My car is wonderful. It is almost 20 years old, and aside from being hard on tires for a while, it has been great the entire time. I need to do a little regular maintenance, but every car needs that. This weekend I drove a newer car, and when we go somewhere in my wife’s car, I think about this story, which is on its third iteration, and still not bothering people enough. Your car’s data privacy problems are worse than you think<:
(R)esearchers from Northeastern University, in collaboration with Consumer Reports, published an in-depth examination of connected vehicle privacy behaviors. Utilizing nearly two dozen vehicles from CR’s test fleet, the team sought to answer critical questions: Which cars transmit data? Who receives it? Does it cross international borders? And what personally identifiable information is actually being exposed?
David Choffnes, project lead and former director of Northeastern’s Cybersecurity and Privacy Institute, said the goal was to reveal the sheer scale of modern vehicle data tracking and highlight how little visibility or control owners truly have over it.
“I think the conclusion is that there’s a lot to be worried about,” Choffnes said in an interview.
To get a complete picture, researchers analyzed 21 late-model vehicles from 19 brands currently sold in the US, along with 30 companion mobile apps linked to active vehicles.
Manufacturers, enthralled with selling you off something you bought from them, are happy to sell you out to advertisers, to your insurance company, and probably to anyone that asks. They’re counting on motorists to forget about this because they’ve got to get from A-to-B and, besides, Spotify connects easily.
This is going to be an opportunity for a company to offer some other option. I don’t need a touchscreen, I don’t need moodlighting, and I don’t need you to report my driving to anyone without context. (There’s a lot of crap in the road, and sometimes you just want to dodge it.)
If no one takes that part of the marketplace then we basically find ourselves in a loose-to-strict technological cartel.
I think of that for a lot of reasons. One of them is because, today. My office hours were interrupted because of a fire alarm. I dutifully gathered my things, trying to make a quick assessment of whether anything else in my office needed to go, just in case, and then walked down the six flights of stairs into a cement chamber merrily repeating the sheer trill of the fire alarm. Students stood on the sidewalk outside on three different sidewalks. Ours is a big building. Everything in the frame is the same building.
There is housing, a gym, some sort of offices, and a bunch of academic stuff in there. The alarm could be about anything, anywhere. Even still, I decided to stand on the opposite side of the street, even though there’s no smoke emerging from anywhere. After a few minutes, I walked over to where my class meets, and finished my
we started talking about surveillance in my digital media class. The students had to read a brief chapter about it. This becomes a curious part of the subject matter because they think they know about this. I used a cool slide-shattering transition for this one. No one laughed at the joke I’d prepared for it.
We start talking about databases and data mining and implicit data and, much like that car example, above, people don’t necessarily want to think about this all of the time. The platforms quite obviously count on that. It is within their best interests to be less than transparent and forthcoming, to allow you to think of the good, and not the potential. And so I put up this slide.
People, after all, just want to post their thing or see the thing that others posted. And, yet, they’re going to hear about various parts of this for about four meetings in a row.
We talked, among other things, about the new Meta Muse, and how it’s breaking rules and what that means, and … well, first I had to explain Meta’s Muse. What it presently is is a dangerous mess masquerading as a product that you have to use, because marketing.
It’s worth pointing out: no one needs that product, but the company absolutely needs to convince you otherwise. And we could, perhaps, say that about quite a few of these tools and toys.
After class I walked back over to my building. Happily, it was still standing. The fire trucks were gone, and people were moving about as normal. On the way, though, I walked by the statue, Contact. I wrote about it here. Then, last week, we looked a bit more closely at the couple’s hands.
Today, a quick study of the man’s jacket.
You have to love that texture. It’d be comfortable, and probably quite breathable. I am trying my best not to think that the artist, Seward Johnson, was leaving a code for one of his fans to find his secret, buried treasure.
I can tell you the code doesn’t say anything about looking inside these subjects pockets for the treasure. Realistic feeling as a lot of this feels, you can’t reach in the pockets. Or so I’ve heard.
But in looking at the code that we can’t crack at a glance, you might notice some interesting small details. He really nailed the wear on the jacket vent. I’m pretty sure most of my jackets look like this.
The jacket also has wide lapels, and an oversized pocket. And the man seems to have a bit of stubble on his face, which is almost tucked out of site. I know this isn’t for everyone, but it is easy to marvel at the detail put into this project.
We’re going to study the faces next week. But, for now, I have to do a bit of studying on what I’ll be discussing in class tomorrow. So, until then, keep your hands at 10 and 2, just in case your car is telling on you.
