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Rookie Dongle Warns Parents When Their Kids Are Driving Too Fast (thestack.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Dongle Apps, a Belgian tech company, has introduced a new system which alerts a car owner if the vehicle's driver is breaking the speed limit. Initially designed for parents and guardians to keep an eye on their young ones behind the wheel, the 'Rookie Dongle', connects to the vehicle's on-board diagnostics (OBD II) port, internal GPS and mobile technologies to push real-time data to the cloud and send notifications to car owners via email or text when the driver is speeding, suddenly accelerates, brakes hard or has high RPM levels.
If the kids moved it to the parents cars, the parents would be livid with their kids over their horrible driving.
And considering most teens learn to drive from their parents, the irony will be lost on these helicopter parents that they are responsible for their precious little snowflakes bad habits.
Do these people honestly not consider that their kids are watching them speed, failing to indicate, aggressively tailgating and talking on the phone whilst driving and thinking that this is perfectly perceptible behaviour.
Sorry for answering my own question, but of course not. See: Dunning-Kruger. We need a large campaign of public service announcements that begin with the words "Parents, you are not as good at driving as you think you are".
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
What will be reported as speeding? Exceeding the speed limit in short bursts is necessary (and legal) if you are overtaking slower-moving vehicles.
Of course it's bullshit. So is the story itself - these devices are not about warning parents that their kids are driving too fast, it's a backdoor to gather driving data to sell to insurance companies. They do a very nice job of trying to conceal that fact though.
Privacy Policy
Your data will not be shared, lent out, sold or made available in any other way to third parties, unless you give us your explicit consent hereto or if we are obliged to by court.
Sounds all well and good but then you go to the general conditions, which are in Belgian (even though the rest of their site is English)
Dongle Apps is also the sole owner of the information collected automatically by the dongle or while using the corresponding Services by the Client.
The Client grants Dongle Apps explicit authorization to exploit these data in accordance with Article 13 of these conditions.
Basically, they can do what they want with the data and fuck you very much.