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by Bluestrike2 2648 days ago
You're right. The owner/driver has to approve the update, if I recall. But putting responsibility to review and understand release notes on the car's owner seems kind of absurd. And that's assuming that you have accurate and descriptive release notes, which was most certainly not the case for the described instance. In any case, clicking "update" is such a rote behavior for users on computers, phones, and now their Teslas, I'd argue that it's effectively no different than an update happening without notice or user intervention.

There's only so much you can learn from even the best release notes, period. The ever-so-common "bug fixes," for example, is so broad that it effectively means nothing at all. At best, it's telling the end user "this little update just changes some stuff hidden under the hood. You won't notice anything, so don't give it any thought."

1 comments

Disclosure seems like a red herring, if there is no real choice other than to accept the update. If I get an update to my car that says "this may cause your car to explode at random times", and I don't want to scrap it, the only thing I can do is look around and see if other people are ignoring the warning, and then rationalize that it won't happen to me.

You can't ever look at consent outside of the context of the best available alternative to agreeing to something.