Question 1 isn't really about letting violent men stalk and rape women

Why is all this okay when car dealers do it already?

After all, car dealers have this ... issue ... with trust as it is.

This is good:

Question 1 creates no safeguards for this platform or app.

The MA legislature shouldn't be in charge of determining security processes. There's no reason that the system can't be encrypted and only accessible to the vehicle owner. At this time, most vehicles are not encrypted and the only security is that it's annoying to figure out what message means what.

Despite that, there is a community of people that decodes the messages anyway. You can find tons of information posted on GitHub.

I haven't read through the whole question, so I haven't made up my mind, but "security by obscurity" is the absolute worst method.

would require them to start from scratch, and create one single standardized open platform that connects to every vehicle and a single app.

This is just not true. It requires only

the prospective owner’s ability to access the vehicle’s mechanical data through a mobile device

I'm not sure I like that particular requirement, but that does not require the underlying system to be rewritten from scratch, nor does it require a single app. A simple interface could access the important information and relay that to the user.

Personally, I think the mobile requirement is a bad idea. It's hard to hack things to do what you want, but it's relatively easy to hack things to not do what they are meant to do. I'm not worried about somebody gaining access to my car and driving it all around town, but DoS'ing it so there's lag in my control could still kill me. I'd prefer hardwired access in a clearly visible place.

The NHTSA's comment isn't wrong, but it's silly to deny people the ability to maintain their cars only so that auto manufactures can use security protocols that are less than the web browser you are currently using to view UHub.

Connor - Would you please mind disclosing your lobbying ties to this question? Thanks.

We need to defend the right to repair or corporations will use government forces to eliminate it.

Vote YES on question 1.

For smartphones you have three choices: Be submissive to Apple, be submissive to Google, or don't own a smartphone.

Boycotts don't work when there are no alternatives. They are monopolies.

Voting with your wallet is not a replacement for voting with a ballot.

I'm guessing you don't remember when you couldn't buy a phone or service from anyone but AT&T...

You can now. Hint: This isn't because there was a boycott.

Oh, bummer.

Do you have an older Mac? I replaced the one in mine from 2011 and it was like doing surgery: 25 steps to take the computer apart and 25 steps to put it back together, and I needed some specialized tools to do it.

on that basis alone.

And nothing in Question 1 would change your ability to get your car fixed by your local mechanic.

A NO vote on Question 1 keeps the Right to Repair law the same. The existing law already ensures that independent repair shops have access to all the information they need to diagnose and repair your vehicle.

Conor, if you had led with ads that made THAT argument, I'd be more willing to listen. When you scare people, or try to, you are going to get a fight or flight response. Unfortunately for you, it isn't always flight.

I like facts, I like data, I like references. A good argument lets me prove to myself you are right. A bad argument makes me not want to listen at all.

From Domestic Violence and Sexual Assault prevention advocates in both California and Massachusetts.

We have to make a number of different points. This is a complex proposal that the other side has not been honest about.

For example, 99.99% of funding for Question 1 comes from $35 billion Missouri-based O’Reilly Automotive, $27 billion Tennessee-based Autozone, $10 billion North Carolina-based Advance Auto Parts, the Auto Care Association (ACA) and the Coalition for Auto Repair Equality (CARE).

Both ACA and CARE are led and funded by the retail auto parts industry and aftermarket parts manufacturers. ACA’s Chairman is the CEO of a private equity-owned auto parts supplier, and CARE’s Chairman and President are the CEO of NAPA Auto Parts and the VP of Government Relations for AutoZone, respectively.

This is not about local repair shops, and it is not about Right to Repair. This is about major national retail chains that want access to your vehicle information.

It reminds me a lot of this hilarious ad put out by the No on Question 4 folks in 2016, when question to legalize recreational cannabis was on the ballot. I'm pretty sure it backfired and helped the Yes on Question 4 side. Scare tactics like this usually make vote against whoever puts them out. They treat voters like idiots.

Question 1 allows for two-way access to vehicles. It's not just about gathering information. It also allows for pushing information to vehicles.

A NO vote on Question 1 keeps the Right to Repair law the same. The law already guarantees you can get your car fixed wherever you want and local repair shops get the same information as dealer repair shops.

That won't change no matter what happens with Question 1. According Bill Hanvey, President & CEO of ACA, the main funder of Question 1, there are 15 times more local repair shops than dealer repair shops in the U.S., and his colleague, Paul McCarthy, President and COO of the Automotive Aftermarket Suppliers Association, also a major supporter of Question 1, says: “There’s simply not enough capacity in the automaker system to repair these vehicles.”

I'm not sure that speaks very highly of your point. What practical or useful knowledge does a malicious entity gain from maybe being able to infer that someone who owns a car has maybe driven it in a coastal area? (on the East Coast especially!)

If this is really private information that needs to be protected, I'm wondering why we don't have a campaign out to protect us from the dangers of parking stickers, town beach permits, or decals for ski resorts, all of which I see regularly on cars and immediately give much more detailed information about places where those cars regularly drive to much more than the mechanical data would.

I understand many of you disagree with us. I appreciate you letting me make the case.

Wireless access is unnecessary and insecure inherently in comparison to a wired connection.

If you have a wireless access point in your car, I can access it as long as I'm anywhere within range. If you're talking to your car's wireless access point, I can copy whatever is going between you two. If you're trying to connect to your car wirelessly, I can pretend to be your car and lie to you. You can put encryption and security in place, but those can be beaten or backdoors found. Furthermore, neither encryption nor firewalling nor other security options are mandated in the referendum (which goes back to my point of well-intentioned but totally inadequately drafted).

There's absolutely no reason your mechanic would need a wireless solution. It adds tons of unnecessary risk while providing a very mild convenience considering if your mechanic is working on your car, he can open the hood and plug into an outlet. It could even be a physically locked-alike location that requires the car key to unlock it. People can't even properly lock or hide their WiFi at home and you want them to manage their car's WiFi better than that just so the mechanic doesn't have to bend over to learn why the motor warning light is on?

It will be expensive for car manufacturers to implement correctly, but that doesn't strike me as a good reason not to mandate it

If it's expensive to do, they won't do it. They'll meet your mandate but not do it correctly. The end result will be a disaster. Additionally, any future patches to match any future laws you put in place to fix all the ways they attempted to skirt the "true intent" of your mandate (but would have cost them more money initially) will require people to update their car's computer...which won't happen except for the super-vigilant (or the ones going to the dealership every time anyways). Compare this to how many people drive around with 10 year old maps in their car's computer.

So, if you're going to mandate it, you should craft a law. You should get a consumer protection committee to define the requirements to meet the law. You should do this on a national level with industry group involvement and realistic timelines.

Half-assing it in a MA referendum is not going to accomplish anything but a disastrous landscape of barely acceptable results with the DA and advocacy groups wasting time chasing down every manufacturer flaw and most mechanics being no better off wading through all the bugs/problems while hackers find ways to extract data left and right through security holes that never get patched, and an app landscape that will lie about what it's doing to tell you what your warning lights mean (while secretly uploading the rest of your data to the app creator).