On June 26, 2017, the lifeless body of Ronald French, a bearded auto mechanic with once-twinkling eyes, was mysteriously found in a cornfield in Kalamazoo County, Michigan.
[...] For more than two years, Kalamazoo County sheriff's detectives investigated French's murder without making any arrests. Then, according to police records obtained by NBC News, one of the detectives learned of an emerging field — digital vehicle forensics — which focuses on extracting the treasure trove of data stored in an automobile's onboard computers.
They returned to French's 2016 black Chevy Silverado pickup truck, which had been stolen around the time he vanished, and discovered time-stamped recordings of someone else's voice using the hands-free system to play Eminem on the radio at the time of French's murder.
The voice, according to the police report obtained by NBC News, belonged to Joshua Wessel, [whose] voice was identified by relatives, including his wife, key evidence that allowed investigators to reconstruct his movements and the final hours of French's life, the police report says. In July, Wessel was arrested and charged with French's murder. He has pleaded not guilty and is awaiting trial subject to psychiatric assessment.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Grishnakh on Wednesday December 30 2020, @03:16AM (25 children)
Usually privacy advocates decry the systems in cars that can be used to incriminate drivers, but in this case, it looks like it worked out well: the truck was owned by the victim, who surely would have wanted its data (*his* data, since it was his vehicle) used to find the perpetrator and bring him to justice.
However this doesn't say anything about any safeguards against the data being used against you if it's your vehicle.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by barbara hudson on Wednesday December 30 2020, @04:22AM (5 children)
And you worry about using even a fake user name on the Internet? Hahaha. Tell me another one.
SoylentNews is social media. Says so right in the slogan. Soylentnews is people, not tech.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 30 2020, @04:31AM (3 children)
> Your phone spies on you. Your car spies on you.
No phone (except a land line), so it's obvious I'm at home. Older car, no built in gps.
But "they" do spy on me one way--back when I (and most people) believed Google when they said "do no
evil", I signed up for Gmail. Can't win them all?
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Wednesday December 30 2020, @04:50AM
That was "Don't be evil"
And it wasn't all that long before the joking truth was that they left out the punctuation, and it was actually "Don't. Be evil.". Certainly well before Gmail existed.
Of course, the big alternatives for free email were Yahoo and Hotmail - not exactly like they were any better.
Heck, remember the good old days when Windows wasn't spying on you?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 30 2020, @05:36AM (1 child)
Aye, old flip phones really are a gem. I have a smart phone which I neutered to all hell. But even with endless tweakign and skipping all the "updates" I still think it knows a bit too much. There is no incentive for anyone, from the app makers to the hardware manufacturers NOT to spy on you. It is a shame.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 30 2020, @11:54AM
Check out LineageOS [lineageos.org]+MicroG [microg.org].
With those two, you can cut Google out.
At that point, only your wireless provider (who needs to know who you are to deliver voice calls and text messages) and any apps *you* install can track you.
And if enough of the people you care about (or care about you) are on an app like Signal Messenger [signal.org], you can get rid of the wireless provider and use that for encrypted voice/video/text over WiFi.
As for GMail, why not go for something like Protonmail [protonmail.com] instead?
It isn't perfect, but it's a lot better than what happens now on a "smart" phone.
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Thursday December 31 2020, @03:46PM
Your phone spies on you.
It can spy on me. It could record all my phone calls, if its manufacturer was stupid enough to risk a felony for no reason whatever.
Your car spies on you.
My car's a 2004. It doesn't even have disk brakes or bluetooth.
The crossing lights at the corner spy on you.
So can anyone else at that crossing. IT'S IN PUBLIC! You have no reasonable expectation of privacy in public, and never have.
You give your DNA to 23andMe.
Why do you assume I'm that damned stupid??
You give your email and search history to google.
No, I give Yahoo access to my mail. If I have something I wouldn't want seen I'll use snail mail. If I want to search for something privately, I have Duckduckgo installed.
You buy from Amazon.
How is that any different than buying from Walgreens or Ace Hardware? More like "you use a credit/debit card" or worse, "you participate in customer rewards programs".
Impeach Donald Palpatine and his sidekick Elon Vader
(Score: 5, Informative) by fakefuck39 on Wednesday December 30 2020, @05:26AM (15 children)
the problem is, *his* data is not even accessible by him. cars collect a lot - in fact, who knew it records your voice when you ask it to play something, and permanently stores it over two years. now it's your vehicle - you own every piece, you own all the data. so, you say, let's see the data I own stored on the vehicle I own. Nah, that's only for the police.
