The No side's ads are <i>incredibly</i> scummy.<p>The retired boston police commissioner has done an ad spot for Yes on Right To Repair specifically to slap down the "you will be raped in a parking lot" FUD: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0bye5DRBSpw" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0bye5DRBSpw</a><p>The EFF is also strongly in favor, naturally, but i think Ed Davis will pull more weight if anyone's undecided.<p>(when marijuana legalization was on the ballot in 2016, the then-chief of the state police did a similar ad spot whose pitch boiled down to "vote yes so we can stop wasting our time on stupid college students, willya?", which I think had a similarly large impact. )
The other ballot option in MA this year, Question 2, would enable ranked choice voting for state and federal elections. There was a bit of a thread about this the other day: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24561551" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24561551</a><p>What's weird is that before moving to MA I had never even heard of ballot options. As far as I can tell they just don't exist in PA, so social studies curricula just don't teach them. I'm increasingly a big fan; it seems like a valuable escape hatch for a democratic republic for the citizens to have the power to bypass the legislature if necessary.
MA voter who's genuinely torn here.<p>The thing that bugs me out about this law is that, AFAICT, this data is _already_ required to be available to any 3rd party manufacturer through a physical "non-proprietary interface" (so far, an OBD-II port) after a similar ballot initiative from 2013 [0]. This law essentially just makes the data available wirelessly.<p>I care about security holes and I care about consent. Having a physical interface makes it easy to provide data with consent to repair shops who need while trivially making sure no third party manufacturer or insurance company is leaked a massive database of everyone's driving data. I really don't see how the "wireless" addition gives me more of a right to repair, but I clearly see how it forces manufacturers to significantly increase their surface area of possible data leaks.<p>I'm all for Ben Franklin's liberty/safety argument, but with the 2013 law already in place, I honestly don't see the upside of the 2020 law.<p>[0] <a href="https://malegislature.gov/Laws/SessionLaws/Acts/2013/Chapter165#:~:text=All%20content%20in%20any%20such,diagnostic%20and%20repair%20information%20system" rel="nofollow">https://malegislature.gov/Laws/SessionLaws/Acts/2013/Chapter...</a>.
While I support right to repair and will be voting accordingly as a born and raised Masshole the whole "centralized platform for service info" thing is a massive red flag to me.<p>Having to go through the government (the proposal as I understand it) to get service literature is only better than having to go through an uncooperative manufacturer. They could have just revoked the exemption for telemetry data without any of this platform nonsense. I don't want to get too off in the weeds here but I have zero expectation that the legislature doesn't have more nefarious things in the works for later. Cracking down on the backyard mechanics who keep the shitboxes of the greater Boston area running and forcing the poors onto the T would be their wet dream. If the goal is to give owners and manufacturers more access then why not just mandate that the OEMs provide the access, why go through the trouble of a platform if it's not part of a bigger picture that you don't want to tell people about just yet?
Massachusetts sends out a voting guide: Massachusetts Information for Voters. It's the red cover brochure.<p>If you look at the Against side of Question 1, the largest paragraph is from Jane Doe, the MA Coalition Against Sexual Assault and Domestic Violence.<p>Jane Doe, Inc. has retracted their support, but it was too late for the brochure to be updated.
MA resident here -- I'm voting yes on this ballot question for the exact reason why farmers seek older farm tractors and machines. The more shops that have access to data, the more competition there will be, which is a good thing.
The bill is summaraized in the voting guide which also has the full text.<p>I’m voting yes.<p>PDF of Massachusetts guide to the ballot question. It has a nice summmary and the legalease versión too.<p><a href="https://www.sec.state.ma.us/ele/elepdf/IFV_2020.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://www.sec.state.ma.us/ele/elepdf/IFV_2020.pdf</a>
....
Commencing in model year 2022 and thereafter a manufacturer of motor vehicles sold in the Commonwealth, including heavy duty vehicles having a gross vehicle weight rating of more than 14,000 pounds, that utilizes
a telematics system shall be required to equip such vehicles with an inter-operable, standardized and open access platform across all of the manufacturer’s makes and models. Such platform shall be capable of securely communicating all mechanical data emanating directly
from the motor vehicle via direct data connection to
the platform. Such platform shall be directly accessible
by the owner of the vehicle through a mobile-based application and, upon the authorization of the vehicle owner, all mechanical data shall be directly accessible by an independent repair facility or a class 1 dealer licensed pursuant to section 58 of chapter 140 limited to the time to complete the repair or for a period of time agreed to by the vehicle owner for the purposes of maintaining, diagnosing and repairing the motor vehicle. Access shall include
the ability to send commands to in-vehicle components
if needed for purposes of maintenance, diagnostics and repair.
