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OnStar Considered Harmful
Frisky070802 writes "A few weeks ago Slashdot ran an article on the privacy issues in EzPass. Some of the comments referred to other things Big Brother could do with GPS in cars, and now the New York Times has run a column on what else your car is saying about you (free registration req'd). From the article: 'Aviel D. Rubin, the technical director of the Information Security Institute at Johns Hopkins University, said that every new technology with the potential to invade privacy was introduced with pledges that it would be used responsibly.
But over time, he said, the desire of law enforcement and business to use the data overtook the early promises. "The only way to get real privacy," he said, "is not to collect the information in the first place."'"
It is impossible to be completely private. This is not a bad thing.
I have been pwned because my
Most technology can be used to violate your privacy.
.
OnStar is a good system, and can even save your life in the event of an accident.
Or, the government can use it to track you down and assassinate you because of your contributions to
Which one of these two situations are you more likely to be in?
Job? I don't have time to get a job! Who will sit around and bitch about being broke and unemployed then?
If you read the article, that now includes tires. So start driving on your rims when you're wearing your foil helmet.
riding round the world on an old motorcycle
Maybe if the Beagle 2 had onstar they would have an idea where it is now. privacy be damned.
Onstar: "Onstar operator here. I see that your airbags have deployed do you need assitance?"
Beagle 2: "Uh, no, everythings fine here."
Onstar: " We are concerend that you have fallen in a crator, can you confirm?"
Beagle 2 : " Look can I get some privacy here! I am in the crator taking a wicked piss. You would to if you had to travel that far without a potty break! I'll be in contact when I am done."
See mystery solved and an example of when to much privacy causes confussion.
Papa Legba come and open the gate
Google link here
If you're that paranoid, don't install anything trackable in your car.
Does that include a license plate?
every new technology with the potential to invade privacy was introduced with pledges that it would be used responsibly. But over time, he said, the desire of law enforcement and business to use the data overtook the early promises. "The only way to get real privacy," he said, "is not to collect the information in the first place."'"
From the New York Times' mandatory registration page: "We'll keep your information private. The following fields are required. NYTimes.com respects your privacy, so we will never share any personal information without your consent."
What's on the front page tomorrow, an in-depth report on the pot and the kettle?
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
You see this all more and more often, our privacy is pushed back to make room for more and more "helpful services." I wouldn't be surprised if OnStar would report you to the police if you just happened to go over the speed limit or some other activity. Pfft, for all we know we could have to submit to random memory scans in the future as a new wave of "drug tests" that can do much more. Where is our privacy now?
FuckTheFuckingFuckers.com - Post your th
does anyone else see the irony in a registration required article preaching against the invasion of privacy of another device that can track people?
As with most things in life, this is an easy problem when approached from a cost/benefit viewpoint.
In this case, we have:
(risk of being spied OnStar)*(loss of privacy) +
(risk of being stranded)*(result of being stranded) +
(added price of OnStar and service)
(<,=,>?)
(risk of being spied on with a cell phone)*(loss of privacy) +
(risk of being stranded w/ cell phone)*(result of being stranded) +
(added price of cell phone and service)
If you've already got a cell phone, and you always have it with you, that side of the question is pretty small.
My little formula ignores the gee-whiz-me-too value of having a built-in car phone and other trivial factors.
sigs, as if you care.
... can it also STOP your car and LOCK your doors?
