[kragen]

autocratic hellholes arise where autocracy is more stable than democracy, for example when the police have enough dirt on activists to keep them from organizing opposition and can persuade themselves that such a crackdown is justified

you can sell the car, but you may find yourself walking to work, and you can't un-record the videos the car already recorded of you; and, if your neighbors still have surveillance cameras the police have access to, you may not have achieved any actual privacy

privacy, in the civil liberties sense, is a collective good, not an individual good

[generic92034]

It is an unrealistic expectation that a sufficient number of people boycott modern cars (with internal cameras) to change the vendors' offerings. Besides that, there will not even be a sufficient number of old cars for everyone (everywhere).

Your general point is quite correct, though, and I am avoiding surveillance more than most people.

[kragen]

yes, i do think preserving democracy and civil liberties is an unrealistic expectation, but i think that we can make efforts in that direction which are productive even if they ultimately fall short of what we would want