Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Rookie Dongle Warns Parents When Their Kids Are Driving Too Fast (thestack.com)

Posted by samzenpus on from the always-watching dept.

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.

16 of 153 comments (clear)

  1. Are these sponsored stories? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    They keep saying submitted by "anonymous" and include a link in the title bar to the front page of the site that is hosting the article. Bullshit detector is going off full blast right now.

    1. Re:Are these sponsored stories? by JMJimmy · · Score: 5, Interesting

      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.

    2. Re:Are these sponsored stories? by JMJimmy · · Score: 2

      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)

      Extraordinary, they invented a new language as well?

      Belgian is the short form for saying Belgian Dutch which is a group of four dialects used in the North of the country.

    3. Re: Are these sponsored stories? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      One should never, ever, for any reason allow telemetry data to be uploaded to anywhere. Even if it isn't sold to insurance companies (and the notion of them geting their slimy hands on it is bad enough), you should never subject yourself or your family to the pile of trouble this can cause in case of an accident.

      So your kid drives imperfectly. Who doesn't? Then maybe gets into a wreck. You now have a legally discoverable trail of evidence that can be made to show whatever the other party wants to. That your kid drove imperfectly in the past and you did nothing about it would be a good place for them to start.

      Never keep records you don't have to keep, and never help anyone sue you.

    4. Re:Are these sponsored stories? by JMJimmy · · Score: 2, Interesting

      If the insurance company wants the data, they would just mail them out honestly, offer a discount for people who use it, then raise rates across the board by the same amount as the discount. The vast majority of customers will be using it, and the average is all they care about.

      This product is about selling a false sense of control to parents, which is exactly what it is supposed to be. No conspiracy needed.

      The problem with insurance companies doing that is that they get the data on their customers only. Yes, that's useful for them and lots of them do that but it does not tell them anything about their new customer or customers they want to target. Third parties going after young drivers habits will allow insurance companies to target the drivers they want while having advanced warning about potentially costly customers before they get their first quote. While that's not necessarily a bad thing, it does make the point of insurance less and less meaningful (ie: distribute the costs of accidents/liability over a large base so lives aren't ruined due to lack of money). It's a path that leads to people's options being limited due to their inability to pay high premiums.

      It's already occurring due to historical data that showed that men under 25 were the most dangerous drivers, where I live that data lead to ~$900-1200/year initial premiums for young women and $2,500-3500 initial premiums for young men. It can be a serious impediment when your cost of employment for any job requiring a car (either on the job or just to get there) is 4 times hire than someone else with the same driving history as yourself. The sad part is, where I live anyway, the data that all that was based on was from a generation that grew up with drinking and driving, very little driver education, significantly lower safety standards, etc. Looking at only data from the 2000s onward, men under 25 were among the safest drivers on the road and paying among the highest premiums.

      What's really wrong though is the deceptive way they go about getting the data - making it seem like you won't sell the data without explicit permission then burying that explicit permission in another language/document. It's deplorable not conspiratorial.

  2. Easy solution by tkrotchko · · Score: 2

    Swap it to the parent's car in their OBD II port.

    --
    You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
  3. Parents by AK+Marc · · Score: 2

    If the kids moved it to the parents cars, the parents would be livid with their kids over their horrible driving.

    --
    Learn to love Alaska
    1. Re:Parents by mjwx · · Score: 3, Interesting

      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.
  4. It's been done by dlleigh · · Score: 3, Informative

    Fifteen years ago! The Autowatch a.k.a. "Narc on Lisa"

    https://news.google.com/newspa...

  5. Just a consumer version, not really new by localroger · · Score: 4, Informative

    Businesses have used these things for years, especially for heavy trucks but my company sedan has one. My company gets a healthy break on insurance rates because it's there, and they get a nifty web interface where they can pull up everyone's real-time location. Some people find it intrusive but it's kind of hard to complain since it's their car and they pay for the gas. The reporting does include sketchy errors, so it's best not to trust the warning reports too much unless there's a clear pattern. It doesn't always know the real speed limit and sometimes the GPS thinks you're in a very different place than you really are.

