Re:China is spying on all cars using Chinese 5G Modems
by elefanten on Thursday August 02, 2018 @11:45AM
(#17672330)
It may be gauche to say it bluntly, but I would consider it a huge difference if German companies held my data vs Chinese ones. China needs to reckon with it's deeply immoral political structures before I will ever feel safe as a consumer if their products.
Re:China is spying on all cars using Chinese 5G Modems
by ThePhysicist on Thursday August 02, 2018 @11:49AM
(#17672372)
Sure it's probably better if your data is held by a democratically elected government or a company that's under strict privacy jurisdiction, I would often prefer though if the data wouldn't exist to begin with (or at least would be properly anonymized). Let's face it, such detailed data sets can be very dangerous to a person and his/her freedoms if used by the wrong people, so they should not be created for purely economic reasons.
* https://www.srf.ch/news/schweiz/wie-uns-autobauer-ausspaehen (in German)
For example, Mercedes Benz forced people to accept this kind of data collection when signing the buying contract (no consent -> no car), though I think they might no longer be able to do this now due to restrictions imposed by the GDPR, which forbids making an entire contract dependent on the consent to a data collection measure that is not strictly required for the purposes of the contract.
The data does (to my knowledge) not get centralized yet, but a conglomerate of car companies is working on a platform that will make the data accessible to third parties (supposedly with user consent), so that e.g. gas station operators can offer tailored discounts to people based on their route.
In general there's nothing fundamentally wrong with collecting this data, as a German I was very surprised to learn about this though as normally people are pretty privacy-aware here, and having all your movement data (and more) continuously streamed to your car manufacturer didn't seem like something that most people would take lightly. Seems I was wrong about this though as of today no one really seems to mind.