If they were forced to tell, why would anyone pay for the service? Why would Honda keep the service around if Honda had to foot the bill and not be compensated for it?
How would you turn it back on again when they do pay?
Having to visit a dealership to enable the feature would cost them more in "meh, I can't be bothered" lost sales than the couple kilobytes of cellular data probably incurs.
This is the kicker for me. If the owner didn't subscribe, Honda should not be able to locate the vehicle at all. This implies that Honda is able to track every HondaLink-capable vehicle at all times, without permission of the owner.
It's a privacy concern as it is now too. I would think that if I did not pay then they would not collect the info to begin with and that's precisely why I would decline.
They will likely change it so that the people on the phone can't see any info about any car not in the plan instead. Just easier than patching every car already made.
No, they are not an accessory - they had no involvement, prior knowledge, or active involvement with covering up the theft at all. The fact that they could have discovered information relevant to the investigation merely makes them part of that investigation.
The proper way to compel them to spend their own resources to determine the location of a vehicle that may have been stolen would be to present a warrant for that information.
If the government wants to set up a tax structure to pay Honda for its call center staffing, the government is perfectly able to do so modulo things like votes and whatnot.
Regardless of subscription payment or not, if they gather evidence of a crime, they must release such information to the police if presented by a warrant. Illegal tracking is another issue.
>the employee reportedly told them to "get a warrant," leaving Ablhd with no choice but to drop approximately $112 on the service in order to get his vehicle's location.
So why didn't he just get a warrant? The surveillance video provided clear evidence of a crime.
Only takes a couple of hours to chop a car down to enough parts to make it hard to find.
Thieves aren't dumb -- I mean, plenty of them are, but plenty of them are smart enough to also know there are tracking devices in common consumer vehicles. Give them enough time and they can find and remove or disable such trackers.
OTOH, turning on the tracker ASAP gets you a location now, and that's something the police can move on.
I don't think it's unreasonable for getting a warrant to take a couple of hours. We want judges to be able to think at least a little about each of their cases.
>OTOH, turning on the tracker ASAP gets you a location now, and that's something the police can move on.
Can you get a police response in time to move on that information? In the world of police response priorities, I can totally understand that a stolen vehicle (even with active tracking in progress) pretty low on the list. Active car jacking, send a unit to respond. Reporting a car theft from a shopping mall parking lot, send a unit when available.
I'm pleased that they at least required either a transaction or a warrant. How would they verify that police and the owner are legitimately making the request?
Yeah, I can see the estranged, violent stalker using this feature to find the location of a victim.
So, if your car has the potential of manufacturer tracking, you really need to make sure that any estranged partners cannot activate the feature. I wonder if shelters have some list of cars that can be tracked?
I agree. And am glad they're not handing over personal info without a warrant.
That said, it's easy enough to look up a police departments phone number and call back, should one want to verify they're actually taking to the police. It's not a problem of verifying identity.
> it's easy enough to look up a police departments phone number and call back, should one want to verify they're actually taking to the police
This requires staff, training and monitoring to prevent abuse. When done, it introduces liability. It's reasonable to ask to be compensated for all that.
Complying with police and/or court orders is a cost of doing business. If your business subjects you to that beyond a trivial amount, the cost needs to be otherwise built-in to your business plan.
Especially if you're a multi-billion dollar conglomerate. They can't exactly claim ignorance like a start-up might.
Option 1: comply with LE+owner's request; they have a chance to recover vehicle; costs are low and bad PR is avoided.
Option 2: don't comply with LE+owner's request; deal with later warrant at higher cost (now you have compliance & legal involved); vehicle is not recovered, bad PR is obtained, and everyone loses.
> Option 1: comply with LE+owner's request; they have a chance to recover vehicle; costs are low and bad PR is avoided
Consequence 1b: you released tracking information to a stalker. They fooled your rep into thinking police were involved. Not only do you have a PR nightmare, you've also opened yourself up to legal liability.
I'm not arguing this is the right balance. Finding that balance depends on branding, legal and financial factors. But it's not an unreasonable position.
> They fooled your rep into thinking police were involved.
This is why you have policy for appropriate response and organizational escalation in place if necessary. Not hard to contact the department in question via another directory and verify the request.
Not giving data to police without a warrant who have a story about the owner is competence.
There are a significant number of frauds committed by police (using official resources to stalk, bully, or sell information) and they are caught and prosecuted only when people don't help them bypass things the system can reasonably audit.
