Big Brother wants to keep tabs on you inside your car
Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not after you, David Booth writes.
OK, this one hits home. You see, I am a little, well, security conscious. Not Joseph Heller paranoid, but were my significant other describing me, the word would be “cautious.” I pay a few small bills online, but my main bank accounts are way off the grid. I still insist on depositing my cheques in person, I don’t ever “tap” my credit card and what little financial/work/ corporate interaction I do online requires a re-confirmation code through my cellphone.
Business Insider posted a story that says a company called Nest has surreptitiously built microphones into its products. In this case home security systems, but it also famously makes Wi-Fi-enabled thermostats. And it has done so without informing anyone.
It’s not mentioned in any of its marketing brochures. There’s no mention of a mic on its product page. No one knew. Certainly, I didn’t know (says he, staring at the Nest thermostat).
I know you’re thinking, ‘What’s with all this Catch-22 nonsense? Who cares if some little Silicon Valley upstart has a few details of how warm you like your house and can listen in to conversations in your kitchen?’
Except Nest isn’t just a little startup. It is owned by Google. Yes, that Google. The same Google that claimed its geodata-collecting Street View cars “accidentally” collected emails from our personal, home-based Wi-Fi networks as they drove by. The same Google that owns Waymo, the world’s leading proponent of the completely autonomous automobile.
So yes, you’re getting my drift; the same company that wants to know your whereabouts when you’re away from home now also wants to listen to your every conversation when you’re safely ensconced in said home. The big question is what we, the consuming public, are going to do about it.
Probably nothing, unfortunately. Paranoia about privacy seems to be a generational concern. Boomers fret about it continuously. But millennials and Gen Xers, who are already posting pictures of their underwear — or lack thereof — on pretty much every website? Not so much. The general public seems to simply shrug off invasions of privacy that would have, just 20 years ago, been deemed unconscionable.
And a controversy regarding peeping thermostats pales in comparison with the informational intrusion that our future’s connected car promises. I’m not talking about the paltry millions they’ll charge us directly — at $15 or so a month — for our OnStar and BlueLink informational services. No, I’m talking about the billions to be made monetizing the information we’ll generate transmitting data from our vehicles.
The information our cars produce will be sold. Our infotainment screens will become plagued with more advertising than our TVs. With a captive audience, what marketing maven wouldn’t jump at the chance to advertise its pizza to hungry travellers or gasoline/tires/service to motorists whose cars are continuously pumping out data detailing how long it’s been since they’ve been tuned up or how empty their gas tanks are?
Even much ballyhooed safety devices will be monetized. It’s not a huge entrepreneurial leap to imagine all those drowsiness sensors to be sponsored by the roadside motel chains. And would Mr. Days Inn be willing to pay a little extra if we made those sensors a little more, um, sensitive to sleepiness behind the wheel?
Too much? Automakers would never do anything so underhanded, you say? Have we really forgotten how greedy car companies are? Volkswagen sold our environment down the river to save a few hundred bucks per car in diesel emissions hardware. Even back when Ford decided against relocating/reinforcing the Pinto’s gas tanks — which, I will remind you, exploded upon impact — it was so it could save the measly $11 a car it would have cost to re-engineer its four-wheel time bomb. Sell us out for the estimated US$750-billion McKinsey & Company says that “car data monetization” will produce by 2030? They’re setting up divisions to do it as we speak.
Remember all that data Google “accidentally” gathered with its cars? The company claims its antennas were just trying to use our personal Wi-Fi networks for location services and it unknowingly — completely without intent, mind you — gathered “payload” data as well.
I’m not sure I believe them.