This Car Can Talk. What It Says May Cause Concern. By JOHN SCHWARTZ Published: December 29, 2003 Last year, Curt Dunnam bought a Chevrolet Blazer with one of the most popular new features in high-end cars: the OnStar personal security system. The heavily advertised communications and tracking feature is used nationwide by more than two million drivers, who simply push a button to connect, via a built-in cellphone, to a member of the OnStar staff. A Global Positioning System, or G.P.S., helps the employee give verbal directions to the driver or locate the car after an accident. The company can even send a signal to unlock car doors for locked-out owners, or blink the car's lights and honk the horn to help people find their cars in an endless plain of parking spaces. A big selling point for the system is its use in thwarting car thieves. Once an owner reports to the police that a car has been stolen, the company, which was started by General Motors, can track it to help intercept the thieves, a service it performs about 400 times each month. But for Mr. Dunnam, the more he learned about his car's security features, the less secure he felt. A research support specialist at Cornell University, he is concerned about privacy. He has enough technical knowledge to worry that someone else - say, law enforcement officers, or even hackers - could listen in on his phone calls, or gain control over his automotive systems without his knowledge or consent. Any gadget that can track a carjacker, he reasons, can just as readily be used to track him. "While I don't believe G.M. intentionally designed this system to facilitate Orwellian activities, they sure have made it easy," he said. OnStar is one of a growing number of automated eyes and ears that enhance driving safety and convenience but that also increase the potential for surveillance. Privacy advocates say that the rise of the automotive technologies, including electronic toll areas, location-tracking devices, "black box" data recorders like those found on airplanes and even tiny radio ID tags in tires, are changing the nature of Americans' relationship with their cars. Beth Givens, founder of the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse, said the car had long been a symbol of Kerouac-flavored freedom, and a haven. "You can talk to yourself in your car, you can scream at yourself in your car, you can go there to be alone, you can ponder the heavens, you can think deep thoughts all alone, you can sing," she said. With the growing number of monitoring systems, she said, "Now, the car is Big Brother." James E. Hall, a transportation lawyer and former chairman of the National Transportation Safety Board, said the monitoring systems presented a subtle blend of benefit and risk. "We are moving toward a kind of automobile that nobody's ever known," he said. "It's mostly good news, but there are negative things that we will have to work through." Mr. Dunnam said he had become even more concerned because of a federal appeals court case involving a criminal investigation in Nevada, in which federal authorities had demanded that a company attach a wiretap to tracking services like those installed in his car. The suit did not reveal which company was involved. A three-judge panel in San Francisco rejected the request, but not on privacy grounds; the panel said the wiretap would interfere with the operation of the safety services. OnStar has said that its equipment was not involved in that case. An OnStar spokeswoman, Geri Lama, suggested that Mr. Dunnam's worries were overblown. The signals that the company sends to unlock car doors or track location-based information can be triggered only with a secure exchange of specific identifying data, which ought to deter all but the most determined hackers, she said. As for law enforcement, the company said it released location data about customers only under a court order. "We have no choice but to be responsive to court orders," Ms. Lama said. Other information systems being added to cars can be used for tracking as well. Electronic toll systems ar
Boycott everything - they're all trying to fuck you one way or another
It seems like it's relevant to ask in a privacy related thread, so please share with us all of you who don't register for the nytimes.com silliness, why do you avoid this formality? The cost seems very slight for some of the best journalism (IMHO), especially compared to salon.com which makes you watch click-through ads.
This may sound like flamebait, but take a moment to think about the complaints about the registration vs. the information that the ny times provides, then if you still think i'm a jerk for asking, mod me down.
Yawn.
If you don't believe me, recall the TIA project where the government wants to aggregate all avaliable data from public corporations about you.
Religion is a gateway psychosis. -- Dave Foley
In 2002, Nebraska's largest bank robbery took place in Norfolk, Nebraska. 5 people were shot and killed, and the robbers stole a brand new Subaru. They got about 100 miles away and would probably have gotten away with it except that the OnStar system shut the car down and told the police the location of the car (it had been reported hijacked an hour or so earlier).
I don't post this with the intention of saying how "great" OnStar is - infact I am wearing my tinfoil hat right now - but simply to illustrate what the system is capable of.
I think that's a general rule with information that's often not taken very seriously.
When I look at my (non-US) government and a large number (not all) of organisations that I give personal information to, I generally trust them. Within certain bounds, it's not very likely that most people will abuse the trust that you put in them. They ask for information because they think it might be useful for what they're doing for you, and that's initially its primary use. There are obviously some exceptions with marketing motivations -- I don't trust spammers with my email address and never gave them permission to use it. Partly that's where privacy policies and legislation should come in where possible.