Is this something I'm supposed to feel outraged about? Amazon refused to give me an EC2 instance with 2GB of RAM because I only paid for 1GB. Microsoft refused to give me 1 hour response times because I only paid for 24 hour response. Google refused to let me use Gmail with my own domain name because I didn't pay for Gmail for Business. Nest won't show me what happened on my camera five days ago because I only pay them to store that data for three days.
If Honda offers a service that lets you track your car and you choose not to pay for the service that lets you track your car, you should expect that Honda will not let you use that service for free. And we should all be especially glad that they didn't provide the information to law enforcement without a warrant. There is a provision in the legal system for law enforcement to infringe on your right to privacy, and it's called a warrant and has to be authorized by a judge. This is one of the core tenants of many Western justice systems.
This seems like a complete non-story. "Man didn't pay for service, company refused to provide said service for free". Kinda loses the punch there, doesn't it?
Honda Canada spokesperson: "Without an active subscription, the police would have to present a warrant to activate the location services on the vehicle and no such warrant was provided. At no time was Honda or its HondaLink provider aware of the location of this vehicle."
Right, but as a matter of business policy. I'm speaking as a matter of legal precedent. (Which may be applicable in this case, just not explicitly stated.)
Top level comment suggested a right to charge for costs incurred, irrespective of having a warrant.
If you interpreted my comment that way I apologize, but that's not what I said. I said the owner could pay for the service OR the police could get a warrant. In no way was I attempting to suggest the police need a warrant AND still have to pay.
While requiring a warrant from law enforcement is likely correct, refusing to give the owner the information necessary to track a signal from their own property is wrong. The owner of property should have a right to the information necessary to access a signal emitted by their own property. A situation where an owner does not have that right is essentially claiming that the device is leased rather than owned.
(Of course Honda wouldn't want this because then they'd have to compete with other providers for connected car services. Instead they wish to maintain a monopoly over Honda owners who may only choose between their service and no service.)
"A situation where an owner does not have that right is essentially claiming that the device is leased rather than owned."
Owning the device is not the same as having a service that enables the device. Especially when it is a device that relies on third-party networks. There's a cost in that. That's like saying that Apple needs to give me data to use my iPhone just because I own the iPhone and I pay them for it. Those are separate concepts.
Honda can totally deny the customer access to the data associated with this service. The way I see it there are two possibilities here:
1) He reports that his car was stolen to law-enforcement and they, within the scope of their duties, can go and ask Honda to release this information. That's fair.
2) He contacts Honda saying that his car was stolen and that he already reported this to the police. He asks for the location data because he wants to know where is the car now. He doesn't want to wait for the police to do their job. They deny it because he doesn't pay for this service. They will, however, honor the situation described in #1. That's also fair.
No, it's like saying Apple needs to give me the information required to use a phone with a network/MVNO of my choosing, rather than Apple saying "we'll pretend your phone doesn't exist unless you buy an ATT subscription."
Edit: your comment got updated.
I agree Honda can deny access to the data, but they shouldn't be able to deny the information needed to interface with his car via a 3rd party system instead.
Says who? He was free to install his own tracking system if he didn't want to use the manufactures. This sounds more like someone being upset at not getting a payout when their house burned down after they passed on fire insurance.
You act like "the information needed to interface with his car via a 3rd party system" exists. It almost certainly doesn't, because they'd have to specifically develop their system to support that use case. And there's no reason that they would.
If honda does in fact have the location data available, then they are withholding evidence from law enforcement. They are making it more expensive and time consuming to solve crimes so they can extort money from people. This is entirely different from memory provisioning in VMs and other comparisons people in this thread are trying to draw.
A more accurate comparison would be if a hosting service logged the process of one of their customers being hacked, but then refused to turn over evidence to the FBI unless the customer paid them for "special security service."
The legality of doing this kind of thing can be debated, but i would hope people can at least recognize wrong when they see it.
They absolutely are not withholding evidence. They're just asking the police to follow the correct procedure, which is a court-issued warrant.
No one should ever be compelled to hand over data to a police officer without a warrant, especially with something as sensitive as tracking the location of your car.
According to the article,
“Ablhd told Global News that he wasn't briefed on the service when he purchased the vehicle, which he says he would have sprung for had it been offered.”
Even if that’s no true, he still payed many thousands of dollars for a vehicle, which has GPS tracking capability, which was seemingly always active, considering they told the police they knew where the car was located, but told them to pound sand because they didn’t pay an exorbitant price for a service that likely costs Honda basically nothing to run.
You own your car but do you own every service your car is capable of? Your car is capable of picking up signals from SiriusXM radio, should that be free too? Your car has a 4G connection built in, should it allow unlimited data for free? My sister's minivan has screens in the back seats with a Netflix app, should Honda give every car a free Netflix subscription?
