One Company Wants to Sell the Feds Location Data from Every Car on Earth
upstart writes in with an IRC submission:
One company wants to sell the feds location data from every car on Earth:
There is a strange sort of symmetry in the world of personal data this week: one new report has identified a company that wants to sell the US government granular car location data from basically every vehicle in the world, while a group of privacy advocates is suing another company for providing customer data to the feds.
A surveillance contractor called Ulysses can "remotely geolocate vehicles in nearly every country except for North Korea and Cuba on a near real-time basis," Vice Motherboard reports.
Ulysses obtains vehicle telematics data from embedded sensors and communications sensors that can transmit information such as seatbelt status, engine temperature, and current vehicle location back to automakers or other parties.
"Among the thousands of other data points, vehicle location data is transmitted on a constant and near real-time basis while the vehicle is operating," the company wrote in a sales pitch document obtained by Vice. As roughly 100 million new cars are manufactured worldwide each year that are "increasingly connected to the manufacturer, other vehicles, infrastructure, and their owners, it becomes apparent that telematics will revolutionize intelligence," the document adds. Ulysses claims it can currently access more than 15 billion vehicle locations around the world every month, and it estimates that by 2025, 100 percent of new cars will be connected and transmitting gigabytes of collectible data per hour.
Meanwhile...
[...] A coalition of privacy advocates in California is now suing Thomson Reuters, which operates CLEAR, alleging that it violates state privacy law by collecting and sharing personal information without individuals' consent.
"When we look at the ways that these data brokers are remaking our country, the Fourth Amendment concerns are terrifying," Surveillance Technology Oversight Project Executive Director Albert Fox Cahn, who is participating in the suit, told the Post. "But the way that they're allowing companies to track millions without the most basic consent is deeply alarming as well."
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