nagware is absolutely not for safety features. Deny the terms and conditions and every time you start the car you have at least three screens you have to scroll and click buttons. It is a very recent feature, have seen it on models from january onwards.

BTW: You also want to deny that because if you agree you also agree to update the system at their will (many cases on the press of them fucking it up, bricking cars requiring ECU replacement. A couple of manufactures i won't mention fucked that up as badly as using two different ECU makes for the same car model, and sending the wrong binary and the bootloader happily accepting it. All without user approving the update beforehand. All happening in the background. Car stops at the sign, ECU reboots and dies.)

You also have constant nagware when you disable the tracking features in software.

Your trust in the law (EU law! Haha) to do the enforcing itself is nice, but history and lived experience tell me that these laws are going to be skirted if there’s money in it.

Nobody seems to care and this isn't enforced at all.

It is very hard to live in Germany without having a google account. Many services are only offered via phone-app that is only available through play-store. I'd have to use apks from questionable, untrusted third-party websites.

Good luck finding an employer that doesn't require you to have a microsoft account.

The EU is not the privacy paradise some make it seem to be. It's a corrupt, bureaucratic, exploitive nightmare with some splashes of democracy here and there.

Von der Leyen is the perfectly ridiculous representative, she left nothing but corruption, collusion and incompetence in her wake.

But based on my experiece:

- GPS cold start requires 1-2 minutes to get a fix. That's too long in case of a crash. That means GPS is started at the same time as the car.

- A-GPS is better, but not sufficiently fast in case of a crash either.

- The cheapest way to implement an eCall module is to use a phone chip that includes both phone and GPS functions. I'm sure we can agree that all manufacturers will choose the cheapest. That means the telephony is started at the same time as GPS - when the car is started.

- Let's assume that telephony chip is separated. A phone boots in ... 30s? Too slow even if the eCall module doesn't include a full OS.

- A phone in airplane mode still takes 5-10 seconds to connect to the network and 3-5 seconds to dial. If you press the ecall button on your car, how fast does the call connect? If it's less than 5s, the ecall module was already registered on the network. If it's registered on the network, the car leaves a metadata trail on at least one of the local phone operators' servers. That metadata includes the time and the cell towers = full tracking data.

- GSM networks since the beginning mandate that the SIM card can execute commands received from the network. A SIM card is a full independent embedded processor. You should really watch the Defcon and BackHat presentations about SIM cards. Anyone that can send binary SMSs (and most operators are very ignorant/permissive) can track it, start calls, listen on the mic, etc.

Of course, I can't or won't prove it.

And yes, I am _intimately_ familiar with the GDPR and other laws and regulations. The US also had (has) wiretapping laws that would have prevented snooping on Americans.

I'm not claiming the EU is no better than the US, it clearly has better intentions. But fundamentally, I think the EU will end up in the same place as the US sooner or later, simply because the same forces are at play: desire for security >> desire for privacy for most people if the rubber hits the road.

Here's some fun read for those who seek more info:

https://www.politico.eu/article/germany-privacy-watchdog-sid... https://www.bnd.bund.de/EN/Service/PrivacyPolicy/privacypoli... https://www.lexxion.eu/?newsletters_method=newsletter&id=477

Or, more succinctly - they are likely following the law but have figured out a way to avoid it as written using consumer opt-in and dark patterns.

You call it FUD, but this is hacker news and with overwhelming incentives it is not unreasonable to ask for verification that data isn’t being exfiltrated.

They were also in mass breach of vehicle emission laws. The fact that there was some backlash (although people didn't really stop buying VAG cars), people got prosecuted, the company got fined, didn't really change their decisions while they were pumping out fraudulent cars.

Yes, we should have privacy laws like this in the EU, this is a good thing! But thinking that, when these laws are in place, all companies magically will follow them is naive. To them it's still a cost/benefit analysis, and history has shown short term benefit trumps many other things for these companies.