Hello people, my family recently bought a Renault 5 e-tech. The car itself is great, but there are some aspects that creep me out, especially the driver-facing camera. We didn’t actually know that such a camera existed before we bought the car, it was only mentioned as the car was given to us.
The cameras official purpose is to see, if you are tired and paying attention to the road, by some “AI magic”, I suppose. You can also let it scan your face, so that you automatically get logged into your profile.
I personally think, that that is kinda creepy, especially as there is no visual indication if the camera is currently recording and no official way to disable the camera hardware-wise. When it is being coverd, the car immediately complains about it.
When talking to friends or family about it, I got one of two reactions: equal concern, or “nice feature actually”, “what about the camera on your laptop?”, “you are way too paranoid”, “I have noting to hide; it is only me driving being recorded”.
I have also seen such cameras in other cars, BYD for example.
What do you think, is this creepy or am I too paranoid? Does anyone know where the actual data is processed, on device or on some cloud server? Do you have any experience with such cameras? I couldn’t really find any information about it on the internet.
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I don’t think you are paranoid. This technology is creepy as hell. Almost all cars are connected nowadays and send data back to the manufacturer’s server—visible or not. In the best case it’s just the service history, in the worst case live positions and more. Some cars stop working if the server is shut down *cough. Cameras equipped to unlock based on a face record biometric data. And honestly, would you trust your car manufacturer (!) to handle your biometric data?
Another in the list of a “1001 Things To Do With Duct Tape.”
Black tape ought to solve it, if not a pair of wire cutters.
I think it’s unacceptable and indicative of this dangerous path we are headed down as whole. There’s already been a few write ups on how cars are the most privacy disrespecting “devices” out there, which is wild considering we have smartphones.
With the driver facing camera we have no control over it also has complete access to our travel data, probably knows exactly who we are in the car with, records all our private conversations etc. etc.
It’s so tiring to hear people defend this as if privacy is a thing of the past and anyone advocating it is being dramatic.
I fckn hate these laws that force so much tech into new cars under the guise of safety. Not only is it a massive breach in privacy (I don’t care if the car manufacturers claim they don’t use this data for identification, I won’t belive them), but it also makes small cars way more expensive, comparatively. Fck this sh*t, cars have been becoming obnoxiously expensive and forced BS tech like that just makes everything worse.
It’s rent seeking through regulations. It’s too expensive to make a simple car that also complies with these regulations. The only people who can afford to do it are gigantic established brands with a century of production lines and established infrastructure.
“Oh no. More car brands failed. We can’t let them fail can we? Allow us to merge more?”
“Oh no. We’re in trouble financially. If we die you won’t have cars at all any more because we merged everything. Lots and lots of your voters will be pissed if that happens. There’s also no way in hell a new car brand is going to establish itself when it costs so damn much to meet these regulations we lobbied and guided to benefit our established interests”
I’ll just buy a second-hand 2011 Skoda Fabia. Compact car that just works and doesn’t spy on you. Though I’d rather buy the LPG version of it because it costs 86 eurocents/liter here.
I’m cool with just not driving. Fuck you, car manufacturers. If I can’t feasibly live a lifestyle on public transit I’ll buy the oldest shittiest shitbox on Earth and drive it until it fucking explodes.
Required in the EU and will be required in the US soon. BYD’s big export market is Australia which doesn’t require them yet but they’re mandatory to get a good crash safety rating.
Renault and a lot of BYDs use Android as the software os, so probably it’s Android doing the facial recognition (and also probably the attention eye tracking) and that’s onboard.
Renault has a dashcam function that records from the built in cameras, but you have to plug in your own USB drive, so the upside of memory price-fixing is it’s probably not worth it for Renault to spend $300 to store the data now.
So it’ll be possible to root the car through an OBD2 port, theoretically.
Monthly subscription for safety features coming soon 🔜
Your concern is definitely justified. This is creepy as hell.
yes, it’s in my BYD, i like it. i have read of people complain that it beeps at them, the # of false positives is infintesimally small. Im more alarmed at being on the road with assholes who have taped over it because it keeps telling them. to pay attention… wtg kind if shitty driver are they ?
As an Australian, I have zero issues with chinese cars spying on me, i assume they are, i refuse to buy a car from the five-eyes as it’s my government spying on me that’s the real concern. (no euro car, no american car etc)
Find and disable the antenna used by the cars electronics.
It’s an EU decision. It will be coming to many more cars as it will be mandatory from July 2026 for all newly registered vehicles. Renault 5 is simply one of the first new cars to feature it.
According to the same law, it is illegal to use the system in a way that can identify the person, it may not save biometrics, and it must function in closed loop without sharing the data. It’s looking for things like head nodding or looking away from the road for more than 3.5 seconds while driving over 50 km/h. The camera is likely using infrared lighting as it should also work at night.
Anyway. According to the manual, it can be disabled by double tapping a button on the steering wheel or through the touch screen menus, though it will default to being enabled everytime you start the car as per the legal requirement.
If you cover it with tape, wear a mask or drive somebody else’s car in which you don’t have a profile saved, it will simply use the last previous profile and show an icon in the dashboard as a warning that the function isn’t working.
Thank you for the clarification!
I wish, Renault and/or the salesperson would communicate clearly about the camera. It’s way creepier when there is just a camera looking at you without having the context of it being required and which privacy requirements it has per law.
Interestingly, if I disable the function and then cover the camera, a warning still appears. I don’t know if that’s due to a weird implementation by Renault or a thing implied by the law
I’d just cover it or break it 🤷
Void the warranty on a car that you paid 50,000 for, which was worth 30,000 by the time you drove it off the dealer’s lot?
In many states any information not disclosed by the seller is grounds for you canceling the deal. But you would have to look that up for where you live. Or there’s black tape, but then you’re still paying for a camera you didn’t want, aren’t using, and weren’t told about.
