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All Cars Sold in the EU Now Require a Camera Aimed at Your Face. It’s Still Not Clear Where That Data Goes (allaboutcookies.org)
submitted 4 months ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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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.

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[–] 54 points 4 months ago (2 children)

Every new car. So congrats on further destroying the new car market, good job.

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    • [–] 33 points 4 months ago (7 children)

    Sounds like more ways for insurance companies to a) charge you more based on behaviors they arbitrarily determine are “bad”, and b) take your payments for years/decades then never pay out because they say something you did on video makes any accident your fault based on some term buried in the 500 page contract you obviously didn’t read all of.

    They already do “a” by taking vehicle blackbox info uploaded by dealers or via telemetry and increasing your rate via their risk analysis. Note, your rates never go down for good driving. Only up.

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  • [+] 5 points 4 months ago* (7 children)
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  • [–] 7 points 4 months ago (1 child)

    Should read up on the history of medical insurance, e.g. blue cross blue shield. The idea was that expensive payouts can happen early on during someone's coverage, before they have a chance to build up savings. No one wants that to happen to them, so if everybody is in the pool of people who will pay for coverage, that risk is mitigated by being spread over a large group who only need to pay in a little at any time.

    Rich people or institutions who can afford to self-insure don't need insurance.

    This original insurance was non-profit. The capitalist insurances are the ones realizing they can choose to only cover people who aren't likely to need payouts, and profit off of the difference between pay ins and pay outs. I also agree this is a morally dubious system.

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  • [–] 5 points 4 months ago (4 children)

    I used to think like you do. "How does this benefit me?"

    But as a pedestrian who was hit by an uninsured driver, I can firmly tell you that you have no idea what you are talking about. Driving is not a constitutional right. It's a privilege that the state gives to you. It's extremely dangerous for those around you, so limiting the ability to drive very dangerous vehicles to people who are financially responsible isn't the worst idea. You might even say, "but you can just sue the person who hit you if they don't have insurance." The response is to think about the kind of person who can't afford $100/mo and how much you might be able to squeeze out of them in a lawsuit over $20,000 in repair bills.

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  • [–] 1 point 4 months ago (1 child)

    It's not a $20k repair bill I'm worried about, it's the potential of $100k+ in medical liability that I'm really buying insurance for.

    In my area there's plenty of expensive cars driving around too, I somehow doubt the minimum $25k insurance would cover even half the cost of a totaled car + everything involved.

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  • [–] 2 points 4 months ago

    I didn't mention the medical liability, since a modern civilized society shouldn't need to have me worried about medical liability. I was lucky to have good insurance when I was a pedestrian hit by an uninsured driver. I wasn't on the hook for my $60,000 in medical bills, because I had insurance. In a good society, I shouldn't need private medical insurance to protect me if I get hit by an uninsured driver.

    Now, if my new car gets totaled by a shitbox '88 Cutlass Cierra driven by a person who can barely even afford THAT car, then that's where requiring insurance comes into play.

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  • [+] 0 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (2 children)
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  • [–] 0 points 4 months ago (1 child)

    Got it, so you think it is punishing to poor people to make them pay $60-$100/mo for the privilege of driving a dangerous vehicle that can cause many thousands of dollars in damage to both cars and people, but your response to high car repair bills is for poor people to "just buy a new car." I don't think you have thought your cunning plan all the way through. Notice how I never brought up medical bills, only car repair bills? That's because I agree that health insurance should be covered by the state, not private insurance. Health care is a basic human right. Driving a car is not. You talk about exploitation of poor people through making them have insurance, but you ignore that poor people can also be the victim of bad drivers. If a poor person with a $5000 car who badly needs that car to drive to work gets their car totaled by a driver without insurance, your solution is for them to "just buy a new car." Do you have any idea how dumb that sounds? Your main argument is that this poor person should not be expected to pay $100/mo for insurance, but you think it is totally fine to ask them to pay $5000 to get a new car that they need to get to work to pay off that car?

    And if you think only the wealthier drivers drive more recklessly, you should drive in a really poor part of town. You know who doesn't give a shit whether they crash their cars? The people who drive really shitty cars. The statistics back that up, too. Wealthy areas have lower serious traffic accidents per capita than lower income areas. They also have far lower traffic fatalities per capita, but that can be down to the safety of their expensive cars. People in sports cars do tend to drive faster, but rich moms in expensive SUVs do not.