So it's not his data. It's data stored on storage he owns, recorded by a computer he owns, he can't see it. he can't delete it. he doesn't even know what it is. does it just record all the time? perhaps a private business meeting with a client, which is under an NDA?
there was a case in chicago a long time ago. a guy was fighting for custody with his wife. he had the court get the last few years of her electronic toll data (ipass in IL), showing how frequently she had to work late. she lost custody.
Now, one might say, cool! Courts usually unfairly side with women as the caretaker, refreshing to see this. Yes it is. The thing is, when you have the father at home, it's ok to work late. That does not mean you're gonna work late when there's no one home. The court didn't want to take that chance and gave the kid to the dad.
I'm not here to debate good or bad of this. The big question is, when she paid $12 for that toll tag, did she know they would save every timestamp of her passing the toll, forever, and it will be used against her?
Long story short, I returned my ipass and have lost hours added up over the years by paying cash. Not even the self-service fast credit card swipe thing. Cash, handed to a guy, who gets paid to sit in the toll booth.
Ipass was supposed to be a convenience to replace the function of those tollbooth attendants. And they could have done it, with a prepaid pass not tied to a name. Like cash. They could have erased the data at least annually. Nope.
My TV doesn't record me, it's a dumb tv. My phone doesn't record me, it's a custom android. Google doesn't record me, because the search is via a proxy site. Gmail? lol And the thing is, it's not because I give a shit about privacy. It's because a dumb tv is a better experience, the custom android is faster and I barely charge my phone, and zoho and fastmail are actually much better services.
I'm sure there is some tracking going on here and all that. But the trend lately is not just tracking. It's having you pay for tracking to use against you. And it's that that's the bullshit. But because you pay, you control it, so just don't pay.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 30 2020, @11:01AM (6 children)
So your license plate number is recorded by the cameras in the toll booth lane instead of the electronic tag being recorded by the tag reader. What have you actually achieved here, other than getting on the list of people who are so paranoid about being tracked by the tags that they pay cash over and over and over again? Is that a good list to be on?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 30 2020, @12:02PM
Better than being on the massive list of indoctrinated morons who do absolutely nothing to even try to reclaim their privacy and then proceed to attack people who do. They're destroying our liberties and democracy.
(Score: 2) by Muad'Dave on Wednesday December 30 2020, @12:56PM (3 children)
And if you've got TPMS sensors [wikipedia.org] on you tires, you're transmitting your unique tire IDs everywhere you go.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Wednesday December 30 2020, @08:31PM (2 children)
Those things are not readable any significant distance from the car. Sure, the government could be hiding TPMS-reading sensors in roadways, but why would they bother when they don't know which sensor goes to which car? Do tire shops inform the government of the new codes when they put new sensors in your tires? This is a textbook conspiracy theory: why would the government go to all this trouble when all they have to do is put up cameras to record license plates, which they already know and control? (Plus, it's pretty well-known that police cars are equipped with license-plate reading cameras that continuously read and record plates; you'll see them mounted on the trunks of cop cars, one on each side, facing forward.)
(Score: 2) by Joe Desertrat on Friday January 01 2021, @02:18PM
Is it recorded in the car? If so, that information likely goes eventually to the car maker, probably each time you get the vehicle serviced. I just purchased a new car (my previous was a 2001) and it is astounding how much potential there is for a massive amount of data about your habits to be collected on a daily basis. What actually are they collecting? How do they use it? To whom do they give/sell access to that information? There's a fat manual filled with dire warnings about what can go wrong if you do this or don't do that. I've found nothing yet that tells me about what they do with the data they collect, except perhaps the vague "improve our service to you" line.
(Score: 2) by Muad'Dave on Sunday January 03 2021, @01:04AM
It's not conspiracy theory, it's certainly being done by individuals and most likely governments. Schneier [schneier.com] wrote about it, and you can see other results here [google.com].
I can't find the citation right now but I recall an instance some years ago where the US Customs Service caught a drug smuggler at the border returning from Mexico because the automatically-read license plate data and the TPMS data did not match what they had on record when they went into Mexico. It seems the smugglers would prepare a tire with the drugs and swap it.
(Score: 2) by fakefuck39 on Wednesday December 30 2020, @02:22PM
well, if one were to be able to read what i wrote and reply to that instead of random shit their autistic brain makes up, you would see my issue is paying for the things tracking me, like buying the ipass, and not any tracking. so what i achieve is my wanted outcome. by not buying an ipass, the funds pay for someone to have a job -another outcome i want.
so i'm on a good list. and i'm guessing you'e on a list too. is it the pedo registry from.when you tried to make your anime fantasy happen?
