China’s Talking Car Informing the Government about Its Moves

Chinese automakers are providing real-time location information and other data points from the electric vehicles to the Chinese government monitoring centers. The move is enhancing China’s rich surveillance tools no doubt, but it is also helping in achieving the objectives of President Xi Jinping, who is gearing up the use of technology to track Chinese citizens.

The whole mechanism happens without the knowledge of the car owners. More than 200 automakers selling electric vehicles in China which includes BMW, Ford, Tesla, Volkswagen, Daimler, Nissan, General Motors, Mitsubishi and US-based automobile Startup NIO are sending at least 61 data points to the government monitoring platforms installed in all the big cities of China.

According to the automakers, they are only complying with the local laws, which is applied to the alternative energy vehicles. Whereas Chinese government officials say that the data is used for analytics to improve the public safety, that helps in the facilitation of industrial development and infrastructure planning and also to prevent fraud in the subsidy programmes of the government.

While the critics are of the view that the information collected are more than the limits. They are of the opinion that the government is using the collected information to undermine the foreign carmakers' competitive position and also to keep surveillance over them.

Under the leadership of Xi Jinping, China has unleashed a war on dissent, marshaling big data and artificial intelligence to create a kind of policing that can immediately track and control, perceived threats to the stability of the ruling Communist Party.

This is also a big concern that the rules are set for sharing data from next-generation connected cars, which may soon start transmitting even more personal information.

According to Michael Chertoff, Former Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security in the United States and author of the book ‘Exploding Data’ says, “You’re learning a lot about people’s day-to-day activities and that becomes part of what I call ubiquitous surveillance. Companies have to ask themselves, ‘Is this really something we want to do in terms of our corporate values, even if it means otherwise forgoing that market?’”

In normal practice, government monitoring system across the world, tracks vehicle positioning, in many cases vehicles transmit their position information back to the automakers. In some cases, automakers feed it to car tracking apps or maps that pinpoint nearby amenities and emergency services. 

More or less the data stops here, government or law enforcement agencies would generally access the vehicle data in the context of a specific criminal investigation.