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from the is-Howard-Stern-listening-in-on-you? dept.
A recent techdirt article says that
Thomas Fox-Brewster of Forbes is taking a closer look at a decade-plus of in-car surveillance, courtesy of electronics and services manufacturers are installing in as many cars as possible.
Following the news that cops are trying to sweat down an Amazon Echo in hopes of hearing murder-related conversations, it's time to revisit the eavesdropping that's gone on for years prior to today's wealth of in-home recording devices.
One of the more recent examples can be found in a 2014 warrant that allowed New York police to trace a vehicle by demanding the satellite radio and telematics provider SiriusXM provide location information.
In this case, SiriusXM complied by turning on its "stolen vehicle recovery" mode, which allowed law enforcement to track the vehicle for ten days. SiriusXM told Forbes it only does this in response to search warrants and court orders. That may be the case for real-time tracking, but any location information captured and stored by SiriusXM can be had with nothing more than a subpoena, as this info is normally considered a third-party record.
It's not just satellite radio companies allowing cops to engage in surreptitious tracking. OnStar and other in-vehicle services have been used by law enforcement to eavesdrop on personal conversations between drivers and passengers.
In at least two cases, individuals unwittingly had their conversations listened in on by law enforcement. In 2001, OnStar competitor ATX Technologies (which later became part of Agero) was ordered to provide "roving interceptions" of a Mercedes Benz S430V. It initially complied with the order in November of that year to spy on audible communications for 30 days, but when the FBI asked for an extension in December, ATX declined, claiming it was overly burdensome.
The 2001 case didn't end well for law enforcement. It wasn't that the court had an issue with the eavesdropping, but rather that the act of listening in limited the functionality of the in-car tech, which the court found to be overly-burdensome.
[...] Law enforcement may find encryption to be slowing things down in terms of accessing cell phone contents, but everything else -- from in-car electronics to the Internet of Things -- is playing right into their hands.
-- submitted from IRC
(Score: 2) by Unixnut on Saturday January 21 2017, @09:51AM
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias [wikipedia.org]
Yes I know that well, but I am talking about buying an 80s-90s car now, which means you are picking from the reliable survivors already. We have already passed the survivorship filter.
Some cars from that era were the 1%. They are actually good cars. But the majority of cars are junk even today.
I quite agree, but the same applies today. 90% of the cars built in the last few years won't make it to 20+ years. Some due to just not being built that well, others because they have been written off in accidents.
Everything goes through that cycle, even modern cars. Once had a modern 911 brought to the shop that had gone completely haywire, must have been less than a year old. In the end we had it shipped for replacement under guarantee, but goes to show that every era of manufacture has its lemons.
However I suspect that if in future we look back, we will see that a larger number of modern cars will be filtered out over time than equivalent early generational models for the same year.
For the simple reason that they are much more complicated, have more to go wrong, need expensive specialist equipment to maintain and are harder for humans to work on. This makes it harder to enthusiasts to keep the cars going, and pushes up the costs for garage work, which means after a certain time it will be cheaper to scrap the car then pay the large bills for people to work on it, especially if it is an independent garage.
We are already at the point where when a new gen car is out of warranty, people want to sell it and get a new one just to avoid the massive maintenance and repair costs for even minor things.