Comment by dahart

Comment by dahart a day ago

1 reply

Oh, so why did you ask ‘renters of what?’ and start talking about home rental?

Well, I think it’s unrealistic to not expect car rentals to track their cars. Renting gardening tools might be a different story. However, SASS subscriptions are software rentals, and GDPR makes it explicitly illegal to track what the software companies rent to EU citizens without consent.

To me it seems like the question in practice is not renting vs buying, it’s about what information is collected, what they’re allowed to do with it, and who it is sent to.

Car rentals could request or require consent as terms of rental. (They probably do, I can admit to never having read the entire contract.) One underlying issue here is whether the car rental company passes your name or identification on to the manufacturer, law enforcement, or service providers. It does seem like they should not have the right to do that automatically without informed consent (not buried in contract legalese). They probably should have the right to track where their car is until it’s returned, and then delete that data. So all depends on what they do with the data.

diggan a day ago

> Oh, so why did you ask ‘renters of what?’ and start talking about home rental?

Have people completely lost their reading comprehension? My comment:

> Renters of what? Items people can just take and leave with [...]

A car is a item "people can just take and leave with". I literally answer the question myself, right after stating it. And not until the line below I start talking about expecting privacy in a rented home.

> Car rentals could request or require consent as terms of rental

They very much do, at least in the countries I've rented a car in. Every time they asked for consent, like the regulations require them to in my region.