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  • [+] 1 point 4 months ago* (1 child)
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  • [–] 0 points 4 months ago

    When poor people have a car accident it’s already fix it themselves, tolerate it, or replace it the vast majority of the time.

    So your solution to exploiting poor people is to force the burden on the victim to just deal with it when someone else is at fault?

    "I'm sorry the person who just totaled the most important part of your livelihood chose not to have insurance. Guess you just have to fix it yourself with all that free time and money you have, tolerate it, or buy a new one with all that money you have. Sucks you are poor!"

    Great solution.

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    [–] 32 points 4 months ago (8 children)

    This is for cars where everything is being put on touchscreens so you have to take your eyes off of the road to control it?

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  • [–] 6 points 4 months ago* (7 children)

    A camera that faces both the driver and front windows by default, but only stores it where the owner wants it stored would be nice. Making it a default would change how cops interact with people.

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  • [–] 10 points 4 months ago (3 children)

    If body cams being on didn't change how they interact with you. Nothing will.

    The footage will only be used to harm you

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  • [–] 8 points 4 months ago

    The terrifying thing is, body cams probably did change how cops interact with people. They were that bad before. There's also been a few times when a cop their forgets to turn off their body cam or arrives late and got in some trouble.

    If you actually owned the car and the software on the car, then you could set the feed to be stored offsite somewhere. Even if the cops knew it was being recorded, they wouldn't be able to get it deleted. Even if they deleted the local copy, they wouldn't be able to know how many backups there are.

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  • [–] 2 points 4 months ago (2 children)

    We are talking about EU, not USA.

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    • [–] 83 points 4 months ago (16 children)

    How many more years before me never owning a car and never driving is enough to put me on a list?

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  • [–] 19 points 4 months ago (12 children)

    I won't own anything made after 2015... That's when LTE chips started becoming standard in cars...

    I told my wife, my next car will have a carbuerator.

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  • [–] 12 points 4 months ago (9 children)

    A carburetor is a step too far, you invite misery, do you hate yourself? Take care, lol.

    But yep would love to see more folks keeping old cars running, I won't be taking the plunge into "~mortgage and routinely operate my own bubble of dystopian hellscape", think I'ma pretty much lifetime "pass" on that flavor of nastiness.

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  • [+] 9 points 4 months ago (3 children)
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  • [–] 6 points 4 months ago (2 children)

    Eh better then throttle body fuel injection. I drive carb, direct injection and throttle body. Never had much issues with carbs other then my fucking rototiller.

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  • [–] 2 points 4 months ago (1 child)

    Some of the happiest moments of my childhood were getting a holly six-pack dialed in perfectly on my old Javelin... And balancing a six-pack is tricky as hell.. ;-)

    I'm a FIRM believer in fix-first... Too many people treat cars as disposable... and I maintain that keeping a 60 year old classic on the road is better for the environment than any new car... We (the world, not just the US) produce nothing but crap these days...cars have a life-expency of about 5 years, 10 at the outside (if you're a non-BMW built Toyota that is)

    My 2014 is 12 years old and still runs like it's brand new... I'll get another 15 years out of it easily... And when the engine dies, I'll replace it.

    The only thing that kills cars permanently is rust..rust is the only true killer.

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  • [–] 2 points 4 months ago

    Ah, an ancient wizard, then - carry on lol.

    If I'd grown up around people who understood and enjoyed cars, my life (read: curiosity) would probably have simply gone that direction.

    Instead I learned a lotta other things well, and so I've come around to this badly and through some longer paths, lol. I envy what I assume to be your built-in, muscle-memory secrets.

    And hell yeah, I drive and enjoy a 2006. Had it for some years, went very deliberately from a 2018 Mazda I really liked to this, consider it an improvement (no one else in my life does 😅).

    Only "outsource" the stuff I know I can't find time to learn and do, the thing is fundamentally easy to work on and understand. Delicious!

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  • [–] 3 points 4 months ago (1 child)

    Glad my 2018 car only had 3G which I had removed at the dealership due to it causing battery drain so I’m good!

