It’s crazy to me that cars can legally phone home at all
Fun fact: Nissan’s privacy documentation admits to collecting data on your sexual activity, among (many) other things.
Fucking what? Man I’ll take key fobs over some bullshit app any day. Imagine paying a subscription to turn your vehicle in remotely when RF fobs been doing it free for decades.
Don’t they all?
Sounds like something that wouldn’t be a problem if we had adequate privacy protection regulations and enforced them properly.
How about we do that?
Other countries won’t care about your county’s privacy regulations.
The only way to regulate your own privacy is to make sure you are not being surveilled in the first place.
Hence proper privacy protection regulations and enforcement. No more black box devices that upload data to their servers that can’t be deciphered by the users. Get caught? A crippling fine on first offense. Jail sentences and ban from the market for further offenses.
If someone gets caught planting a listening or a tracking device against someone else they can go to jail for it. Why should we make an exception for corporate leaders?
All the more reason to make it so companies in your country can’t collect your data and sell it to those foreign countries so cheaply and easily right?
I think a law banning the collection of private data in things like cars would do more than regulating the surveillance of people for profit.
Also, the right to repair or modify equipment one owns would make it easier to disable these dystopian practices.
We can (and should) verify compliance with call-home restrictions.
Let’s say you are able to prove that a foreign entity was not in compliance with your personal data. And you were able to sue for damages. How long would you be ready to wait? How long do you think it would take for that foreign entity to earn back their lost profits? How would your government force compliance if they refused?
Sue for damages? Hell no. The national regulator conducts random checks, like food safety. Found a car that sends data across the border? Inform the manufacturer and give them a short window to remediate, following which you stop all imports, and or prohibit sales under the regulation. Similar to how we can prohibit sales of all sorts of goods on the basis of safety.
You’re right it’s better to keep our head down and do nothing
/s obviously
Not what I’m saying at all.
Sir, this is
a Wendy’sA&WCanada. Litigationarrhea not necessary.That’s fair. My point is that once your data is no longer yours, regulation won’t save it.
Kinda hard to ensure that if you can’t inspect the entire software and hardware stack.
It’s ok I don’t speak Chinese so they can’t understand me.
I don’t give two shits if my BYD (or other of the Chinese evs that outclass tesla for less money) reports directly to Chairman Xi’s laptop.
I also want the commemorative Release The Epstein Files Edition, in Atlantis Gray.
Yeah, honestly, all modern cars are full of spyware already, and if something it to spy on me I’d prefer if it was reporting to someone on the other side of the globe vs. some company or government in my jurisdiction. The former may show you more annoying ads, the latter may literally put you in prison. (of course, it is possible that the former will sell your data to the latter, so it’s better to avoid spyware altogether)
I have excellent news for you about contemporary government spying. Spying on OUR citizens is bad, so we ask the foreign allies for that data.
I don’t think China would willingly hand over precious data to the US/Canada governments. But it might be willing to sell it.
So our tax dollars are paying for our stolen data? Quite the win-win.
This is not the main problem with Chinese EVs. As far as privacy goes I would be much more concerned with what they are slurping up about where I am than what I am talking about. For instance all the SSIDs and Bluetooth device around the car. I also kinda doubt they have the bandwidth and storage space to ingest billions of phone call recordings.
It’s that they are being subsidized by the Chinese government and Chinese labor markets. Their aim is to put other countries’ automakers out of business and then exploit their monopoly. Pretty much the only thing that could make American transit worse is having no domestic manufacturing capability, Europe at least has decent public transit.
And if they have a kill switch. In case of a conflict, disabling large parts of transportation and logistics is a given. Take Musk disabling Starlink in Ukraine as an example, or the F35 startup password thing.
I also kinda doubt they have the bandwidth and storage space to ingest billions of phone call recordings.
They’re like a couple of megabytes each if compressed properly. Short calls could be less than a meg and long ones in the tens of megabytes. Billions would be petabytes. That’s actually… Kinda doable these days if you’re a country with the resources of China.
Even if that kind of client side compression went totally unnoticed, and petabyte level use of cell and satellite services also went unnoticed, and even supposing we are only talking about a billion calls a day (unlikely given the population of the US alone, before even adding the rest of North America, Europe, and wherever else they want to spy), what are they going to do with all that data? It’s not a training source and any AI they unleashed to sort it would be subject to hallucinations and attack from people who know their conversations are being recorded.
I find it much more likely that they will target individuals directly for that level of surveillance. Hacking one journalist’s cell is going to be far easier than trying to find their recordings in the vault, assuming the targets have a new Chinese car.
They are much more useful as scouts for mapping things just like Google has been doing with their street view cars for decades now and as the other commenter pointed out, with a kill switch just like OnStar uses for stolen cars, as a first attack wave gumming up transport and evacuation options.
Man, while I will always do everything I can to protect my privacy, I’d take Chinese privacy invasions over American privacy invasions any day.
Hell at this point I’d take a Chinese privacy invading product over an American privacy respecting product just out of spite
If I have to get creeped on I’d rather it be from a distance, China’s less likely to raid my home :p
The appropriate response ought to be better regulation and enforcement on all these companies instead of adding another to the pile. Whataboutism and complacency just drags us deeper into the torment nexus.
I’m over here, thinking about building my next car.
“but Timmy’s parent let him stay up until 10 o’clock!”
This is the rebuttal to a privacy concern? “But everyone else does it”?
I think it’s more he’s an idiot for thinking China needs to spy on you when they could just buy that data so easily from all the companies that are allowed to now.
China, known for not caring about its supply-chain and outsourcing everything to other countries? It’s funny how they never seem to strategically build alternative pipelines for anything.
/s
