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.
Don’t overestimate the learning curve, your mainline distros like Ubuntu aren’t really much different anymore for most of your average consumer use cases.
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!
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.
They dropped off the kid in a park further down and then left the truck a few miles after. Kid was OK.
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.
I feel like this is a brainworm capitalist take. The capability was there, were their profits actually more important than locating a kidnapped child?
It’s not like this was going to drain a risk pool of equity and put other people’s coverage at risk; literally ping the fucking car and find out where it is. The capabilities are already there. Save the baby.
Why is this even a question?
“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.
