China cracks down on use of Tesla vehicles, citing privacy concerns. China cracks down on use of Tesla vehicles, citing privacy concerns - The Verge
There’s more to that story for certain. China is likely concerned exterior cameras can and do record and could hurt any official stories about current events.
However, as a recovering car guy, I can tell you that any vehicle equipped with OnStar or similar equipment 100% tracks your speed, RPM’s, braking, as well as your movement 24/7 and has the ability to listen and record any conversations within the vehicle. You cannot shut that off unless you rip it out which is impossible. Not to mention remotely shut the vehicle down.
If you are concerned about privacy while driving, that horse left the barn 20 years ago.
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There is a reason I don’t drive a “modern” vehicle. I try to maintain what I got and at least some vehicles as late as 2005 don’t have a significant amount of tracking relative to vehicles that come after, but no doubt vehicles even earlier than this period have some tracking. All cars post 199x have a government mandated little black box in them. It’s not as bad as what you get with On Star or probably any or at least most newer vehicles, but, it’s still bad.
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1996 and newer were required to have obdII ports and computerized engine controls, allegedly for emissions reasons.
Onstar is terrible, but can probably be defeated with some effort. it may be as simple as soldering in a resistor with the impedance of the antenna (and disconnecting said antenna), or you may need to feed it fake info, so it thinks its connected to the onstar network.
Lookup QNX automotive operating system.
Can be attacked, backdoored, manipulated, etc.
Many recent strange car or motorcycle events where people died.
Prince Otto in Germany
recently son of billionaire in the united states, car accelerated into strip mall without explanation.
You should always be suspicious when the same thing is going in all cars, which these systems are.
There is no reason anymore to trust the government or “agencies” with remote control access to civilian vehicles, it will be abused and probably is already being abused.
Some people can simply not allow other individuals to have power, even to have a personal vehicle, or personal computer.
Anyone calling anyone names about this, is very likely in on it in one way or the other.
So china is right, but also, we should be just as concerned for backdoors in all chinese products, which are known to be there, solar winds, server motherboards, and take the big hint when china says there are backdoors in american products. not many good guys in this fight, low tech is best for now unless you know for sure you are a sheep.
Heck it is even a cliche in the tv show silicon valley. With AI out there, wireless encryption is become more and more trivial to track.
I personally don’t see any benefit to networked computing on my vehicle, so i stand with Admiral Adama on this issue.
So say we all.