The problem, though, is that times change, organisations change, the people running them change, societial views change, and ethics change. Data that you've given to an organisation, on the other hand, doesn't change on its own. It stays right there to be interpreted and used in whichever ways the current powers see fit.
Consider how many organisations and governments have changed over the last 50 years. Then consider that most of the information collected 50 years ago is probably still on record. Just because you trusted the people heading an organisation or a committee or a council or a government at a particular time does not mean that those people won't change later on.
Information collected today will almost certainly be on record 50 years from now. In fact, it's likely that much more of it will remain on record than from the past 50 years until now, because digital information is so easy and cheap to manage and manipulate compared with paper.
For the same reasons when I was a membership secretary for a small-medium organisation I felt an ethical obligation to destroy at least the digital membership records of former members a year after they left, unless there was a good reason to keep them. I wasn't going to do anything deceptive with them, but I couldn't guarantee who would be on the committee in five or ten years' time. This isn't the norm with most organisations, though.
Realistically I do trust the majority of people and organisations when they tell me that they wouldn't abuse information that I give them. It means a lot more to me though if they'll commit to destroying it after they no longer need it.
I don't know if this is a problem that can easily be fixed. Realistically information about people is what the world runs on -- it's a fuzzy boundary and matter of opinion that determines how much is too much or what constitutes misuse. If it suits you then you could get all paranoid and not give out any personal information to anyone, but that's not an option for most people and in some situations it's not legal for arguably reasonable reasons.
My friend bought a brand new Mustang a few weeks ago. He comes into the living room yesterday and told me that his car tracks speeds, seatbelt information and even the way he drives. Also right after that it says that it can be downloaded by ford, the US government and that he can even request the information. I dont want a car that spies on me, thats just a bit much
life sucks, then you die
Get it straight, I could care less if a computer decided it wanted to catalouge and profile my life to help me out. Most people feel this way. I'd love to have a PDA that was intellegent enough to tell me what restuarants served food with my preferences (such as no msg, no feedlotted beef, no tap water, etc) or that'd give me directions in my car when I got lost, or could call up emergency services if I get stranded in the desert. But I have HUGE problems with the US goverment, companies and buisnesses, or even my neighbors having that information. The potential for abuse is to great for me to allow myself to be invaded like that.
Why? Because the information people have about you is power they have over you, and I don't trust anyone accept family with that information. I DO NOT trust the US goverment as much as I trust my parents or siblings and that's how it's supposed to be. I DO NOT trust sony to know what my buying preferences or toxic waste distributors like coca cola to know I don't like drinking their toxic waste. Infact, the very fact that most of us are scared shitless at the US goverment or corperations or buisnesses prying is proof enough that something's wrong and something needs to be done before a real civil war takes place and people begin shooting and dieing and nuking.
Candy-Coated Knowledge
"How about insurance companies viewing the information to see how you drive to determine whether they should jack up your insurance rates."
I'm all for that, and so should you be. I drive obeying all posted signs and speed limits. Were it not for the fact that I live in a provice with socialized insurance on my car, I'd be paying about 3-4 grand per year to insure my car (worth about 1500$ CDN), rather than the 720$/year I pay now. Plus, since I have no accidents on record, I get a discount of 1% per each year of no accidents (6 years since I got my licence accident free).
The thing is, I'm a male in my low 20s. Most insurance companies traditionally track what they'd charge based on the age and gender, which (thanks to other drivers my gender and age being retards) would put me in a very shitty spot. Anything that lets insurance companies rape bad drivers while leaving better drivers with lowered rates and protection in case of stupid drivers is fine by me!
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Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
As they say around here, RTFB (blurb):
"The only way to get real privacy," he said, "is not to collect the information in the first place."'"
That, my friend, is the bottom line of the article summary, and also the bottom line for many of us. Some fights are worth fighting for purely on their merits, and privacy is one of them. Pragmatism has nothing to do with it. I just enjoy my privacy, so do thousands of others here on Slashdot, and it's nice to remind everyone else of that.
