this post was submitted on 20 Jan 2026
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Eh Buddy Hoser
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This is not the main problem with Chinese EVs. As far as privacy goes I would be much more concerned with what they are slurping up about where I am than what I am talking about. For instance all the SSIDs and Bluetooth device around the car. I also kinda doubt they have the bandwidth and storage space to ingest billions of phone call recordings.
It’s that they are being subsidized by the Chinese government and Chinese labor markets. Their aim is to put other countries’ automakers out of business and then exploit their monopoly. Pretty much the only thing that could make American transit worse is having no domestic manufacturing capability, Europe at least has decent public transit.
And if they have a kill switch. In case of a conflict, disabling large parts of transportation and logistics is a given. Take Musk disabling Starlink in Ukraine as an example, or the F35 startup password thing.
They're like a couple of megabytes each if compressed properly. Short calls could be less than a meg and long ones in the tens of megabytes. Billions would be petabytes. That's actually... Kinda doable these days if you're a country with the resources of China.
Even if that kind of client side compression went totally unnoticed, and petabyte level use of cell and satellite services also went unnoticed, and even supposing we are only talking about a billion calls a day (unlikely given the population of the US alone, before even adding the rest of North America, Europe, and wherever else they want to spy), what are they going to do with all that data? It’s not a training source and any AI they unleashed to sort it would be subject to hallucinations and attack from people who know their conversations are being recorded.
I find it much more likely that they will target individuals directly for that level of surveillance. Hacking one journalist’s cell is going to be far easier than trying to find their recordings in the vault, assuming the targets have a new Chinese car.
They are much more useful as scouts for mapping things just like Google has been doing with their street view cars for decades now and as the other commenter pointed out, with a kill switch just like OnStar uses for stolen cars, as a first attack wave gumming up transport and evacuation options.
Government, sure. Labor markets, eh, quality of life in China is not worse than in the west in many respects.
In any case, I don't disagree, but the obvious solution is to have self-sufficient economies not relying on external markets. The most successful example of this has been the Soviet economy, so I agree that we need protectionism but also centrally and democratically planned socialist economies.