    --
    Brackets contain world's first nanosig, highly magnified:[.]
  6. Love it! by bwwatr · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Let's condition our kids to expect systemic surveillance from early on, and teach them about trust by demonstrating a complete lack of it ourselves.

    1. Re: Love it! by jep77 · · Score: 2

      I'm writing this comment on a 5-year old smartphone, you insensitive clod!

  7. Define speeding by Livius · · Score: 3, Interesting

    What will be reported as speeding? Exceeding the speed limit in short bursts is necessary (and legal) if you are overtaking slower-moving vehicles.

  8. Great. Another internet-to-CANbus bridge by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    The OBD-II port allows access to the life-safety systems of the car. It is a private unsecured network that performs no authentication.

    These dongles allow arbitrary access to the car bus, limited only by their buggy software. They shouldn't even be manufactured.

  9. He must hate his parents by wonkey_monkey · · Score: 2

    Rookie Dongle Warns Parents When Their Kids Are Driving Too Fast

    Poor guy. I mean, bad enough that your parents are Mr and Mrs Dongle, but then they name you "Rookie"? He should sue.

    --
    systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
  10. Re:Great. Another internet-to-CANbus bridge by jittles · · Score: 3, Insightful

    You are wrong. On the internet. Shame, shame.

    Pot meet kettle?

    Arbitrary access to the car bus is provided by the port that you plug this device into. The device listens to that bus and takes actions outside of the car network. Arbitrary access to the car network existed already.

    This 'arbitrary access' you refer to is only available to someone who has physical access to the CANBus to begin with. And when has anyone ever claimed that you could prevent a network from being owned when someone has physical access to it? These devices put that air gapped network ONTO the internet. Sure you could buy a car with OnStar and achieve the same thing, but many people are smart enough to avoid OnStar vehicles.

    Also, the only part of the "life-safety" system you can access is the airbag status. The "life" and "safety" things in the car computers are the airbags and brakes. Those both have their own isolated subsystems. You cannot mess up the "life-safety" systems in the car through the ODB-II port, you can only read the status.

    This is not true either. Just a few months ago black hats demonstrated the ability to control the ABS systems of cars, kill the engine while they are traveling at high rates of speed, and more. Less than a year ago I had a meeting with a major car manufacturer to discuss Android Auto and CarPlay with the engineers working to integrate it into their vehicles. With the prototypes I saw, you could start/stop the car and affect many other systems directly through the Manufacturer's own app. This app keeps you in their nice little playground. You could do a lot more if you escape their jail.

    The things you could change, if a device changed operating mode to the diagnostic mode, are just things that would make your car run like crap, or shut off.

    Having your car shut off at just the wrong moment could result in your death. And as I mentioned before it has already been established that ABS systems are vulnerable to tampering. So now you could have someone kill your engine and your brakes at just the right time to result in a fatal crash.

    Yeah, if you plug this thing into your car, and the software gets cracked, trolls could disable your vehicle. Why should manufacturing stop? If your doorknob was built with a lock that some people could pick, bad people could steal from you. Does that mean that locks shouldn't be manufactured? No, it means you have to choose what product to use, and some people will make poor choices.

    The CANBus was never designed to be exposed to attack like this. You're willing to have people in 2500+ pound vehicles flying down the road with script kiddies attacking their cars? And for what gain? So insurance companies can track your speed and position? So that you can have some company babysit your kid so you don't have to actually be a parent? So you can stalk your ex girlfriend? The risk to society far outweighs the benefit to society which, from my perspective is absolutely zero.

    My car is old, a 2000, but even with the car off and the main computer without power, the traction computer is still on and functioning. The anti-lock brakes are on the same computer as the anti-roll parking mode, and the traction assist for ice and snow. I could totally fry the main computer that connects to the ODB-II port, and I'd still have traction control. And if the vehicle is in gear and moving, I'd still have power assist to the brakes even if the engine had stopped firing because of a computer problem.

    Your car may not be as vulnerable as other cars but that doesn't mean that we should open up the car's network to the whole world for no reason. Let's look at your argument about door locks. Let's consider the fact that the network is NOT on the internet to be one of the locks securing it. Are you suggesting we should just remove this lock because someone could