this post was submitted on 03 Jun 2026
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Hello people, my family recently bought a Renault 5 e-tech. The car itself is great, but there are some aspects that creep me out, especially the driver-facing camera. We didn't actually know that such a camera existed before we bought the car, it was only mentioned as the car was given to us.

The cameras official purpose is to see, if you are tired and paying attention to the road, by some "AI magic", I suppose. You can also let it scan your face, so that you automatically get logged into your profile.

I personally think, that that is kinda creepy, especially as there is no visual indication if the camera is currently recording and no official way to disable the camera hardware-wise. When it is being coverd, the car immediately complains about it.

When talking to friends or family about it, I got one of two reactions: equal concern, or "nice feature actually", "what about the camera on your laptop?", "you are way too paranoid", "I have noting to hide; it is only me driving being recorded".

I have also seen such cameras in other cars, BYD for example.

What do you think, is this creepy or am I too paranoid? Does anyone know where the actual data is processed, on device or on some cloud server? Do you have any experience with such cameras? I couldn't really find any information about it on the internet.

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[–] yogurt@lemmy.world 7 points 9 hours ago (1 children)

Required in the EU and will be required in the US soon. BYD's big export market is Australia which doesn't require them yet but they're mandatory to get a good crash safety rating.

Renault and a lot of BYDs use Android as the software os, so probably it's Android doing the facial recognition (and also probably the attention eye tracking) and that's onboard.

Renault has a dashcam function that records from the built in cameras, but you have to plug in your own USB drive, so the upside of memory price-fixing is it's probably not worth it for Renault to spend $300 to store the data now.

[–] DieserTypMatthias@lemmy.ml 4 points 8 hours ago (1 children)

So it'll be possible to root the car through an OBD2 port, theoretically.

[–] locahosr443@lemmy.world 1 points 5 hours ago (1 children)

Maybe but I don't see you doing that over can us so it would need other connection to the ICE. I'd guess all those updates are OTA now.

I'm guessing though, 2014 is my newest car

[–] DieserTypMatthias@lemmy.ml 1 points 3 hours ago* (last edited 3 hours ago)

If you have access to the port, you can do some really cool stuff, like installing Magisk (app for generating rooted version of the Android ROM based on your filesystem), unlocking bootloader and flashing the image, since some manufacturers don't know that less is more.

SpoilerSee the Security issues part of the article.