>The White House said threats could arise because vehicles “collect large amounts of sensitive data on their drivers and passengers"...[and] also said vehicles could “be piloted or disabled remotely” and added the investigation will also look at autonomous vehicles.
Why do vehicles have to collect large amounts of sensitive data and be remotely controllable?
I hate the "electric cars are all about software" meme. You need a PWM thingy to work as a motor controller / switching converter. And a charge controller with a little bit of ramp up/down logic. And a temperature controller hooked into the heat pump, battery coolant, motor coolant, and cabin radiator(s). You should be able to do the whole thing with a bunch of power FETs, some LM-series chips, and maybe an 8051 microcontroller.
I'd love to hear exactly what this security threat is. The only scenario I can envision is tracking a chinese national in America and trying to abduct them back to china, or perhaps blackmailing a US government official by proving their car went to a whorehouse. Of course these threats have nothing to do with china - I'm sure China could get an agent at Tesla for example. And even if they couldn't such blackmailing/abduction is just as bad if it happens from a US source.
How about we simply pass a law that ALL cars sold to Americans must have the ability to disable all tracking?
The irony of the US worrying about stuff like this when they spent years introducing security vulnerabilities into SSL and TLS for decades for "exported software" (esp. when that then became a flaw that undermined people in the US) :-/
"National security data risk" is a funny way of saying "risk to the profits of the domestic car companies." If it was about spying it'd broadly apply to all vehicles and not just those imported.
And what about the other non-Chinese foreign automakers. Are they not also spying?
Well, I guess I'll have to buy cars from communist countries to get something that doesn't spy on me?
Probably just older used cars and accept the cost of having a shop fix it up, maybe modify it a bit whilst it's there.
My car is from 2012 and I am very reluctant to downgrade to something newer.
I'm with you. My truck is soon going to be a classic by age and I do whatever I can to keep it running. The next one may be even older and modded to get better fuel efficiency. In my opinion the automotive industry has jumped the shark adding widgets nobody asked for. Worse, adding remote telemetry and drive-by-wire that is connected to that remote network. Not even theory, some automotive security enthusiasts got into a bit of trouble a decade ago taking control of a vehicle on a live highway. That will be a never ending game of whack-a-hole just like internet software has been since the beginning with the only difference being real lives of real families are at stake.
I with I could see the CCP leadership laughing their asses off at how paranoid the US is about China. They could fart and waste two months of our intelligence agencies' time.
Xi Jinping: Enters a meeting through the left door,
The Entire US Apparently: IS THIS A SECRET PLOT TO MOVE AMERICA TO THE LEFT? — TOWARD COMMUNISM?!
Protecting "domestic industry," which in this case really means anywhere in NATO, for national security is an actual thing so we don't lose our manufacturing capability but this is just silly. As if all our other connected devices aren't made in China already.
Why do vehicles have to collect large amounts of sensitive data and be remotely controllable?