Sounds like something that wouldn't be a problem if we had adequate privacy protection regulations and enforced them properly.
How about we do that?
this post was submitted on 20 Jan 2026
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Kinda hard to ensure that if you can't inspect the entire software and hardware stack.
The point of laws isn't to be perfectly enforced, it's just to give recourse when they're broken.
It would be far from impossible for example for a few dweebs to say "hey, despite checking the no spying box in the contract, my car keeps sending data packets out for no reason" currently those dweebs tend to be shit out of luck.
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Other countries won't care about your county's privacy regulations.
The only way to regulate your own privacy is to make sure you are not being surveilled in the first place.
Hence proper privacy protection regulations and enforcement. No more black box devices that upload data to their servers that can't be deciphered by the users. Get caught? A crippling fine on first offense. Jail sentences and ban from the market for further offenses.
If someone gets caught planting a listening or a tracking device against someone else they can go to jail for it. Why should we make an exception for corporate leaders?
And laws that deter bad behaviour help move us toward that goal by helping those in our society who don't know better.
One would hope. Saddly, there are always loopholes.
Bill C-15 would allow corporations to be exempt from most Canadian laws
All the more reason to make it so companies in your country can't collect your data and sell it to those foreign countries so cheaply and easily right?
I think a law banning the collection of private data in things like cars would do more than regulating the surveillance of people for profit.
Also, the right to repair or modify equipment one owns would make it easier to disable these dystopian practices.
Fun fact: Nissan's privacy documentation admits to collecting data on your sexual activity, among (many) other things.
How else would their AI assistant know when to recline your seats and start the Marvin Gaye playlist?
Fucking what? Man I’ll take key fobs over some bullshit app any day. Imagine paying a subscription to turn your vehicle in remotely when RF fobs been doing it free for decades.
Don't they all?
Probably. This is just the case I can point to where they came out and said it.
Tesla employees were (probably still are) watching people in their cars and sharing clips of people singing, eating, and fucking around the office to laugh at.
My in-cabin camera stays covered 100% of the time for this reason.
so does your GM, VW, BMW, Tesla, Fiat... every brand of car spies on you - to a scary amount
Just to be clear though:
Both are bad
Because a lot of tankies here are of the opinion that the US listening is evil, but it's fine when China listens in
It's crazy to me that cars can legally phone home at all
I don't give two shits if my BYD (or other of the Chinese evs that outclass tesla for less money) reports directly to Chairman Xi's laptop.
I also want the commemorative Release The Epstein Files Edition, in Atlantis Gray.
Yeah, honestly, all modern cars are spying on you already, and if something it to spy on you I'd prefer if it was reporting to someone on the other side of the globe vs. some company or government in your jurisdiction. The former may show you more annoying ads, the latter may literally put you in prison. (of course, it is possible that the former will sell your data to the latter, so it's better to avoid spyware alltogether)
china doesn't need spyware, they can buy all the data they could ever want direct from US corpos for pennies
I have excellent news for you about contemporary government spying. Spying on OUR citizens is bad, so we ask the foreign allies for that data.
I don't think China would willingly hand over precious data to the US/Canada governments. But it might be willing to sell it.
So our tax dollars are paying for our stolen data? Quite the win-win.
Man, while I will always do everything I can to protect my privacy, I'd take Chinese privacy invasions over American privacy invasions any day.
Hell at this point I'd take a Chinese privacy invading product over an American privacy respecting product just out of spite
If I have to get creeped on I'd rather it be from a distance, China's less likely to raid my home :p
I get how Ford wants to protect his provinces auto industry money but instilling fear in the populace is more of a Trump tactic.
Ford is an idiot, what else did you expect?
The appropriate response ought to be better regulation and enforcement on all these companies instead of adding another to the pile. Whataboutism and complacency just drags us deeper into the torment nexus.
I don't know how to send a message to car makers so they know whoever offers a simple functional OFFLINE car will have my money when I change my car. At this stage I'd rather sacrifice real-time GPS updates to avoid a creepy spying car.
It's ok I don't speak Chinese so they can't understand me.
I'm over here, thinking about building my next car.
NISSAN KNOWS WHEN YOU'RE HAVING SEX. YES, THEY TRACK THAT
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.
I also kinda doubt they have the bandwidth and storage space to ingest billions of phone call recordings.
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.
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Cute to think it's only listening to your phone calls
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