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.

Comments

Are these sponsored stories?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Are these sponsored stories?

[JMJimmy]

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.

Re: Are these sponsored stories?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Just a consumer version, not really new

[localroger]

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.

Love it!

[bwwatr]

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.

Great. Another internet-to-CANbus bridge

[Anonymous Coward]

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.