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Transportation Government Privacy The Military United States Technology

Surveillance Company Wants To Sell Over 15 Billion Car Locations To the US Military (vice.com) 62

Posted by BeauHD from the sounds-like-a-great-idea dept.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: A surveillance contractor that has previously sold services to the U.S. military is advertising a product that it says can locate the real-time locations of specific cars in nearly any country on Earth. It says it does this by using data collected and sent by the cars and their components themselves, according to a document obtained by Motherboard. "Ulysses can provide our clients with the ability to remotely geolocate vehicles in nearly every country except for North Korea and Cuba on a near real time basis," the document, written by contractor The Ulysses Group, reads. "Currently, we can access over 15 billion vehicle locations around the world every month," the document adds.

Although the company told Motherboard it has not sold the product to the U.S. government at this time, the news highlights the scale and reach of car-tracking technology, and the fact that car location data is of interest not just to insurance companies and the finance sector, but to government contractors who explicitly say they want to source the data for intelligence and surveillance purposes. [...] Included in the document is a map showing apparent vehicle locations spread across Russia, Ukraine, and Turkey, including along the border with Syria. A section of text next to the map says Ulysses' data access lets clients analyze targets "whether you want to geo-locate one vehicle or 25,000,000 as shown here." An image on the company's LinkedIn page appears to show data related to Bulgaria. [...] The document does not explain exactly how Ulysses sources its data, be that directly from automakers or OEMs, or via an aggregator company. But there are plenty of companies that could be contributing. Andrew Lewis, president of The Ulysses Group, told Motherboard in an email that "any proprietary promotional material we may have produced is aspirational and developed based on publicly available information about modern telematics equipment." Lewis added: "We do not have any contracts with the government or any of its agencies related to our work in the field and we have never received any funding whatsoever from the government related to telematics."
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Surveillance Company Wants To Sell Over 15 Billion Car Locations To the US Military More

Surveillance Company Wants To Sell Over 15 Billion Car Locations To the US Military

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  • It says it does this by using data collected and sent by the cars and their components themselves, ...

    Yet another reason to hold onto my 2001 Civic and 2002 CR-V, as I think wrapping a new(er) car in a Faraday cage might negatively impact the gas mileage...

    • Got to be older than that.

      The reason why North Korea and Cuba have cars that are unable to be tracked is because the majority of their vehicles were built *before* the concept of the integrated circuit came into being in 1958. By then the communist revolutions had isolated these two nations.

  • my car. Thus I have not given my consent for collection of position data about me - so this is illegal under the GDPR. What is the legal basis for this data being collected ? How do I switch it off ?

    • Disable the LTE modem.

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by rtb61 ( 674572 )

        Far smarter, spoof the vehicles digital identity, those systems aren't particular secure so you can just change it, for even more fun, spoof another vehicle with your vehicles digital identity and they can chase that one and fire missiles at it. Just like chasing sim cards and killing whom ever has the wrong one and any one near them. Doesn't take more than half a brain to spoof digital phone identity and all of a sudden instead of killing terrorists you are blowing up wedding parties because someone got so

      • When I finally make it to owning modern car this is the first thing I'll do.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

        Something doesn't add up. There are around 1.4 billion cars in the world, so 15 billion locations/month is only one every 3 days on average per car. Hardly "real-time".

        Lots of cars don't have cellular modems either.

        My guess would be it's marketing wank. They just buy access to ANPR databases where available, and their data is shit.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by tlhIngan ( 30335 )

          Something doesn't add up. There are around 1.4 billion cars in the world, so 15 billion locations/month is only one every 3 days on average per car. Hardly "real-time".

          Lots of cars don't have cellular modems either.

          My guess would be it's marketing wank. They just buy access to ANPR databases where available, and their data is shit.

          You don't need a cellular modem to report position. There are plenty of ways to identify a car. Such as TPMS and Bluetooth, even the toll transponders.

          But you need something like

      • If that's even possible without causing a fault or wrecking the warranty. This is why we need strong data protections, and precisely why the government won't allow them to be implemented. Implementing strong data protections hurts corporations, and government surveillance.

        Oh and Rothbard is wrong as it ignores criminal organizations like the mafia/triad/et al., religions, and rent-seeking corporations.
    • By turning the ignition key for the first time, you accept the terms and conditions of the EULA.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Ichijo ( 607641 )

      I have not given my consent for collection of position data about me

      You're a car, you don't have rights.

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward

      this is illegal under the GDPR.

      The Ulysses Group is a US company, from a quick internet search they do not seem to have any presence or office in the EU.

      Since the GDPR is a EU directive, The Ulysses Group is not bound by it as long as they do no business in Europe.