The more people sign up for the NYT online, the more acceptable it is for companies to do it. Thanks, but no thanks.
Endless arguments over trivial contradictions in books written by ignorant savages to explain thunder in the dark.
Slightly off-topic, but it's interesting to note that when Google News or other links send me to "registration required" sites, the username/password of password/password usually works.
;)
I first learned of that for the NYT links here on slashdot, but it seems to be everywhere.
It'd be pretty interesting to see the stats on this "password" person.
$0.02 (CDN)
Well...my guage of how much something infringes on my privacy is to ask myself, "Could this same information be collected by a cop sitting on public property?" For example, say it reports if you're speeding. That's nothing a motorcycle cop with a radar gun couldn't see.
You get tracked driving to your terrorist buddy's place to buy some illegal weapons. Nothing the FBI couldn't see by tailing you.
btw what's wrong with defibs in planes? And frankly I *want* GPS in my phone when I call 911. I did that once for a fire in the middle of nowhere and it took a good few miles before I hit an exit and could tell the dispatcher where I was (this was in California where they don't believe in mile markers...) And once again when there was an "incident" when I couldn't stay on the line long enough to say where I was. The situation diffused itself, but it *really* would've helped to have gotten a cop there.
Closed captioning pisses me off, but just because I don't feel like I should have to pay for it...
Folks - this isn't about speeding. OnStar is everything : GPS, location tracking, speed, locking and unlocking your car doors, disabling the engine, knowing how many people are in the car (determined by how many seat belts are latched), and the real kicker : real time audio surveillance.
You read that right - they can open the phone connection on your in-dash phone and listen to everything said and done in the vehicle. In theory they should announce themselves, but don't kid yourself.
Think you are being entirely too cool taking your secretary out in your new Mercedes Benz for a ride in the country and a romp in the back seat? Not only do they know where you picked her up, where you went, where you stopped in the country to tap a little ass, they can listen in on the juicy parts.
If you think they are not already doing it, think again. Watch the movie Enemy of the State and remember it is about 5 years old. That's about 28 in computer years.
Glonoinha the MebiByte Slayer
In my province, registering your car (= making legal to drive) is also insuring it. SGI is the one government body which does the car registration, auto insurance, and licencing for everything in the province.
:)
There's no way you can drive your car without insurance, as everyone has it. If you do decide to drive an unregistered car, it's immediate jail time. The insurance is no fault; if there's an accident, you pay your deductible, and they cut a cheque for the rest. This also makes for the interesting situation where it may be cheaper to swerve into a pedestrian that it would be to let yourself be hit by a car that's out of control, because the no-fault stuff covers any liability in that case.
SGI's also pretty reasonable for an insurance company. I bike all summer, and some guy decided to open his door into me (despite my shouting and his looking back at me). I ended up being fine, but he managed to destroy everything in my pocket (GSM phone, Palm pilot, pen). I got a cheque for $400 after a week and 1 report to SGI.
I like insurance on something like a car. Nowhere else do you typically involve yourself with devices that can easily cause so much personal or property damage. Insurance means you have a small, controlled expense in the event of an accident. That's really the goal of insurance -- everyone pays a small amount so that those who need it aren't fucked. If I hit a 70,000$ BMW, I pay my deductible and walk away fine mostly fine: I will pay more for registration and have points on my licence if I'm at fault, but I won't have to sell everything I own and declare bankruptcy!
Yea, you can argue that you'd be better off sticking that money in a bank account and accumulating interest on it, but insurance is always there with no build up period, plus it requires no discipline on your part beside paying for it -- there's no temptation to run out and buy a new car or home theatre with the money. In that sense, insurance is already escrow.
Saying that auto insurance is an artificial industry is like saying that medical insurance is an artificial industry. The only people who say that are those who haven't yet used it, or incredibly naive people. Everyone wins with these kinds of social agreements -- go take an economics course, and you'll understand why
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Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.