TRASHFUTURE - Automobile Conversation Part 2 of 2 ft. Victoria Scott

Episode Date: May 27, 2022

This week, we're joined by auto journalist Victoria Scott (@mikurubaeahina) about new developments in automotive surveillance. As in: what if your car was the cops, recorded everything you ever did in the car, was accessible by the other cops via forensic devices, could be monitored without a warrant, and had no option for you to shut this off? Well, apparently that's 90% of cars made since 2008 already. Get the whole episode on Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/posts/66893618

This is something that you were talking about in an article that I've seen an advance copy of, right, where the sort of probably some of the most worrying implications for this are, again, in people going across state lines to seek health care, whether that is abortion or gender-affirming care that have been criminalized in like half of U.S. states. And again, like that stuff that as well, just like to keep it slightly transatlantic, that could things that already are, let's say, under assault here as well, right? Yes. So the specific example that made me want to pursue this story was, it's in Texas, the

first really interstate travel ban came about because of Greg Abbott's directive to prosecute parents for giving their children gender-affirming care. And the reason that that one specifically left out at me was because CPS can open an investigation if you get care for your child anywhere. So if you're like, well, shoot, they close all the gender clinics in Texas. So I'm going to drive to Oklahoma or whatever to get my kid blockers or whatever. When you come back, they can still investigate your family and then pursue charges because that's how Child Protective Services works, which has led to states like Connecticut and

Minnesota passing laws that say, we won't extradite you back to Texas if you flee here because CPS is investigating you for affirming your child's gender, which is like this entirely, I'm sure there are legal experts who are salivating at the idea of basically interstate commerce completely breaking down in a way that hasn't been seen since, I don't know, Dred Scott. Oh, yeah. Because this is, I mean, it's really, really uncharted territory. But that was what got me thinking about it was, what is to stop someone from pulling over a parent and searching through all of the locations they've been in the past six

months and seeing if they went to any, any Planned Parenthoods or, or, you know, gender clinics or whatever, and then using that to open a CPS investigation. Even more worryingly, what's fun is all of this data that's on your car is largely sent back to the manufacturers themselves if your car has any kind of connectivity to it. So Wi-Fi hotspots or, or 3G connections or GPS or app connections or pretty much anything you can imagine. Every car built in the last 30 years. Yeah, it was, I think I have it in here somewhere.

I think it's somewhere around 95% of cars sold in the US now have some sort of, yeah, 90% of cars sold in America in 2021 have some sort of embedded connectivity in them. And that's your, that is your threat model is not only does your car have all this data locally that they can access any warrant or reason. It's also sent all the way back to car companies who then generally aggregate and will sometimes sell the data to third parties. So there was a vice report from a, I think a year ago where they had talked to the office of Senator Ron Wyden and gotten a, a, I don't know, a pitch, I guess, from this company

called the Ulysses Group that claimed that they could track. Well, that doesn't sound dominant. So yeah, they claimed that they could track any car in the world in real time, except for in Cuba and North Korea. I think that they're probably kind of full of shit. There wasn't a whole lot of documentation on it. And my own research leads me to believe that's not possible, but there's still this massive trove of data on every car, everywhere it's been, every time it needs an oil change, every

time you drive distracted and the safety features kick in, this stuff is all being continuously uploaded somewhere. And no one has any control over where it goes. And it's basically because the U.S. has such weak approaches to personal privacy, it's up to the manufacturers to decide what to do with it. Why is dogging.com made this million pound payment to Voxel Motors? Well, and it's, it's something that we know we've talked about in the past as being largely related to like, say insurance, where your insurance provider is essentially spying on

you so they can try to update your rates in real time. Like if you, if it detects that you like lane drift a little bit, suddenly this trip, this trip in your car is $3 more expensive. You say on your podcast that you're a good driver and yet your, your car's data system shows. Yeah. And so this, but this is- You actually had Jeremy Vine turned up to maximum volume from this time to this time.

How can you drive safely while listening to a debate about who has the loudest freezer? So, so this, we've talked about it in this way before, but I mean, I just think that again, especially as, you know, the U.S. enters, it's sort of more, it enters a more sort of nakedly authoritarian political setup. Yeah. It's fun how if you live in the U.S., you either have to live in a state that's run by like Chelsea Clinton or something, or you get to live in a state that's run by like Boss Hog from the Dukes of Hazard and those are like your two choices.