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 30 2020, @12:01PM (4 children)
I recall getting on the Edens Expressway (i94) one night a few years back and there was no toll collector and no way to pay the $0.20 (or some similar ridiculously small amount) except with IPass.. Helpfully, I did receive a letter forwarded from the rental car company asking me to pay. I have to say it was pretty inconvenient.
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Wednesday December 30 2020, @02:16PM (1 child)
And I came in my own car prepared to pay cash for a trip on one of Chicago's toll roads, only to learn at the tollbooth at the exit that the machine didn't take bills, only coins. I didn't have enough coins to pay in coins only. No person there either, of course. After thinking about the situation for a moment, I concluded the only thing I could do was drive on without paying.
I have heard that if cash is offered for a debt, and refused, the debt is nevertheless canceled. Besides, I thought it unlikely the state of Illinois could do anything as I live in a different state, nor would they be inclined to make a huge fuss over a dollar and change in unpaid tolls, unless they have some racket going on in which they are allowed to impose unreasonably high fines that are so high they are worth chasing after, as Texas does. Skipped a $0.25 toll? $30 fine! Plus, administrative fees! Additional huge fines if you're late paying the $30 that was due yesterday and for which you received notification only today. Texas pushed that crap too far, and there was a backlash. They're a little more reasonable now, but only a little. Have never heard boo about that Chicago toll.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 30 2020, @10:35PM
When I had the same problem at a Chicago toll booth (no person, didn't take bills) it turned out there were plenty of coins on the ground. With all those cars passing through, some people miss the target/funnel.
(Score: 2) by fakefuck39 on Wednesday December 30 2020, @02:25PM
yeah, you gotta know the roads. the tolls with people and credit cards stop up north. but you get off before that and hit US41. it's parallel, and not any slower. maybe 1 light every few miles.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 31 2020, @04:34PM
This is what we refer to in the US as business innovation. Laying careful traps for the unwary to get snagged on.
See also bundled internet and landline, cell phones that do 100 things but need to be charged every 12 hours and you need a PhD to do basic texts.
(Score: 2) by sgleysti on Wednesday December 30 2020, @03:33PM (2 children)
I think what happened is this was recorded en route to the murder, then the vehicle was locked up in evidence after that for the two year period. It's still surprising though. I work in embedded systems (smaller stuff, not automotive), and I'm surprised they save voice clips to nonvolatile memory at all. Perhaps they simply didn't have enough RAM to both store a voice command and process it? Not sure.
I wonder how many of the last voice commands it saves.
(Score: 2) by fakefuck39 on Wednesday December 30 2020, @03:46PM
Yeah, this doesn't scream privacy invasion via data collection to me. This screams something like, we have to record it to process the voice print, so fill up a few hundred meg of audio files, delete them all at once then run a TRIM command, to make the shitty flash card last longer. Perhaps not just storing it in RAM is because of the strict separation of stuff within a car. Maybe those voice commands can control car functions, so the only access you want from your media player is to be able to read a file, not share RAM or any kind of compute, for when someone pops in an infected thumb drive and puts a virus on your entertainment system.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Wednesday December 30 2020, @08:37PM
I work in embedded systems (smaller stuff, not automotive), and I'm surprised they save voice clips to nonvolatile memory at all. Perhaps they simply didn't have enough RAM to both store a voice command and process it? Not sure.
Modern auto infotainment systems have fairly powerful multicore CPUs and flash memory. It's probably not a big deal to save the last few voice commands to disk in a /tmp file. I am a little surprised they'd bother though, after the command has been processed.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 30 2020, @02:58PM (1 child)
The fact that they happened to get somebody that wasn't the legal owner of the vehicle doesn't make this any less troubling. It's just further evidence of how far we've slid into the police state. You've got all these yokels refusing to wear masks because freedom, but when things like the Patriot Act and FISA are up for a vote, there's no opposition from the right.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 31 2020, @04:37PM
I read the same comment about George W Bush effectively eliminating the 4th Amendment. Where were the 2nd Amendment folks marching on DC when that happened? They were cheering him on, that's where. Yeah, so much for your precious rights dipshits.
(Score: 5, Touché) by maxwell demon on Wednesday December 30 2020, @03:54PM
And by complete 24/7 surveillance of everyone, close to 100% of all crime could be solved. That doesn't imply that we should do it.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 30 2020, @03:28AM (3 children)
Chevy BAD. Ford GOOD.
I have no idea what TFS is about.
Hehehe, "editors," eh. Yeah.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 30 2020, @05:06AM (1 child)
Found On Road Dead Ford? Or Fix Or Repair Daily Ford? :-P
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 30 2020, @01:52PM
Fails On Recording Data?
That would be good, amirite?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 31 2020, @04:45PM
Wait, I got one.
CHina Electric Vehicle Yonder