Have I told you about my neighbor who uses a leaf blower nonstop from 7am until 8pm? Well, he doesn’t actually, be he has a right to, and it’s splitting hairs whether he actually does or not.
I’m not a fan of the “they did something bad, so we might as well pretend they did something worse” line of argument. It strikes me as dishonest.
These companies do not get the benefit of the doubt. I do not need proof to assume they are selling us to the highest bidder when they explicitly outline it in their terms and services and have done it time and time again. Experience has shown us that more often than not they will.
I also didn’t say Nissan stole or broke into anything. My example is appropriate.
But in the absence of solid proof, I think the history of the last several decades of surveillance shows that it's completely reasonable to assume the absolute worst. Snowden showed that the scope of government data collection was far beyond even the wildest assume-the-worst theories floated in tech media prior to the revelations, and Doubleclick (wearing its Google façade) makes the NSA look lazy.
The reason these assumptions are reasonable, is that there's incentive for them to be true. Someone's willing to pay for that data. Maybe not very much, but if it costs almost nothing to collect, then it works out.
The way some manager sees it, Nissan would be "leaving money on the table" if they didn't spy on their customers to the absolute maximum permitted by their EULA. This gets brought up in every internal meeting about telemetry features, I can assure you. (I've been in those meetings for a number of automakers, though not Nissan specifically, the whole industry is on board. It turns the stomach. My voice was not heard.)
While I think it’s reasonable to split hairs about whether or not they were actually collecting the data, I think this is a really problematic analogy for a number of reasons.
I think a better comparison would go something like this: “My neighbor told me he might record everything that happens in my back yard”.
Your neighbor having the right to run his leaf blower constantly isn’t analogous to your neighbor directly claiming they might do something that impacts your privacy. Even if they never actually record anything, coming out and saying they might is more newsworthy than an unstated “right to be annoying” that never occurs.
It’s still worth distinguishing between “my neighbor said he might” and “my neighbor is actually doing this”, but just the claim on its own is still worth paying attention to if you care about your privacy.
With the cars, they went out of their way to get the right to do so, implying they want to do it, otherwise it would be a waste of money. Nobody can really verify whether they are or are not doing so, as that's confidential company information and it's not illegal (since they have to right to do so) so nobody can subpoena them to find out. So maybe they are doing it and just lying about not doing it.
