The charitable read is that they are notifying you of the possibility that the car’s data collection may unintentionally include sexual activity. E.g. your car was recorded as having a rocking motion while parked.
The other read is that they are intentionally collecting sexual activity data for nefarious purposes.
The first is the lawyer drafting the release being overcautious. The second is a corporation being evil.
I’m not in love with either, but the claim was that Nissan was actively collecting data about sexual activity, when there is no proof of that. The only thing there is proof of is that they put a notice in their terms of service.
> The first is the lawyer drafting the release being overcautious. The second is a corporation being evil.
How was the hypothetical overcautious lawyer able to independently come up with such a specific scenario, which would require intimate technical knowledge?
I believe your are missing a third option, which is a synthesis of both. This is that the engineers reported that their sensor data could be used to collect sexual activity. However, in response to that, the corporation preferred to cover themselves legally rather than making any technical effort to address the risk on their customers' privacy.
The lawyer is not being overcautious, but simply displaying the corporation's priorities. The corporation is not being evil, it is just being psychopathic.
I’ve been in conversations many times where lawyers chose language about a product that the product couldn’t do and there would be no reasonable way to do it technically.
The language is usually in response to specific precedents or jurisdictions where surprises happened to someone else.
It’s not the job of the lawyer to trust what the technical people are saying, it’s to protect the company. The lawyer will want to protect/cover anything even remotely plausible and/or has been seen to be a problem in similar situations.
Over the past couple decades I’ve been giving companies and our government the benefit of the doubt. And I’ve been burned every time.
Not only am I wrong, always, I’m extremely wrong. In fact the conspiracy theorists are often wrong too - they’re too lenient.
After Snowden, we should all understand that whatever the worst case scenario is, it’s probably worse than that. If you can think it, it’s probably happening. If they allude to it happening, it’s definitely happening.
I don't trust a single one of them. It's not even just they haven't earned it, it's that we have every reason not to. The public trust in these companies should be completely and irreparably shattered at this point.
The charitable read is that they are notifying you of the possibility that the car’s data collection may unintentionally include sexual activity. E.g. your car was recorded as having a rocking motion while parked.
The other read is that they are intentionally collecting sexual activity data for nefarious purposes.
The first is the lawyer drafting the release being overcautious. The second is a corporation being evil.
I’m not in love with either, but the claim was that Nissan was actively collecting data about sexual activity, when there is no proof of that. The only thing there is proof of is that they put a notice in their terms of service.