 Last week, Mozilla published a great article talking in great depth about the privacy nightmare that cars are nowadays. One of the bold claims of this article was that cars were actually monitoring our sexual orientation and sexual activity. That sounds like such a dystopic scenario that hundreds of articles and videos have been published with this title. Car makers know when you have sex. Even Luis Rosman made a video about it. That's how you pronounce his name, right? So there's a little issue here, though. It's bullshit. And Mozilla knows it. So let's give some context. This entire discussion as far as the Mozilla article is concerned is about two car manufacturers, Kia and Nissan. The latter has a particularly clear privacy policy page and that's the one that gets quoted most often. Indeed, if you open their webpage and search for the word sex, you can see that Nissan might collect sexual orientation and activity. Even worse, they say that they might disclose this information to business partners. But let's not panic yet. The context that's missing is in the third column. How will this data be collected? The answer is only, and I repeat only, in a conversation with a Nissan employee. Wait what? Well, keep in mind that this policy is about collecting all the data from any possible Nissan operation, both for users like us and also Nissan contractors. Sure, this webpage talks about the data collected by Nissan cars, but also data collected from website usage, such as name, surname, address. Nissan does disclose very clearly that the car indeed collects data about you through Nissan Connect functionality. In fact, there's an entire section about it and includes everything that you would be expecting from a data hungry company, position, velocity, driving habits and so on. However, this section does not include ethnicity, sexual orientation or activity or intelligence and so on. This is because the car does not collect this information. Instead, in a different section of that page, we have everything that can be collected by a direct contact with Nissan employee. Now, I can only speculate on the exact reason behind this data collection policy, which is still weird, and I would probably be wrong, but do allow me to speculate. What if phone calls to Nissan client support are recorded? If that's the case, then people might mention and prompted some of their personal data. It might be as easy as, oh my boyfriend encountered this problem with the car and boom, Nissan has a recording of you disclosing your sexual orientation, which is legally nasty. So they have a couple of options in this speculation of mine. Either they create a system to delete any recording that has any personal information in them, which I assume would be fairly complex and prone to error, or simply they'll make you agree in advance that everything you share with a Nissan employee, Nissan will keep a record about it. This would also explain why they say that the information might be disclosed to business partners. It is not unusual for big companies to outsource some of the client support wobbly stuff to external companies, or they might want to share the recordings of the support calls with external companies again for who knows what reasons, like outsourcing client service quality assurance, I don't know. Either way, some business partner might also get access to your voice saying my boyfriend, so that's what they state in the privacy policy. And yes, it's all speculation, but I think it's at least a reasonable speculation. So remember that sexual orientation and activity is a very sensitive kind of info, I don't think I do remind you of that. And there are laws specifically protecting those. Nissan might be one to be like super extra careful not to be sued out of oblivion for accidentally keeping a record of you jokingly mentioning you had sex in your Nissan super cool modern on a support call. So they just list every single low protected personal topic in that section. But all of that is not about what the car collects about you. It's only only about what you decide to tell Nissan employees. And yet this feels scary. So firstly, saying that the car does not collect collect sexual activity, but it only collects, you know, driving habits, you shouldn't be collecting that right. And yeah, I don't like the idea of being recorded when contacting Nissan employees either nor do I like the idea of Nissan lacking a reliable system to not collect my sensitive info in the first place, even if it's me mentioning them. This whole thing, even when debunked, is just sketchy, which brings me back to Mozilla. Everything they claim in their article is factually correct as they phrased, but to actually know what's going on, you have to click on a link and then click on another link and then actually read the entire Nissan policy and then only then you can draw your own conclusions. Nowhere does Mozilla mention anything of what I've just said. Quite the opposite, everything is phrased in such a way that it seems like your car knows when you have sex, intentionally is letting. Luis Rosman does the same and honestly it's disgusting to see him doing this. He starts recording the video, talks about the sexual activity stuff, quickly notices about the only through direct contact with Nissan employee, midway through the video, stares confused at it for half a second, pronounces it and then start providing factually incorrect information completely ignoring that. So the video is false and it's misleading. And yet, and yet obviously, I agree with the goal of both Mozilla and Rosman. I want privacy, I want Nissan to do better. I think that the situation with privacy in cars is just a mess, but we cannot achieve it by spreading factually incorrect information and in fact just lies. There is no need to. The reality is already as horrible as it is now. I will admit I'm slightly disappointed at Mozilla, but even more I'm terribly disappointed at Rosman. Like he's the type of person that can just, you know, wake up, see the Mozilla news, quickly go through it to identify the main points, start recording, post the video and receive 400,000 views. I wish I could poll those numbers off this easily, but I can't. That kind of audience comes with responsibilities and when you purposefully mislead your audience sharing factually incorrect information just to make a point, regardless of how good that point is, if that happens, you're not upholding those responsibilities. You're letting your viewers down. I watched your video and you let me down. But sure, this story was picked up even by the biggest newspapers. The Guardian talked about it and sure, maybe none of them would have covered to talk about how car collects your driving habits, even though that would have been a much more realistic threat to our privacy. You all did a great job, you made a point, but this is not how I do things and it's not how I want to do things. It's actually the second time I got through a Rosman video and then I actually fact-checked everything and the video just turns out to be very superficial or worst case incorrect. The first time was about the web integrity video. I analyzed all the information given by the project to the best of my abilities and I'm proud of that. My impression is that Rosman was just picking some sentences and extrapolating a very superficial analysis with very little preparation before recording. To my viewers, I can just say you all should watch his videos because they're good, but don't trust them. Fact-check everything. You cannot be trusted, but of course you shouldn't trust me either. So, last paragraph. This video, three months ago, would have never happened because this video required a one hour of research in comparing sources to realize that Mozilla was lying, to one hour of writing the script, which I'm reading right now. This allows to have closed captions, subtitles that are accurate for accessibility purposes and an entire blog post with all the same content as this channel, if you don't like videos, you know. Three, half an hour of setting up the studio and recording. D, an editor, which I don't know, editor, write down how much time he spent writing, editing the video, sorry. Finally, he publishing the video and doing the blog post and doing the thumbnail and blah blah blah. This is a short video, which will most likely perform really bad because it's not about clean or Linux. Three months ago, I would have never done something like this and yet, here I am. What changed you did? I received an overwhelming amount of donations, which allowed me to contract an editor and even pay people to write scripts. You can see the whole team here. You've got GNOME contributors, distribution engineering leaders and so on. If you want me to continue doing videos and if you want all of these people to receive a paycheck, to spend their time contributing to the channel and carry your GNOME or whatever, I need this big floating progress bar to reach 100% before the end of the month. Yeah, it's basically impossible, which is going to make it a bit hard for me to do some things, but don't worry, any help is appreciated, even a small donation goes a long way and only thanks to those 100, 400 at least small donations. Thank you, thank you, thank you. I can actually make videos that takes hours and hours just to check the bullshit that I had to listen to all week.