Selling information to a foreign power • The tech reporter: The car knows most about us
Last week, a Tesla exploded outside Trump’s hotel in Las Vegas. The explosion is believed to have been triggered by the driver, who was found dead in the car, after he loaded the car bed full of fireworks, petrol and gas.
Only hours after the explosion, Tesla managed to read out a lot of important information from the car, about where it was and how the explosion started, which accelerated the investigation work according to AP. But even if the police were satisfied with the job, so much so that they thanked Elon Musk himself, the incident has also raised questions about how much information our modern cars hold.
Today, many people connect their phones and apps to the car, which gives our vehicles a unique insight into our lives. But also our driving patterns and places we’ve been say a lot about us.
– First, we know that location data is the most powerful tool for drawing conclusions. The places we are say a lot about who we are. It says something about income group, it can tell about one’s sexual orientation, who we meet, what we do in our spare time, whether we have children or are religious, says Emil Hellerud, tech reporter at TV4.
Microphones in cars create problems for authorities
Even the way we drive the car reveals things about our temperament and our priorities.
– You can tell a lot about a person’s personality based on how they drive. If it has an aggressive driving style in traffic. Are you a person who thinks about the environment when you drive? You can easily collect that kind of data.
In modern cars, there are also microphones that hear what we are talking about, something that can become an extra big problem for authorities that may have security-sensitive tasks.
– Then a foreign power knows what the police are talking about. Then it will be difficult to use a Volvo owned by a Chinese state-owned company. In China there is a law that you have to release information to the state. The US has a similar law, but the difference between the US and China is that the US is an ally more than China. But the possibility of extracting information does exist.
“It’s about manipulation”
And it is not only foreign powers that may be interested in the data. There are many who can pay dearly for information in our advertising society.
– Insurance companies may be interested in taking part of the data and selling it on to companies that want to target ads and get you to buy things you otherwise wouldn’t have seen. What you sell is a prediction of a behavior. You are selling the ability to predict which people will buy a certain product. It is ultimately about manipulation.
Can you call the whole thing a kind of espionage? According to Emil Hellerud, you can. And once the data is acquired, it is difficult to reverse the tape.
– Cars collect a lot of data about us from which very far-reaching conclusions can be drawn. We have no control over how the data is used, and if we do, we have little control. It is not possible to contact a company and say, I do not want you to use my data in this way.
– It is powerful to find out things about ourselves because we humans are quite predictable.