SECTION 4.........
I have to say, the linked Voter Information document in the article does a great job of describing the intent of question and the consequences for a "yes" or "no" vote. I wish all ballot questions had such a clear explanation.<p>These ballot questions are typically bizarrely phrased in legalistic and often deliberately misleading language. Someone entering a voting booth unprepared to read a dense confusing paragraph about a topic they may have never thought of is vulnerable to the whims of whatever politics are in play behind the rhetoric of the ballot question.
The only thing holding me back from a yes vote is the availability of detailed location data to 3rd parties. Can a mechanic sell this data? Can it be subpoenaed by police?
The ballot question is actually about the "Right to WebApp Development Competency." Voting yes means you believe that, after a "Such platform shall be directly accessible by the owner of the vehicle" law passes, webapp developers will MAGICALLY gain the competency needed to rapidly deploy a life-or-death-critical service for access by millions of unsecured client endpoints, and deploy it with no security-relevant design or implementation flaws.<p>There's at least some hope of delivering a secure service to dealerships. (I don't know whether this has succeeded.) There's also some hope of delivering a secure service to registered endpoints at independent shops that can be audited for client security practices. This is the correct next step. With the state of webapp security today, there is NO HOPE AT ALL of delivering a secure service to the general public.
On the positive side of this: My local repair shop has sent a couple of email blasts explaining how they'll be able to use this data safely to help us, and respectfully asking us, their customers, to vote Yes On 1. I'm all for it. And I do infosec for a living.
I'm seeing videos suggested by the YouTube algorithm from time to time about the Right to Repair and nothing is more infuriating then watching those people who basically sold their soul to say things that are not only blatantly baseless but also which are very against the public interest and will have negative impact on the environment for the generations to come.
I would vote yes if they Excluded location data. The language of the propositions doesn’t do that. This suggests to me that it’s as much a Silicon Valley style big data-play as a simple “right to repair” issue, which I would happily support
I don’t understand how engineers can read the actual text of the Question and think this is a good idea...<p>> <i>shall be required to equip such vehicles with an inter-operable, standardized and open access platform across all of the manufacturer’s makes and models.</i><p>What is a “platform” in this context? The vehicle is supposed to be equipped with one, so presumably not a cloud server then?<p>Inter-operable with what? Other manufacturers? Standardized how and by whom? What does “open access” mean in this context?<p>Does this run on the car? In the cloud? How do you connect to it? Remember this is a legal requirement, not a spec that can just be revised.<p>> <i>Such platform shall be capable of securely communicating all mechanical data emanating directly from the motor vehicle via direct data connection to the platform.</i><p>So I think this is saying that all mechanical data which is emanating from the vehicle must <i>also</i> be made available by connecting directly to “the platform” but you could read it two or three other ways.<p>> <i>Such platform shall be directly accessible by the owner of the vehicle through a mobile-based application and, upon the authorization of the vehicle owner, all mechanical data shall be directly accessible by an independent repair facility</i><p>As supposed to the ODBII port which is the current standard, now we have a “mobile-based application” which the “owner” of the vehicle uses to <i>directly</i> access the “platform”.<p>I don’t know how the car is supposed to know who the owner is, let alone the original manufacturer of the car.<p>But then after somehow authenticating the owner on this mobile based application there’s also going to be a way to authorize your repair shop to do the same?<p>So perhaps repair shops are registered with this platform and I can select them from a list, or maybe after I’m magically authenticated I send them an email and they open that on their phone and click a link which send a message to an app which... wait what?<p>> <i>limited to the time to complete the repair or for a period of time agreed to by the vehicle owner for the purposes of maintaining, diagnosing and repairing the motor vehicle.</i><p>Oh yeah and these access tokens are also time limited and revocable.<p>> <i>Access shall include the ability to send commands to in-vehicle components if needed for purposes of maintenance, diagnostics and repair.</i><p>So I’m just not following at all the level of complexity here and the huge number of red flags on legislation which is trying to spell out a technical solution instead of just spelling out the <i>effect</i>.<p>We don’t need an open access inter-operable standardized data platform providing direct and delegatable remote control via mobile application to mechanical control systems. We really don’t.<p>I would be a lot happier if it simply said that manufacturers must provide documented vendor extensions to the ODBII port to cover any new data streams.