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Hertz Puts Cameras In Its Rental Cars, Says It Has No Plans To Use Them
schwit1 writes Hertz has added a camera to many of its newer cars that uses the "NeverLost" navigational device. So why is Hertz creeping out customers with cameras it's not using? "Hertz added the camera as a feature of the NeverLost 6 in the event it was decided, in the future, to activate live agent connectivity to customers by video. In that plan the customer would have needed to turn on the camera by pushing a button (while stationary)," Hertz spokesperson Evelin Imperatrice explained. "The camera feature has not been launched, cannot be operated and we have no current plans to do so."
I've gotten a few rental cars from Hertz with the GPS devices. You can only turn the brightness down a bit. They cannot be turned off. I did notice the camera, so I just tossed my jacket over over it. I just request a car without that device now. Besides I have phone GPS which frankly is easier to use.
I use regular cellophane tape. It is opaque enough to destroy the image, clear enough not to be exactly sure why. Looks like a heavy smudge of grease/oil, like you touched it while eating fries or something.
Never answer an anonymous letter. - Yogi Berra
I love these MBA types who come up with these pretty much psychopathic ways to make a few extra bucks and don't realize that people will have a violently negative reaction.
I call this spreadsheet thinking; that is where a person has a spreadsheet showing the millions of car rentals and then adds a new line item where they make a few extra pennies per rental and it makes the bottom line go up by a nice jump. Then the MBAs give each other nice bonuses based upon this "brilliant" plan. What they don't have is a line item where their customers will actually pay more to use a different rental company that doesn't have cameras in their cars. The MBAs will just call them a few "irrational" actors who need to "get a life". Then when the media gets a hold of this they will say that "It was blown out of proportion" and eventually they will retreat saying that they need to "reposition" the technology.
The lesson the company won't learn is to stop hiring psychopathic MBAs.
"The camera feature has not been launched, cannot be operated and we have no current plans to do so."
So we're to believe hertz put the cameras there for no reason other than to hurt their business by scaring away customers, because may be someday they may want them?
I'm just guessing here, but I'd bet that their hardware manufacturer has been marching forward and may have added the camera to the "latest" model and Hertz is just buying the hardware off the shelf from them. The camera may have some prospective future use which has not been fully defined, but the main reason it's there is it came with the off the shelf hardware. Getting something without a camera may now be more expensive, at least something with the other features they want/need like more memory, better CPU's and more storage.
Custom hardware is insanely expensive to develop and it's way cheaper to go off the shelf in most cases and if the off the shelf offering has a camera, you get a camera. It's not like Hertz is buying these things by the tens of thousands, but likely only a few hundred a month in specific high volume markets to replace older and ailing units as they come out of service.
“We do not have adequate bandwidth capabilities to the car to support streaming video at this time,”
Notice that this doesn't mention *local* recording - say, a snapshot every 30 seconds or so. Then auto-upload via WiFi when the car returns to the agency. This might be very valuable for corporate marketing research, and to catch people doing things in the cars that their contract frowns on :-)
Here's the difference between businesses and TLAs, though: A business will tell you about the features it is offering, the TLAs will deny they're doing anything at all. Samsung made it clear they put cameras in those sets, and that those cameras (and microphones) were used to control the TV by means of transmitting recorded data to a third-party server for processing. There's no conspiracy there, they told you as much when you bought it (whether you listened or not is another issue). Plus, as you said, the cameras are obviously visible. Hertz's cameras are likewise, and they say they're not using them (yet), which I tend to believe; they have to know that a lie today will be found out tomorrow and I don't think they're that stupid.
The only instances I recall of a company lying about surveillance have involved them behaving in an entirely covert, non-obvious (am I being redundant, here?), manner, with the idea that, by drawing no attention, they would not be found out. This is the antithesis of that. I'll let you put that together for yourself.
What's the quickest way to go out of business today? Tell customers you're not spying on them, then spy on them anyway. People are very much apathetic when it comes to security (a-la "oops, we didn't realize the data we told you we were collecting and sending over the internet could be read by anyone), but not so much when it comes to targeted surveillance of themselves and their families, so lying about this at this juncture would would be Hertz's death knell.
APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.