Oh yes there is!
Posted on 07/09/2024 8:53:06 AM PDT by algore
Since 2017, self-driving cars owned by Chinese companies have traversed 1.8 million miles of California alone, according to a Fortune analysis of the state's Department of Motor Vehicles data.
As part of their basic functionality, these cars capture video of their surroundings and map the state's roads to within two centimeters of precision. Companies transfer that information from the cars to data centers, where they use it to train their self-driving systems.
The cars are part of a state program that allows companies developing self-driving technology -- including Google-spinoff Waymo and Amazon-owned Zoox -- to test autonomous vehicles on public roads.
Among the 35 companies approved to test by the California DMV, seven are wholly or partly China-based. Five of them drove on California roads last year: WeRide, Apollo, AutoX, Pony.ai, and DiDi Research America. Some Chinese companies are approved to test in Arizona and Texas as well.
Fitted with cameras, microphones, and sophisticated sensors, self-driving cars have long raised flags among privacy advocates.
Matthew Guariglia, a policy analyst at the digital rights nonprofit Electronic Frontier Foundation, called self-driving cars "rolling surveillance devices" that passively collect massive amounts of information on Americans in plain sight.
In the context of national security however, the data-hungry Chinese cars have received surprisingly little scrutiny.
Some experts have compared them to Chinese-owned social media site TikTok, which has been subjected to a forced divestiture or ban on U.S. soil due to fears around its data collection practices threatening national security.
The years-long condemnation of TikTok at the highest levels of the U.S. government has heightened the sense of distrust between the U.S. and China.
Some Chinese self-driving car companies appear to store U.S. data in China, according to privacy policies reviewed byFortune -- a situation that experts said effectively leaves the data accessible to the Chinese government.
Depending on the type of information collected by the cars, the level of precision, and the frequency at which it's collected, the data could provide a foreign adversary with a treasure trove of intelligence that could be used for everything from mass surveillance to war planning, according to security experts who spoke with Fortune.
And yet, despite the sensitivity of the data, officials at the state and federal agencies overseeing the self-driving car testing acknowledge that they do not currently monitor, or have any process for checking, exactly what data the Chinese vehicles are collecting and what happens to the data after it is collected.
Nor do they have any additional rules or policies in place for oversight of Chinese self-driving cars versus the cars in the program operated by American or European companies.
"It is literally the wild, Wild West here," said Craig Singleton, director of the China program at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a conservative-leaning national security think tank. "There's no one in charge."
So a Chinese Google/Apple map. Wonderful.
Where are our security people ?
I wonder has BYD been testing their self-driving technology here in the USA.
Got photos of these camera-laden self driven cars? Smash camera’s deflate the tires. Incognito of course- wear AntiFA garb.
This is not legal. Google MUST get permission for every roadside home or person videoed in their stream. And most here will not there ARE places google maps have NOT been able to penetrate. Nor should they. And the chinks shouldn’t either. Chi-Coms for future (not too distant) use.
Talk about high-tech spying!! I bet the Agency or the Bureau isn’t following these spy-mobiles and worse yet, doesn’t give a damn where they’re going on U.S. soil. It’s a Chinese take over of a country by a thousand cuts without firing a single shot.
Surely only related to driver less car operations. Nothing nefarious going on......
I seem to recall a contractor using Vietnamese surveyors
to lay out a taxi way in Da Nang, later the Shells landed
in a nice line right down the middle of it.
But that was long ago in a land far away...
I'm concerned that after a couple of generations of educating their students in our top universities and selling them all of our tech (thanks Bill Clinton) and letting their spies infiltrate our top institutions and steal everything, they have finally done something that I don't think many nations have since WW2: exceeded US technical innovation instead of merely duplicating it.
You buy me bah? Tiger 33 very good!!!
I'm curious; when did that start? Certainly nobody ever asked my permission to show my house in Google Earth's street view (taken in June of 2022).
The girls drank beer and tomato juice or beer and Coke...
Funny place Viet Nam...
Google never asked my permission to post a photo of my house. Of course, if they ever actually looked at it they would immediately remove it.
They drove by recently and caught my Betsy Ross flag and Trump flag flying proudly in a strong wind
“Google MUST get permission for every roadside home or person videoed in their stream.”
Nope.
Google allows you to blur your personal info on request.
imagine if you could get detailed information of your enemies entire country.
yea... we’re run by morons.
My understanding is if you don't want your house to show, you let google know and they will blur it out.
Oh yes there is!
There are tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands of Chinese here. they can ride around and take pictures of anything they want. I don’t like it, but what difference does it make if they are driverless or not?
Great for training for a land invasion. Who is the genius traitor in CA government who allowed this?
Gee, what could go wrong? Let me count the ways...
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