictions

from the working-futures dept

Order your copy of Working Futures today »

Over the last few weeks we’ve been writing about all of the various aspects of the stories in our Working Futures anthology of 14 science or speculative fiction stories all relating to the “future of work.” We’ve been getting great feedback on the book so far and are excited with how many people have been reading it. If you haven’t yet, please check it out as well — and support Techdirt in the process. Here are all the posts summarizing the stories in the book:

1. Welcome to Working Futures
2. The future of work is likely to be complicated
3. The future of work will have unexpected consequences
4. The future of work will blur the line between humans and machines
5. The future of work may be beautiful

Since we’ve now written about all the various stories in the book, for today’s post, I wanted to talk a bit about the custom deck of cards we developed and used as part of the process in developing these stories.

As I’ve mentioned in some of the previous posts, much of the impetus behind the Working Futures project was to try to think through the actual implications of technology on jobs and labor in the future. There has been a lot of fretting and a lot of hand-waving, but little exploration of what might actually happen. That’s not a surprise, because predicting the future is mostly impossible, especially when it comes to complex systems. However, one tool that has been really useful not for “predicting” the future, but for exploring multiple possible futures is scenario planning, which is frequently described as a structured way for groups to think about possible futures. It’s not about predicting which future will happen, but to explore various trends, driving forces and the like to determine a few different possible futures — and to explore the implications of each.

We wanted to use this process as a starting point for the Working Futures project, but with a bit of a twist. We first polled people online via Techdirt for what they thought were the key driving forces that would impact the future of work — rating both how much of an impact you thought they’d have and the likelihood that that force would have a true impact. From that, we developed a custom deck of cards showing different aspects of each key driving force on each side. So, for example, one side might show what a world would look like if genetic engineering becomes a much bigger deal, gets cheaper, and is used much more widely — while the flip side of that same card says that genetic engineering has more or less stalled out, and it remains limited to labs, and bigger breakthroughs remain limited.

We used that deck with a group of about 50 people from a variety of different perspectives for an all day session in San Francisco. Attending were journalists, technologists, labor activists, human rights activists, entrepreneurs, philanthropists, academics, lawyers, investors, writers, economists, and more. We had them go through a series of exercises to develop a set of 10 different scenarios, which we then gave to the writers who contributed stories to this collection. A key feature in the scenarios was coming up with four or five “media headlines” that would appear in that world.

Traditional scenario planning folks will likely balk at the idea of producing ten scenarios — as it’s typical to develop just three or four. However, in this case, we thought it made sense, as the goal here was to give authors a variety of different starting points (and I think for that purpose, the system worked quite well).

Either way, in showing the deck of cards to people after the event, we kept hearing over and over again how it might be useful for other scenario planning and strategic planning efforts as well, and people started asking us if they could buy a copy. We’ve now offered up the Working Futures cards via GameCrafter as a print-on-demand option for $19.99. They include an instruction card that basically describes how we used them and how you might use them as well, but there are lots of ways to make use of them, limited only by your imagination.

With this project we’ve been mainly focused on the book and the 14 stories — which was always the end product of the plan. However, we’ve been pleasantly surprised by how many people have also picked up the cards as well and let us know how useful they’ve been for various other scenario and strategic planning efforts. If you think they might be useful for you as well, please check them out.

Filed Under: cards, future of work, scenario planning, working futures