      On the other hand, they claim they can track vehicles in Europe, so going after the companies they get their data from might be an option.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by N1AK ( 864906 )
        You're rather missing the point; the data is being collected by someone so, putting aside the possibility that the data is being accessed entirely criminally like by accessing the device via a security exploit, then GDPR will be relevant to whoever that is.

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by swep ( 7578022 )
        Every company that collects data on EU citizens are bound by the GDPR. That said, the EU might not be able to freeze their funds, and since the penalties are economic, it might work for them to do business in the US only.

    • Find which companies resell their telemetry and send it to the regulators ... no matter how many loopholes they think they found they're going to get fucked.

    • Remove your tires. You consented when the tire pressure sensors were put in.

  • I don't think there are even 15 billion active vehicles, let alone 15b that can be tracked in any form. I'm pretty sure they're playing word games, and claiming each location at a point in time as a "vehicle location". If each vehicle reports its location every 60 seconds, that's only ~10.5M vehicles.
  • There aren't even 8 Billion people in the world yet, how are there 15 Billion vehicles? I call bullshit...

    • Re: (Score:1, Funny)

      by furiousx ( 909573 )
      it's not that implausible. Sure, many folks with one, maybe two, cars. But there are quite a few folks like myself with seven or eight thousand.

    • This question has been brought up in a lot of posts on this page, and answered.

  • Same location, sir (Score:3)

    by PPH ( 736903 ) on Thursday March 18, 2021 @05:32PM (#61174002)

    PPH's car is still up on cinder blocks in his front yard.

    • Some years ago, there was a book entitled "You might be a redneck if..." One of the "ifs" was "...if you are mowing the lawn and you find a car."

      I did, BTW, have a pickup truck in my driveway for several years, with grass growing up around it. I liked the truck, but the emission laws in the county changed, making it no longer legal. And I lived in North Carolina at the time.

  • So Lewis says: "any proprietary promotional material we may have produced is aspirational and developed based on publicly available information about modern telematics equipment."

    Aspirational ==> a hope or ambition of achieving something (google dictionary)
    "based on ... information about .. equipment" ==> rough paper napkin sketch by a non-techie executive wanabe

    I hope the US government/military is not so naive to be sucked into this sales overreach.

  • I'm guessing that they are getting cell tower connection data and correlating that with cars with connections. That's the best way I can imagine to get data on all connected vehicles without cooperation from the car companies. Or they are making stuff up in hopes of getting investors.

  • Estimate I get is 1.06 billion cars, 363 million commercial vehicles and 200 million motorcycles for total of 1.6 billion. Seems Guenter the Goosestepper is lying by order of magnitude.

  • "Currently, we can access over 15 billion vehicle locations around the world every month"

    What is a "vehicle location"? For a single data point, it's a specific vehicle at a specific place. But what about the second data point? Are we to assume it is from the same vehicle, or a different one?

    At the extreme, that could be one vehicle located 15 billion times. Which *COULD* be done by reading that vehicle's location 380 times per second (to get 15 billion readings in a month). Let's say they can track a m

    • Stupid engineers. Once again you have all missed the point. It doesn't matter how many vehicles or how many locations. Just tracking one vehicle and selling it to ANYONE is the start of a heinous breach of everyone's privacy. If there are customers willing to pay for this invasion of our human right of free travel then it will proliferate and we are all screwed. I don't suppose I will live to see a politician who gives a crap about human rights.

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by BobC ( 101861 )

        First, the key takeaway is that the data is likely closer to being crap than to having a high degree of true usefulness. It's "needle in a haystack" stuff.

        Second, there are NO PRIVACY VIOLATIONS here! Traveling public roads is, by definition, PUBLIC, not private. Anyone thinking they have "privacy" while traveling on public roads is sadly deluded concerning the definition of "privacy". Only limited privacy exists INSIDE a car, and none whatsoever OUTSIDE.

        As an example, I know for a fact that my license

  • Another Privacy Rapist is born (Score:4)

    by Sebby ( 238625 ) on Thursday March 18, 2021 @06:28PM (#61174118)

    More Privacy Rapists [urbandictionary.com] - <sarcasm> YAY! </sarcasm>

  • What cars? using what tech?
    Article with no real info and a made up number - 16 Billions!!!

  • Wards Intelligence [wardsintelligence.com] estimates that there are approximately 1.4 billion in-service automobiles right now on the planet. Any company that claims they can track 15 billion car locations should be looked at with great suspicion.

  • Wifi, cellular and what not in your vehicle, was for YOUR convenience?
  • Why doesnt someone sue these data collectors for breach of copyright and say their driving is a copyrighted performance ?

    • Why doesnt someone sue these data collectors for breach of copyright and say their driving is a copyrighted performance ?

      They are only copying a short part of your performance when you go past the scanner.
      Fair use.

  • ... where people share how-to's on disabling car LTE modems?

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