Electric vehicles send real-time data to Chinese government

[rangerrebew]

Electric vehicles send real-time data to Chinese government

by Erika Kinetz
   

When Shan Junhua bought his white Tesla Model X, he knew it was a fast, beautiful car. What he didn't know is that Tesla constantly sends information about the precise location of his car to the Chinese government.

Tesla is not alone. China has called upon all electric vehicle manufacturers in China to make the same kind of reports—potentially adding to the rich kit of surveillance tools available to the Chinese government as President Xi Jinping steps up the use of technology to track Chinese citizens.

https://techxplore.com/news/2018-11-electric-vehicles-real-time-chinese.html

[The_Reader_David]

All electric vehicles?  I was in Nanjing in October, and it seems that anyone who can't afford a care has an electric scooter (think Vespa, not skate-board-like conveyance with handlebar).  The driving habits of the electric-Vespa-analogue drivers are so lawless (they ride in their own lanes, in the same lanes as cars, on the sidewalks with pedestrians, and you have to leap out of their way a lot of the time) that I wonder whether the Party and government consciously decided to not apply any rules to their driving to create a little space of freedom which would have no consequence for the Party's control of society.  Are they all sending data back?  If they are, that's a heck of a lot of data.

[Oceander]

This is probably part of their social credit monitoring system.

Honestly, though, most governments either have, or will soon have, this ability. The only way to avoid being reliably monitored by the government in future will be to either become a hermit, or have one or more electronic doppelgängers who create false trails that are associated with your records in such a way that the data cannot be used forensically after the fact to determine where you’ve been.