And so that, but in that, in that sort of, as we, there's this sort of turn towards much more naked authoritarianism, you know, there is at the same time, this profusion of data being collected with very few safeguards on it. Well, and can I make it even worse? Please go ahead. Oh, please do. Beautiful. Nature of the podcast.

Okay. So to make it even worse. So granted, you have your, your, I would say more malicious like, Hey, check it out. We can track a car. You want a drone strike kind of pitches to the U.S. military, but even data that is collected with no ill intent. So there are companies that will aggregate this, this location and, you know, car information data for fleet management or smart cities.

They try to, you know, figure out traffic pain points and, and optimize travel flows, whatever you want to, whatever the hell they sell. I don't know. Yeah. They're selling big data. Basically. Yeah. The problem is that even that data with any kind of vehicle specific UID can be de-anonymized

almost trivially. There's a 2013 story that was in nature that I've referenced in my piece that showed that with a set of I think one and a half million people, it took four time stamped geotrack locations to uniquely identify a person with 95% accuracy. So with four places, your car has been, they can say, Oh, it's this person's car and you always park your car at home and you usually drive it to work. So it's even simpler than using a cell phone or something where you might conceivably, I don't know, go for a walk, although I don't do that.

But it, well, yeah, even when it's anonymous, it's not anonymous. Well, it also goes back to like how, so how so much like any kind of consumer protection, whether it's data protection or, you know, like protection from financial chicanery always sets on like these very dictionary approaches where it's like, look, personal data is when it's a name or an address. And then, you know, but, and then you can be like, well, a location and all that is that's and defined on some sort of regimes. It is defined as personal data, but still same as like metadata from your emails.

Yeah. I have one thing also that makes it worse because it's not personal data, government agencies can just buy it on the open market and then go through it and be like, huh, that's interesting and they don't need a warrant or to tell anybody or anything. Yeah. And so essentially, like Texas could just like, I don't know, buy a bunch of this data then hand it over to their like, you know, free, like, like fucking a fry core they have, you know, like snooping through people's sort of histories to try to collect, you know,

bounties on people getting abortions, just be like, here you go, here's the information. You find a person, collect the bounty and all of this, but it's worth also going back to ask why all this data was collected. All of this data is collected because in order to have a consumer solution to the problems that we made with our previous consumer solution, we need to have so much more intensive data gathering and automation. And so the other thing that I'll say also, and I hate to reference them, but McKinsey has a report saying that they think that the telematics monetization industry will grow

to $750 billion by 2030. So, right, there's, there's money and it's not even just a no, there's no, there's no high minded solving problems here. It's all money. Well, of course indeed, but the pitch, I think, the pitch that we get is that self driving cars that are going to be, are going to solve our policy problems. And we're going to solve the problems that we created, right? And that, and that's believable to politicians where they can say, oh,

wonderful, great, I don't need to do the difficult thing of building a train or, you know, funding the buses because those wonderful, you know, boffins over at Mercedes or Tesla or Uber or whatever, what they're going to do is they're going to solve this problem for me by just massively intensifying data gathering. And because either they, because either they don't understand or if they do understand they don't care, then these kinds of problems very quickly, not only become ubiquitous, but become unavoidable because if you remake the infrastructure of the city to accommodate self driving cars, then you're stuck with self driving

cars. And this data collection that's, that used to be like something of science of sci-fi is now completely fucking unavoidable wherever you go. People are saying, you know, we're experiencing an infrastructural problem. And they're saying, Cripes, what are we going to do? I say, don't write, we've got the boffins on it. Let's enjoy this calling the cat. I would, I would join this podcast just to hear you speak in that voice for the entire time. Our esteemed Prime Minister.

Would you like to take the position of showrunner? Victoria, we'd welcome you on showrunner. Corporationalist podcast has become positively glutinous. But, but, so I think it's just what we're in the middle of seeing here is a great sort of another wave of surveillance data that is going to very quickly become unavoidable. You're not going to be able to not. It's not even, it's not even on a, it's not even like it's going to become unavoidable. Self-driving cars are not, it's already, it is already unavoidable.

I guarantee you that even if you leave your phone at home or put it in a fair day cage or whatever, you can still effectively be tracked if you own a car newer than about 2008.