Hertz puts cameras in its rental cars, says it has no plans to use them
Hertz puts cameras in its rental cars, says it has no
plans to use them
by Kashmir Hill | March 13, 2015
This week I got an angry email from a friend who had just
rented a car from Hertz: “Did you know Hertz is putting cameras in rental
cars!? This is bullsh*t. I wonder if it says they can tape me in my Hertz
contract.” He sent along this photo of a camera peeping at him from out of his
“NeverLost,” a navigational device that the company has started putting in many
of its cars:
Hertz rental car camera
“I even felt weird about singing in the car by myself,”
he said. A Googling expedition revealed that my friend was not the first person
driven to disturbance by the in-car surveillance system. A Yelp user was revved
up about it. Disgruntled renters on travel forums like MilePoint and FlyerTalk
want Hertz to put the brakes on “spy cams.” A loyal Hertz customer who rented a
car in Chicago said it might make them never want to rent with Hertz again:
The system can’t be turned off from what I could tell.
Further investigation revealed that the camera can see the entire inside of the
car. I know rental car companies have been tracking the speed and movements of
their vehicles for years but putting a camera inside the cabin of the vehicle
is taking their need for information a little TOO FAR. I find this to be
completely UNACCEPTABLE. In fact, if I get another car from Hertz with a camera
in it, I will move our business from Hertz completely.
Hertz has offered the NeverLost navigational device for
years, but it only added the built-in camera feature (which includes audio and
video) to its latest version of the device — NeverLost 6 — in mid-2014.
“Approximately a quarter of our vehicles across the country have a NeverLost
unit and slightly more than half of those vehicles have the NeverLost 6 model
installed,” Hertz spokesperson Evelin Imperatrice said by email. In other
words, one in 8 Hertz cars has a camera inside — but Imperatrice says that, for
now, they are inactive. “We do not have adequate bandwidth capabilities to the
car to support streaming video at this time,” she said.
So why is Hertz creeping out customers with cameras it’s
not using? “Hertz added the camera as a feature of the NeverLost 6 in the event
it was decided, in the future, to activate live agent connectivity to customers
by video. In that plan the customer would have needed to turn on the camera by
pushing a button (while stationary),” Imperatrice explained. “The camera
feature has not been launched, cannot be operated and we have no current plans
to do so.”
The device is often included as a free perk for Hertz’s
“Gold” members, meaning Hertz is taking the risk of creeping out its most loyal
customers with the camera eye in the car. When asked whether customers were
informed there would be a camera in the car, or told under what circumstance it
would be activated, Imperatrice again emphasized that the cameras had never
been used. “The camera on our NeverLost 6 devices has never been active (hence,
it is never on) and we have no current plans to activate the camera in the
future,” she said by email.
hertz callIn a 2013 blog post titled “Peace of Mind,” a
developer involved in a Hertz hackathon wrote about using the in-car camera
along with other sensors in the car to detect an accident and immediately get a
customer a new vehicle. In the post, he included two screen shots of a live
call, but Hertz spokesperson Imperatrice said everything done for the hackathon
event was “essentially a mock-up.” “Even the video that appears to be from
inside the car was not from a NeverLost,” she said.
The feature certainly makes sense as a customer service
offering in the event of car troubles. It’d be nice to be able to talk to an
agent on camera after a fender-bender or while stranded on the side of a road.
But at the same time, you could imagine camera mission creep, such as Hertz
using it to capture video of what a trouble renter is up to in the vehicle, or
to see who is really driving the car, or to snoop on a singing — or snuggling —
driver. The fact that customers aren’t notified about the camera and when it
would be used is troubling.
Not notifying customers that they might be on candid
camera is generally frowned upon legally. In 2012, the Federal Trade Commission
cracked down on a rent-to-own company that failed to warn customers that it had
put spyware on their laptops so that it could turn on the built-in cameras if
they failed to make payments. (During its investigation, the FTC discovered the
company had taken photos of users having sex.) On the automotive front,
Chevrolet put a “nanny cam” in its new Corvette last year so that paranoid
owners could monitor valets, but GM had to immediately warn new car owners not
to use the feature because it is legally problematic to spy on people in your
car without their knowing about it.
When Hertz put its new NeverLost technology on display at
the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas later year, a representative bragged
that the device offered “a rich set of services our competitors don’t currently
have.” Those competitors may now be glad they don’t have it.
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