Volkswagen representatives demanded a $150 fee before using GPS to locate the vehicle and child.
A family is suing VW after the company refused to help them locate their carjacked vehicle with their toddler son inside unless the parents or police paid a $150 subscription fee.
Everything started if February of this year when Taylor Shepherd, after pulling into her driveway in her 2021 VW Atlas, was carjacked by two masked men. Worse yet, her two-year-old son was in the backseat when it happened. She tried stopping them but they literally ran over her with the Atlas; breaking her pelvis and putting her six month pregnancy at risk. “They ran over the entire left side of my body. There were tire tracks all over the left side of my stomach,” Shepherd told Fox32.
Shepherd called 911 thinking that she would be able to get GPS info through VW’s vehicle control and tracking Car-Net app. The app turned out to be useless though unless you paid, which is a wild thing to ask in an emergency like this. However that’s exactly what VW did when Lake County Sheriff’s contacted the company for the GPS Data.
read more: https://jalopnik.com/parents-of-baby-in-carjacked-vehicle-are-suing-vw-for-r-1851025357
Welcome to the 21st century!
Where the gps in your car isn’t yours and the car isn’t either
2000: I bought myself a car!
2023: I bought an limited licen$e to drive a car!I’m very over this subscription/licensing culture corpos are forcing us into.
I think there’s a gap in the market for a Microsoft office alternative you can just buy. And the next Windows is rumoured to be subscription based too.
2025 might finally be the year of linux
2025 might finally be the year of linux
The year of the Linux desktop is right now, if you want it to be. For me it was 2007 - and watching the evolution of Windows since then has been a continuous validation of my choice.
If you want to use Linux, use it! It’s ready, and IMO has been for some time.
(And just to be clear - choosing otherwise is OK too! I don’t intend my enthusiasm as zealotry. Folks making an educated decision to stay is totally valid.)
I just don’t have the time to learn something new at the moment, I’m working full time and studying ontop of that, not to mention I’m almost 30 and to old haha
But in all seriousness the next pc i build will probably be linux
Installing it on a virtual machine can be a good way to try it out to begin with. No need to restart whenever you’d like to use it, and you’ve still got access to everything you normally use.
I remember using VirtualBox years ago to do this.
There’s a good enough one that is free. I don’t see anything that the Microsoft office suite does any better than the free options.
Reminder: corporate claims of “licensed, not sold” are LIES. If you buy something, you own it regardless of what they say. Stop taking legal advice from the enemy!
A whole new meaning for “driving license”
The real problem here is the fact that the car has GPS and the owners can’t even control it. Welcome to the 21st century!
They dropped off the kid in a park further down and then left the truck a few miles after. Kid was OK.
I’m going to play devil’s advocate here: how is the guy on the phone supposed to know it really is the police on the other side and not just some guy trying to scam his way into a freebie?
You could say that companies should err on the side of caution, but then every potential customer could pull the same, and then how do you weed out the real ones from the fake ones?
You could argue the service should be free anyway, but then we’d be arguing a different point.
I’m going to play devil’s advocate here: how is the guy on the phone supposed to know it really is the police on the other side and not just some guy trying to scam his way into a freebie?
At the individual level this is actually pretty simple. I work in IT and when I used to do security training the way we’d validate is with a known contact.
In this situation you get the contacting officers name and department, disconnect the call, call the non-emergency listed number for that department and ask for that officer by name.
There’s a lot of other failure point potential in this scenario but validating the person calling is actually law enforcement shouldn’t be one of them.
That is good life advice.
I hammered into my elderly parents that if they ever get a call/text from their “bank”, “tax department”, “insurance”, or literally anything - ask for a case number and hang up. Then call the number listed on the official website.
Now they’re telling everyone they know about it. Good on them.
In a normal business that is not a mega corporation you would just do it. You can just activate it for a limited period if you really feel suspicious, after two or three tries you will quickly spot the people trying to abuse the system.
Even if people could abuse the system for free aubsceiptions, I don’t agree with the fact that preventing people from getting free subscription is a higher priority than helping a mother getting her 2 years old back.
It’s not like they don’t know who owns the car. They should be able to check afterwards if it was a real emergency, and if it was faked, send the bill and maybe report them for impersonating a police officer.
Lol wut? There’s no way a manufacturer knows who owns the car unless it was registered
I was thinking that if they can remotely unlock features based on a subscription I assume there’s an account involved at some point.
Won’t someone think of the billion-dollar megacorps‽ They may lose a few bucks saving kidnapped children on the off-chance some fakers pretend to be cops! GASP!