You own your car but you rent the GPS tracking service. This person chose not to rent that service and therefor is not entitled to the benefits of it.
Manufacturers should start implementing subscription models for functions like AC because they’ve added smart controls and those have server costs associated with them.
Not likely, given they provide this service through another company. Lots of overhead involved here, not to mention the initial work to set up the system. They should be able to charge for this.
If this had been in EU then the owner could have requested the information under GDPR, as the tracking data is private information connected to the person.
Honda do not have a service where if you pay them they will track your car. Honda track car owners, and if you pay them will give you a copy of the data.
It is very questionable if user data is owned by the company that do the tracking. How would it look if Facebook withhold evidence that a victim requested in regard to information they themselves uploaded? Personally I found find it rather poor behavior if they extorted the victim before returning the victims personal information.
"Man got unknowingly data mined, company refuse to return private information to the victim of an ongoing crime." sounds like a story to me.
The key part of the article is that company is now saying that they did not track the car. If Honda never had the information then the argument that "Man didn't pay for service, company did not provide said service" make more sense.
Okey lets not take about GDPR and simply talk about personal data gathered by companies. Is requesting a copy of that data the same as requesting a service without paying for it?
And since we are not talking about GDPR, who owns the personal data gathered by a company. The company or the person. Is there any argument in favor of the person having a right to access that data without paying?
> If this had been in EU then the owner could have requested the information under GDPR, as the tracking data is private information connected to the person.
That's an interesting interpretation of GDPR. The car is not under the control of the owner, and so the location data isn't the owner's data.
Do you think a judge would be influenced by the distinction between tracking a person and tracking the property of a person?
I am also a bit curious of how the contract between the company and the device owner would transfer to the thief. The common way for companies to enable tracking is by having the user agree to it, but the thief clearly did not. Do a thief in EU have a GDPR case against a company if the owner track the stolen device through a service like this one?
If you're not driving the car it's not your personal data, is it? It can't be used to identify you or anything about you, and so your data rights do not apply.
I hear the argument, but I wonder if you think judge would see that distinction as a valid argument in a court. A big part of the legal system is to actually see similar thing as being similar, even if there are technical differences.
Technically you can not track a person online. You can track an IP address, or a cookie, or an ID string in a database, but the server does not have eyes on the person behind the screen. Anyone can be behind the same IP address, people share accounts, browsers and devices. A operator can never be 100% sure if a data point identify you or anything about you.
But I don't think a judge would see that technical distinction. European courts already see mobile device location data as private data. So I ask you. What do you think a judge say about location data on peoples cars. Personal data just like mobile phones, or not?
GDPR would not have applied as the location data was not being collected in the first place. The entirety of the response to request for data would have been "We don't have that data."
This was the response Honda provided even without the GDPR applying.
The police could acquire a warrant to compel generation of the data, which Honda would comply with.
> HondaLink® Service* Is a subscription-based service that provides convenient features such as voice communication in case of emergency, online security, and one-on-one operator assistance. (source: 2019 SEDAN OWNER’S MANUAL)
Perhaps a case of not reading the manual, clicking next, not reading the EULA... ?
There’s a larger concern (at least for me) not being discussed here. There is conflicting information from Honda: the customer support rep stated (allegedly) that Honda did have the location of the car while the spokesperson later denied that Honda ever had the location of the car. If the customer support agent is correct, the driver was in a vehicle, owned by him, that had surveillance technology in it without his knowledge and that could be activated by Honda, a private company, without his consent. That’s not ok.
We might have two possibilities, if the car is sending "I'm alive!" then it's ok, the rep could say they have the vehicle online, maybe the rep wasn't so accurate with his words and said they had the location. But if it's "I'm alive, my coordinates are X, Y" even without an active subscription, then this is a big issue.
I only have this article to go off of which has the customer service rep saying:
> An employee at a call center operated (or contracted) by Honda reportedly confirmed that they had the vehicle's location, but declined to share it
But even if it’s just pings, the pings have to leverage some sort of network which can be used to establish a general location if not an exact one. That’s still too much for me.
At a certain point, it is incumbent on the buyer to do some research and understand something about what they're buying. The availability of these systems is not a secret.
We just put up a Ring doorbell on our house. I know that making the (surveillance!?!) video available to my phone requires something be stored somewhere and transmitted over some network. Storage and transmittal mean other people will have it at some point. Should I be surprised or offended about that at some point in the future? Or offended that after some trial period I may have to pay somebody for that service?
