Comment by ixwt
1 year ago
I disagree. You can mess with odometer as much as you like. Trying to sell it off with a different amount of miles than have actually been put on it is called fraud.
You should own your car and be able to do as you wish. You should also be able to turn on or off any tracking. There are just consequences for some of the things you might want to do.
> should own your car
Ownership is a legal concept. What it means, what that package of rights tied to a piece of property entails, is entirely dependent on the law. Using ownership as a guideline for rule-making is bad form because it’s tautology; I can justify and condemn anything on the basis of my or adjoining persons’ purported ownership rights.
The machine languages of ownership are control and possession. That’s what we’re delineating, and unfortunately it generally must be done piecemeal. In this case, the pieces are the data cars beam home. Currently, the manufacturer controls it. You and I agree—I think—that it should be the user, which we—by this conjecture—make its owner. The ownership flows from control, not the other way.
(The problem is trebled with cars given they’re typically driven on roads the driver doesn’t own nor control.)
ownership has a legal definition, the concept of ownership exists outside of the law.
> the concept of ownership exists outside of the law
Not really. The common definitions either fall back to control or invoke the term property, another legalistic word. What ownership means is incredibly fluid and context dependent; consider how ambiguous it is when it comes to its classic form, real estate.
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>I disagree. You can mess with odometer as much as you like. Trying to sell it off with a different amount of miles than have actually been put on it is called fraud.
For a long time this was just a fact of buying any car that lived long enough. I have bought several cars where the transaction went something like: "so the odometer has rolled over twice; so there's actually 376,000 miles on the frame... but only 118,000 of those are on this motor and I swapped the transmission with a reman 76,000 miles ago."
Of course we've added a few significant figures to odometers since then, and in the era of digital odometers I imagine "rolling over" behaves very differently. (Will the chassis survive 4 billion miles? Seems unlikely. Do the display and storage have different bit resolutions? Is it a saturating counter internally? Externally?)