Tesla employees were (probably still are) watching people in their cars and sharing clips of people singing, eating, and fucking around the office to laugh at.
My in-cabin camera stays covered 100% of the time for this reason.
I get how Ford wants to protect his provinces auto industry money but instilling fear in the populace is more of a Trump tactic.
Ford is an idiot, what else did you expect?
NISSAN KNOWS WHEN YOU’RE HAVING SEX. YES, THEY TRACK THAT
Just to be clear though:
Both are bad
Because a lot of tankies here are of the opinion that the US listening is evil, but it’s fine when China listens in
so does your GM, VW, BMW, Tesla, Fiat… every brand of car spies on you - to a scary amount
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.
How else would their AI assistant know when to recline your seats and start the Marvin Gaye playlist?
Don’t they all?
Probably. This is just the case I can point to where they came out and said it.
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.
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?
Kinda hard to ensure that if you can’t inspect the entire software and hardware stack.
The point of laws isn’t to be perfectly enforced, it’s just to give recourse when they’re broken.
It would be far from impossible for example for a few dweebs to say “hey, despite checking the no spying box in the contract, my car keeps sending data packets out for no reason” currently those dweebs tend to be shit out of luck.
True but then what would be the recourse? Problem with Chinese manufacturers is that you can’t force them to do shit, because of how involved the whole production to sales process is, with little visibility. A part gets manufactured by an ODM, sold with little (or no) customisation to an OEM, who then sells it on to an ODM that manufactures the larger unit from that part, again gets customised for an OEM, and the chain process is repeated 3-4 times.
I went through this exact issue a while back with my standing desk - the controller burned out, but because of how it was manufactured and assembled, it was nigh impossible to track down the actual company that manufactured things and could provide an appropriate replacement.
To shorten the tale - the UK seller bought the entire readily made assembly from a Chinese seller, who bought it from an ODM and stamped their logo on it. That ODM (let’s call them A) in turn bought the components of the desk - the frame, the motors, the motor controller, the motor controller handler, the power supply, etc. - from different OEMs, who in turn bought them from ODMs with minimal customisation (aside from branding, a level of programming differentiation also went into the MC to specify the motor it will drive, the MCH to specify the protocol version with the MC, the motors to program the limits and limit handling, and so on). So A bought 5 parts from 5 OEMs, each bought them from different ODMs, and I needed to specifically find who A bought the controller from, and what programming parameters they used. Took me nearly 6 months.
Now, how this is a problem when it comes to EVs? Pretty simple. You buy a car from A, but the ODM is B, who used OEMs C, D, E, F, G, and H for parts, each of them using different ODMs. Turns out that one part is actually doing the spying, and A “finds out” it’s done by a part sold by E. So they eliminate E from the supply chain, replacing them with company Z - but Z buys the exact same part from the same ODM, so the issue isn’t eliminated. Meanwhile A can tell the EU that the problem was resolved (except it wasn’t), and not get into any trouble because they can always point fingers. Oh, and E actually gets dissolved and since people in China can’t be held responsible for their companies’ crimes (if convicted abroad), the same people go on to form company Z and continue the exact same shit under a different name.
This is why you’ll always find the same crappy products on Amazon, but under a different keysmash company name.
Oh and you can’t even get rid of A, because the moment you try, a dozen other companies - using the same suppliers, same ODMs just different OEMs, often run by the same people as A - will pop up to take their place.
Enforcing EU regulations on Chinese companies isn’t as straightforward as “let’s make up the laws and enforce them when we can”. It goes a lot deeper and it begins at the ability of transparent review of imported products. Which the Chinese won’t allow because of their general cultural attitude of “IP theft is okay if I do it but horrible if it’s done to me”.
You’re overthinking this - perfect is the enemy of good and all that. The automobile manufacturer would bear this responsibility. The scale of the problem is very different when the object is the size of a car and has to go through a huge regulatory process in order to be sold in the country in the first place.
Just because it’s hard to enforce laws for a small instance in a grey market doesn’t mean it’s still not useful.
That’s what you’re not getting. The manufacturer wouldn’t bear shit because they can point fingers at a supplier, claim they’ve replaced the supplier while nothing changes (or the spying moves onto a different component). And if they do get the short end of the stick, the people behind the manufacturer just spin up another company and sell slightly different cars with the same spying crap, without anyone really knowing because to the public it’s a brand new company…
Someone might weasel out of ticket/fine/jail whatever so we shouldn’t bother?
That is the most shit excuse to not make laws.
I was passed by a pickup in a 100 zone… that guy had to be doing 120 at least. I guess since he wasn’t caught we should just cancel all speed limit laws?
Come on… try not to be so pessimistic. It’s not about saving every single person, it’s about trying to statistically get things better for more people overall.
That’s literally the opposite of what I said…
Again I’m not saying we don’t need laws, but what we need is true transparency ALONGSIDE those laws from any entity wanting to enter the market. Chinese manufacturers want to sell to European markets? Awesome, they can, if they can provide full transparency of their hardware and software stack. Period.
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.
And laws that deter bad behaviour help move us toward that goal by helping those in our society who don’t know better.
One would hope. Saddly, there are always loopholes.
Bill C-15 would allow corporations to be exempt from most Canadian laws
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?
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.
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.
Cute to think it’s only listening to your phone calls
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)
china doesn’t need spyware, they can buy all the data they could ever want direct from US corpos for pennies
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.
It’s ok I don’t speak Chinese so they can’t understand me.
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 don’t know how to send a message to car makers so they know whoever offers a simple functional OFFLINE car will have my money when I change my car. At this stage I’d rather sacrifice real-time GPS updates to avoid a creepy spying car.
I’m over here, thinking about building my next car.
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.
It’s that they are being subsidized by the Chinese government and Chinese labor markets
Government, sure. Labor markets, eh, quality of life in China is not worse than in the west in many respects.
In any case, I don’t disagree, but the obvious solution is to have self-sufficient economies not relying on external markets. The most successful example of this has been the Soviet economy, so I agree that we need protectionism but also centrally and democratically planned socialist economies.
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.