You’re acting as if this is some sort of widespread form of criminal activity and that it’s not already a crime to impersonate a cop or to commit wire fraud while committing a kidnapping. Because who gives a shit about any of that when a few bucks could be made?
how is the guy on the phone supposed to know it really is the police on the other side and not just some guy trying to scam his way into a freebie?
Cop only number or internal group to transfer to? Fax number to send a warrant with contact info so VW can call back and investigate if need be? Get the police department number, google to confirm they’re legit, and call back? Thats just off the top of my head.
If VW doesn’t have an option like that its poor design. If the guy didn’t know, poor training. One or both are gonna be resolved now that the spotlight is on them.
If only there was some system in place where police could verify their authority somehow.
Erring on the side of caution is to say no to the random that calls you asking for GPS coordinates
You don’t have to go that far. The rep could just be soft-blocked to enable the feature unless a card was processed first.
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As a programmer, I will very mildly defend VW here. Not at all defending the payment structure (that’s shit and has no excuse other than rent seeking), but the person who had to tell the police they needed to pay likely didn’t have an override button. Something like this just isn’t an edge case that you often think of in development, so not having the option of getting that data out for free is reasonable if this is the first incident.
Overriding or adjusting payment isn’t an edge case. The article says the reason they refused was company policy. They had the option and said no.
That’s a huge, glaring edge case to ignore for a company as large as VAG. Shouldn’t be acceptable.
Not really. I’m not sure when it became auto makers responsibility to protect you from the world and car hijackings. The tech is primarily an ad on to protect you in crashes and shitty weather.
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So I’m a bit torn on this one… your taxes pay for firefighters and police. However you have to have insurance in emergencies should your house burn down and you want to rebuild, or should something (like your car) get stolen. In all cases, you’re paying to support the infrastructure that provides you a safety net.
Without getting into the social economics of what in this world should actually be free, not paying for this seems to fall outside of that as the person refused to pay for the safety net until it was needed. That’s like trying to go to an insurance company after an accident to get coverage for that accident.
the service is not primarily for emergencies though. This is like cell phones. Phones not on contract are still required to be able to dial 911
Yeah this is exactly like the time Verizon refused to connect the firefighters in the middle of a wildfire because they had “used too many minutes” or something stupid like that. Megacorps need to be held accountable for emergency situations that don’t fit their neat little T&Cs.
liberal answer
It’s not like their GPS capabilities are disabled. They use it to track you and sell the data. If the life is someone was not in danger I would agree with you, but a life was at risk.
Insurance companies have no issue at all watching customers die instead of covering a life-saving surgery. A life being in danger means absolutely nothing to them.
Insurance companies have no issue at all watching customers die instead of covering a life-saving surgery. A life being in danger means absolutely nothing to them.
Emergency response and recovery has always been a problem of the commonwealth, not of individuals. Private insurance is and has always been a scam.
The cost of lives lost became conspicuous during the prison boom of the 1980s in which the Reagan—George H. W. Bush tough on crime policies literally more than decimated neighborhood populations. When police busted someone for possession, or loitering or contempt of cop (or was gunned down in spite) it wasn’t just an alleged thug removed from society, but also typically an employee, a parent, a renter, a consumer who bought food and paid bills. (The You’re Wrong About pod, amusingly on Dan Quayle vs. Murphy Brown gets into the 80s era conservative policies of broken window policing and harsh sentences for nonviolent petty crime)
So whenever someone’s life is demolished by a natural disaster, an untreated health problem, a vehicle collision, a rampage killing, police on a bender, whatever, it hits like a bomb in the community. Almost everyone has others who depend on them, as family, as a friend, as a customer or laborer. And when something makes them disappear, collateral crises manifest like shrapnel.
“I hate companies that freely use my private data, especially the ones that share it with the police!”
VW refuses to use your data unless you comply to the requirements allowing them to lawfully use your data
“Fuck you VW!”
Edit: Turns out it’s a third party they deal with that made the mistake, they might not even have a way to bypass the payment!
What kind of a braindead comment is this? The only reason they refused is because they wanted to get paid even though it was an emergency.
Right? This wasn’t “No don’t take my data but also find my car” it was “Please for the love of god find my car my child is in there” followed with “Right for a modest fee of $150 ma’am we sure can”.
Has nothing to do with privacy. Maybe they ask a boilerplate “We have to ask but you do give us consent right” followed by a “What the fuck do you think fucking yes!”, but not asking for money. That’s not the time.