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  • [–] 2 points 4 months ago

    Yeah... 2015 was about where cellular connected cars started being ubiquitous... And of course car manufactures were too cheap to put two computers in the car (one for infotainment, the other for engine management) so the modem has direct access to the ECU, which means throttle control, brakes, steering(?!), everything.

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  • [–] 4 points 4 months ago (1 child)

    I'm 42, living in the united states, never had a drivers liscense.

    If they tried this over here, people would die. Because they'd force me to be behind the wheel of an automobile.

    And thus, people would die.

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    • [–] 25 points 4 months ago* (1 child)

    before long people are gonna want to buy nothing but used 70s and 80s carbuerated shitboxes just to avoid all this shit.

    10 bucks says all this data is being fed back to insurance companies.

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    • [–] 91 points 4 months ago* (8 children)

    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. 👀

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  • [–] 97 points 4 months ago* (1 child)

    "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).

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  • [+] -6 points 4 months ago

    Second, this sounds super easy to defeat with a printed photo card and a couple of Googley Eyes. 👀

    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%.

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    • [–] 19 points 4 months ago (1 child)

    So if your teenager bangs their partner in the back seat do you sue your insurance or the automaker for recording child pornography?

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    • [–] 18 points 4 months ago (2 children)

    Im sorry, but this is just silly.

    If a camera rocords your face, it can be used to identity you. Thus it falls under GDPR regulations as PII. That requires that the footage is kept no longer than needed for its purpose and that what happens to the data is spelled out exactly. My car already comes with a privacy policy that you can read.

    So the answer is: Anything that can be used to identify you will deleted - or rather it will never get stored.

    And the reason this regulation doesn’t spell out what happens to the data is that it doesn’t need to because GDPR covers ALL data already.

    The EU is guilty of many things, but this is solely about increasing driver awareness and preventing deaths and injury - and it’s working, with each generation of requirements, less people die.

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    • [–] 35 points 4 months ago (1 child)

    The primary purpose of AI systems is mass surveillance.

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    • [–] 34 points 4 months ago (4 children)

    No way in hell I'm buying a car with that BS. I'll ride a bike first.

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  • [+] 13 points 4 months ago* (3 children)
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  • [–] 12 points 4 months ago (2 children)

    No way in hell I could buy a new car. They cost more than my house.

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    • [–] 16 points 4 months ago (7 children)

    This was on the news today on tv and they showed a camera filming the driver, watching his upper body.

    I bought a car from 2023 without all this shit so I'm very happy. Newer electric cars also beep when you go over the speed limit, which would drive me nuts.

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  • [–] 9 points 4 months ago

    If anyone owns a current BMW and the speed limit beeping drives them nuts:

    Hold the "set" button on you steering wheel for about 2s, the screen will inform you the Warnung has been temporarily turned off (until your next start)

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  • [–] 3 points 4 months ago* (5 children)

    My car shortly beeps 3x every time I go over speed limit. So I'm punished when I try to maintain speed limit and going 2kmph over triggers the beep. So I just constantly go 10kmph over now and I get those 3 beeps just for the first time I cross over the speed limit.

    The beep is tied to the road sign monitoring setting so I have to turn off both, not just beeping. So then I don't get signs displayed on my dash board which can be actually useful sometimes.

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  • [–] 5 points 4 months ago

    I think its horrible and should be illegal. It's a massive annoyance and could cause accidents since your attention is on that and not the traffic.

    So tired of all the bullshit people never asked for.

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  • [–] 1 point 4 months ago (3 children)

    May I suggest adaptive speed control.

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  • [–] 2 points 4 months ago* (1 child)

    Don't you know how roads work? Different speeds, situations, city traffic? Any of this rings a bell?

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  • [–] 1 point 3 months ago

    I do. Highway is a solved problem with issues remaining. City traffic, I dont dare to claim solved but Chinese cars seem.pretty darn close. Accidents? Always. I trust it more than myself and I consider myself (as most people) way above average.

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  • [–] 2 points 4 months ago*

    I use it a lot. I set it 10kmph above the speed limit as well. It's not perfect in a lot of city conditions and it can behave unexpectedly as well in these condition. Unless I want to fiddle with a spacing distance all the time and avoid sudden breaking for no reason I have to use it sparingly depending on time of day and location. Outside of cities it tends to work quite well for the most part. Some sharper bends trigger breaks too soon for no reason as well even though I've set sensitivity to the lowest.

