Almost every single car brand has horrible data collection practices. I think Chinese cars are the least of most customer’s concerns anyways compared to the devils already present in the industry.
We all know BYD and Huawei will do this, but so would Tesla and Toyota.
American consumers have always preferred a good deal and a great price over anything. I don’t think this is a shocking purchasing behavior pattern or anything - it’s just the indictment of the American education system in that the general public fully lacks any understanding of what privacy is and why security matters, even when it comes to the tech in cars.
If I were in position to make laws, the first would be one that forbids cars (and most of other smart devices) to communicate to servers outside of owner’s country of residence. And let manufacturers solve this if they need that market.
so basically what is happening with tiktok but for cars, which considering that. It is a horrible idea (because again american big tech its just not all that much better, not mentioning these chinese companies will always find a grey area to exploit)
at this point, just mandate cars to be secure from the kind of attacks that would happen in things like data breaches and exploits. (so enforcing things like E2EE, Data minimization, Standardized/Evolving Penetration testing making it like with crash safety tests but now it’s Penetration Testing of the tech in the car etc.)
TBH I can’t think of so much as a single benefit a chinese manufacturer or chinese government for that matter could get from spying on me. It’s all dead data when you think about it, but I can think of many reasons as to why the data could be of use to spies in my own country. They want the power to manipulate and exploit me in almost every facet of my life and the only way they can do that is by gathering as much information as they can on me.
For those that say I’m paranoid, my response is why would they go to the expense of gathering the data, storing the data and processing the data if this wasn’t the case? It’s a multi billion $$$ business, the manufacturers know that, the politicians know that and they are all after their piece of the action. I certainly wouldn’t buy a car with apple or google on the dashboard. My daily driver is old skool lpg and that’s the way it will stay until Debian-auto arrives on the scene.
It’s just a matter of time before the FOSS auto option becomes a reality…..