I disagree. Even if the vehicle has a built in system for tracking, the tracking should always be opt in and with consent of the owner. If not, at some point, all cars will have this capability built in to it and drivers who don’t want it won’t have an option to buy a car without it. Not wanting to be tracked shouldn’t mean you can’t buy a car.
I don't understand the urgency in recovering the stolen vehicle. It's a brand new car, which means it was insured, which means it can be easily replaced at no cost to the owner. If my car was stolen I'd be shopping for a new one, not trying to play cops and robbers.
I'm not sure the article says it had full insurance. The driver is only required to have liability, which insures damage to others property, but not your own. And in some places even that's not required if you can put up a bond on lieu of insurance.
Unless the brand new car was purchased in cash, and the owner had very poor judgment, it was financed and the financing terms typically require comprehensive coverage.
If he did decide at some point to buy a subscription, the simplest way to enable it is to send a signal to the sleeping-but-live tracker. Else he'd have to go to a dealer for some "factory authorized" service. That might not be reasonably done in some locations.
Giving up privacy in exchange for convenience. This should be an opt in feature, not a company tracking your every move and doing who knows what with your data. Even when you don’t pay for said feature.
I can completely see the inverse business model popping up: default on for everybody and everybody gets the location at all times via google maps; pay 100$ for increased privacy.
Why doesn't Honda sell an as-needed "finder service" for say $200? They'd make some money without looking like a jerk. The $200 should probably be premised on actually finding the vehicle. Honda makes money, customer gets car back: a win-win. (It probably should be coordinated with the cops. Walking straight into a crook's den could be daunting.)
85 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 159 ms ] threadHaving to visit a dealership to enable the feature would cost them more in "meh, I can't be bothered" lost sales than the couple kilobytes of cellular data probably incurs.
Are they doing anything with those data?
Although Honda could save themselves some grief by not tracking at all if the owner doesn't have the service.
The proper way to compel them to spend their own resources to determine the location of a vehicle that may have been stolen would be to present a warrant for that information.
So why didn't he just get a warrant? The surveillance video provided clear evidence of a crime.
Thieves aren't dumb -- I mean, plenty of them are, but plenty of them are smart enough to also know there are tracking devices in common consumer vehicles. Give them enough time and they can find and remove or disable such trackers.
OTOH, turning on the tracker ASAP gets you a location now, and that's something the police can move on.
And for time critical issues like this, it shouldn't be.
Can you get a police response in time to move on that information? In the world of police response priorities, I can totally understand that a stolen vehicle (even with active tracking in progress) pretty low on the list. Active car jacking, send a unit to respond. Reporting a car theft from a shopping mall parking lot, send a unit when available.
So, if your car has the potential of manufacturer tracking, you really need to make sure that any estranged partners cannot activate the feature. I wonder if shelters have some list of cars that can be tracked?
That said, it's easy enough to look up a police departments phone number and call back, should one want to verify they're actually taking to the police. It's not a problem of verifying identity.
This requires staff, training and monitoring to prevent abuse. When done, it introduces liability. It's reasonable to ask to be compensated for all that.
Especially if you're a multi-billion dollar conglomerate. They can't exactly claim ignorance like a start-up might.
If the police present a warrant, yes. Everything else is customer service.
Option 2: don't comply with LE+owner's request; deal with later warrant at higher cost (now you have compliance & legal involved); vehicle is not recovered, bad PR is obtained, and everyone loses.
Consequence 1b: you released tracking information to a stalker. They fooled your rep into thinking police were involved. Not only do you have a PR nightmare, you've also opened yourself up to legal liability.
I'm not arguing this is the right balance. Finding that balance depends on branding, legal and financial factors. But it's not an unreasonable position.
This is why you have policy for appropriate response and organizational escalation in place if necessary. Not hard to contact the department in question via another directory and verify the request.
There are a significant number of frauds committed by police (using official resources to stalk, bully, or sell information) and they are caught and prosecuted only when people don't help them bypass things the system can reasonably audit.
If Honda offers a service that lets you track your car and you choose not to pay for the service that lets you track your car, you should expect that Honda will not let you use that service for free. And we should all be especially glad that they didn't provide the information to law enforcement without a warrant. There is a provision in the legal system for law enforcement to infringe on your right to privacy, and it's called a warrant and has to be authorized by a judge. This is one of the core tenants of many Western justice systems.
This seems like a complete non-story. "Man didn't pay for service, company refused to provide said service for free". Kinda loses the punch there, doesn't it?
But is there any precedent for charging the police to collect extant evidence? (Assuming a warrant is actually presented.)
I honestly don't know.
Honda Canada spokesperson: "Without an active subscription, the police would have to present a warrant to activate the location services on the vehicle and no such warrant was provided. At no time was Honda or its HondaLink provider aware of the location of this vehicle."