    Also during heavy rain it just tends to ignore everything in front of me and starts accelerating to the max set speed.

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    • [–] 32 points 4 months ago* (25 children)

    Can you put tape over the camera?

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  • [–] 31 points 4 months ago (16 children)

    Or disconnect it? What happens when it no longer functions? Will I need to fix this to get my car to run again?

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  • [–] 14 points 4 months ago (15 children)

    I bet the system would sound an alarm if you did that.

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  • [–] 11 points 4 months ago (10 children)

    I'm willing to bet there's an ignition interlock that would keep the car from starting if the camera is disabled.

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  • [–] 4 points 4 months ago (2 children)

    That would be possible but unlikely. If the system fails then the driver can't use their car. What if they're an emergency? That wouldn't pass.

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  • [–] 15 points 4 months ago (1 child)

    There's already legislation in the US to implement such a kill switch based on if the camera says the driver is drowsy or drunk. Considering the uniformity with which totalitarianism seems to be spreading, I assume something similar isn't out of the question.

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  • [–] 5 points 4 months ago

    Just wait until it gets integrated into that database ICE is using that can tell them who is a citizen and who isn't, just by looking. Then it will shut the car off if the driver looks drowsy, drunk, or the wrong shade of brown.

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  • [–] -3 points 4 months ago (6 children)

    Alcohol detection interlocks in all cars would actually be useful. These cameras effectively do the same thing.

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  • [–] 6 points 4 months ago (5 children)

    Have you ever had to use one? I've had to do it (lot attendant) and not only is it unsanitary if someone else has to drive your car, but it's fucking hard to get the breathalyzer to actually work properly to allow you to start the car and it will go off again while you're driving requiring you to actually breath into it again. It's not a passive thing, you have to have the lung capacity to do it. It can be set off by false positives too. This is the dumbest take.

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  • [–] -2 points 4 months ago (4 children)

    Have you ever had to use one?

    No. I don't drink.

    This is the dumbest take.

    Sure, because 32 drunk driving deaths every day is apparently not a problem for Lemmy neckbeards.

    The camera would accurately detect drunk driving patterns, as well as sleepy drivers, dementia drivers, texting drivers, stoned drivers, drivers eating cereal and hot soup, applying makeup, all the stupid shit North American drivers do. If any of that affects your insurance, just don't fucking do that.

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  • [–] 4 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (2 children)

    You don't have to drink to have used one. I don't drink. I have had to use one. This comment reads like "fuck any service worker who might have to drive your car." Fuck mechanics. Fuck tow truck drivers. Fuck EMS.

    Fuck people who have health problems and can't actually use their lung capacity to blow into the breathalyzer to release the interlock. They'll never have an emergency and maybe have to drive anywhere.

    That's why it's a dumb take. This isn't about drunk driving deaths. Your "assume guilt and fuck everyone else who's not guilty but will be put in danger over it" take is exactly what I said it was.

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  • [–] 3 points 4 months ago* (1 child)

    It's always dangerous when we try to apply technical solutions to what are essentially social problems. Because then the task isn't necessarily "how can I improve my behavior", but it's "how can I get around this tech".

    I have long believed that this interlock nonsense is really just a way to punish poor people for DUIs while making sure that rich people can still continue to not face consequences for them by paying to get out of jail. After all, it would be cheaper for all involved to just suspend someone's license entirely (and impound their car), even after they get out of jail. But then there is no opportunity for rich people to use their connections and wealth to get around the rules.

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  • [–] 2 points 4 months ago

    This is the thing. I'm not against using tech to decide if someone is too drunk to drive. But I am against overreliance on tech to infringe the rights of others and possibly put them in danger in order to protect the public. Especially when it comes from people who don't know how the tech works and have never used it.

    If you can't think critically about how the tech works and what the pros/cons of the tech are, then you don't necessarily deserve to be able to make decisions like this for the masses.

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  • [–] 8 points 4 months ago (3 children)

    Unplug the alarm speakers.

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  • [+] 6 points 4 months ago (4 children)
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    • [–] 15 points 4 months ago (1 child)

    Unless it can prove that it is running entirely locally with no outside connection, it can fuck off.

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