Re:Tesla won’t give drivers their own crash data without a c...
by Symmetry on Tuesday June 05, 2018 @11:28AM
(#17238582)
I'd be fine if the only way to get a Tesla was to deliberately sign over your rights to the data. But nobody reads the EULA and the vast majority of consumers have no idea that this is something they're agreeing to. I'd really like for us as a society to rethink how consumer consent could work in a way that doesn't require everyone to be a lawyer. But given that most of the rules around this have been constructed implicitly by lawyers and judges I'm not sure how that could happen.
Re:Tesla won’t give drivers their own crash data without a c...
by vkou on Tuesday June 05, 2018 @11:56AM
(#17238880)
What about used car sales? Are you now unable to sell your car, unless the buyer agrees to the TOS?
Re:Tesla won’t give drivers their own crash data without a c...
by ubernostrum on Tuesday June 05, 2018 @02:01PM
(#17240328)
This is precisely how covenants work on real estate, and is how things like homeowners' associations perpetuate themselves: the original builder, or the first owner to join the HOA, attaches a covenant which will require all future owners to also join the HOA and follow the HOA's policies.
In prior times, such covenants were also used to try to racially segregate property, by forbidding sale to a person of a race the covenant's creator disliked (such covenants are technically still valid, but unenforceable by US courts).
And they're sometimes used for other things, too; I recall there was a house near my college's campus that the college wanted to purchase and use, but the owner had set up a restrictive covenant that would forbid any later purchaser/inheritor from selling it to the college.
[dead]
I agree that preventing a person to choose to sell something they own is a restriction on their freedom. But problems arise when the negotiation of that exchange is unilateral, relegated to EULAs and contracts which are incomprehensible, non-negotiable, and mandatory to purchase the product, and performed in a less-than-perfectly-efficient market.
It would be one thing if I could buy a Tesla, a Nest, or log onto a site with ads, and the process included a step where I could elect to share my data, to not share my data, or to give them the data and promise not to ask for it back, with different price points for each.
It's another thing when giving people the freedom to give up certain rights results in all manufacturers requiring people to exercise that freedom in order to purchase products.
The market is far from efficient. There is no car that's just like a Tesla but costs more by the value of this data exchange. There is no negotiation of the contract with Tesla, it's built into the purchase price and required by the legal department.
Observing that the market is pervasively inefficient in a way that leads to a bad outcome, and devising regulations that correct the inefficiency, is precisely why we have laws and governments.