Top level comment suggested a right to charge for costs incurred, irrespective of having a warrant.
Although I'm still curious as to any case law.
While requiring a warrant from law enforcement is likely correct, refusing to give the owner the information necessary to track a signal from their own property is wrong. The owner of property should have a right to the information necessary to access a signal emitted by their own property. A situation where an owner does not have that right is essentially claiming that the device is leased rather than owned.
(Of course Honda wouldn't want this because then they'd have to compete with other providers for connected car services. Instead they wish to maintain a monopoly over Honda owners who may only choose between their service and no service.)
Owning the device is not the same as having a service that enables the device. Especially when it is a device that relies on third-party networks. There's a cost in that. That's like saying that Apple needs to give me data to use my iPhone just because I own the iPhone and I pay them for it. Those are separate concepts.
Honda can totally deny the customer access to the data associated with this service. The way I see it there are two possibilities here:
1) He reports that his car was stolen to law-enforcement and they, within the scope of their duties, can go and ask Honda to release this information. That's fair.
2) He contacts Honda saying that his car was stolen and that he already reported this to the police. He asks for the location data because he wants to know where is the car now. He doesn't want to wait for the police to do their job. They deny it because he doesn't pay for this service. They will, however, honor the situation described in #1. That's also fair.
Edit: your comment got updated.
I agree Honda can deny access to the data, but they shouldn't be able to deny the information needed to interface with his car via a 3rd party system instead.
A more accurate comparison would be if a hosting service logged the process of one of their customers being hacked, but then refused to turn over evidence to the FBI unless the customer paid them for "special security service."
The legality of doing this kind of thing can be debated, but i would hope people can at least recognize wrong when they see it.
No one should ever be compelled to hand over data to a police officer without a warrant, especially with something as sensitive as tracking the location of your car.
He paid for a car, he didn't pay for the GPS tracking. Simple as that.
You own your car but you rent the GPS tracking service. This person chose not to rent that service and therefor is not entitled to the benefits of it.
Not likely, given they provide this service through another company. Lots of overhead involved here, not to mention the initial work to set up the system. They should be able to charge for this.
Honda do not have a service where if you pay them they will track your car. Honda track car owners, and if you pay them will give you a copy of the data.
It is very questionable if user data is owned by the company that do the tracking. How would it look if Facebook withhold evidence that a victim requested in regard to information they themselves uploaded? Personally I found find it rather poor behavior if they extorted the victim before returning the victims personal information.
"Man got unknowingly data mined, company refuse to return private information to the victim of an ongoing crime." sounds like a story to me.
The key part of the article is that company is now saying that they did not track the car. If Honda never had the information then the argument that "Man didn't pay for service, company did not provide said service" make more sense.
But it wasn't, so none of the rest matters.
On second thought don't bother answering that because again, this didn't happen in the EU so GDPR means absolutely nothing.
And since we are not talking about GDPR, who owns the personal data gathered by a company. The company or the person. Is there any argument in favor of the person having a right to access that data without paying?
That's an interesting interpretation of GDPR. The car is not under the control of the owner, and so the location data isn't the owner's data.
I am also a bit curious of how the contract between the company and the device owner would transfer to the thief. The common way for companies to enable tracking is by having the user agree to it, but the thief clearly did not. Do a thief in EU have a GDPR case against a company if the owner track the stolen device through a service like this one?
Technically you can not track a person online. You can track an IP address, or a cookie, or an ID string in a database, but the server does not have eyes on the person behind the screen. Anyone can be behind the same IP address, people share accounts, browsers and devices. A operator can never be 100% sure if a data point identify you or anything about you.
But I don't think a judge would see that technical distinction. European courts already see mobile device location data as private data. So I ask you. What do you think a judge say about location data on peoples cars. Personal data just like mobile phones, or not?
This was the response Honda provided even without the GDPR applying.
The police could acquire a warrant to compel generation of the data, which Honda would comply with.
Perhaps a case of not reading the manual, clicking next, not reading the EULA... ?
> An employee at a call center operated (or contracted) by Honda reportedly confirmed that they had the vehicle's location, but declined to share it
But even if it’s just pings, the pings have to leverage some sort of network which can be used to establish a general location if not an exact one. That’s still too much for me.
We just put up a Ring doorbell on our house. I know that making the (surveillance!?!) video available to my phone requires something be stored somewhere and transmitted over some network. Storage and transmittal mean other people will have it at some point. Should I be surprised or offended about that at some point in the future? Or offended that after some trial period I may have to pay somebody for that service?