Chinese electric car owners are willing to trade privacy for demons

Want to enjoy the real-time street view of China thousands of kilometers away anytime, anywhere, in a few steps?

The answer given by a Chinese brand smart electric car priced as high as 800,000 is: three steps. The first step is to open the car door and sit in the car; the second step, move your finger and tap the screen; the third step, tactically lean back and enjoy it. When you get tired of a city, you can switch to other places on the list with one click. Watch it whenever you want, and watch it for as long as you want.

Recently, the car blogger “Li Mouse Said Car” shared a “magic but terrible function” that happened on his HiPhi X, which he used for himself: first enter the dash cam interface that comes with the vehicle, and then click “Car launch” WIFI” function icon, and after clicking it, a list of car owners of the same model nationwide will appear.

Finally, click the name of any car owner, and after a short loading buffer, the pictures of other car owners’ dash cams are projected onto Li Mouse’s car.

There are two notable details: First, the avatars, nicknames and distances of other car owners on the list are clear at a glance, without any desensitization. Second, when the vehicle is parked on the side of the road or in the garage, and the power is off, the camera still works, providing real-time networked images.

Judging from the video, during the whole process of turning on this function, there is neither a user agreement that requires the car owner to read carefully for calling the camera, nor a confirmation button that requires the user’s consent to request screen permissions on the central control screen of HiPhi X. Simply put, this feature can be “one-click on”.

The incident quickly sparked heated discussions. There are three main points of view: the supporters believe that this is the advantage of smart electric vehicles, and the most simple hardware and the most convenient way have shortened the distance between car owners; Pai believes that this feature uncontroversially leaks the owner’s privacy, allowing people with ulterior motives to take advantage of it;

Wall parties are not interested in privacy. They want to know who is willing to spend 800,000 yuan on a domestic electric car.

You are being watched

After Li Mouse’s video was released, Gaohe Automobile quickly issued an unofficial official statement on the incident, summarizing three meanings: First, this feature has its own name, called “Car-Vehicle Interconnection”, It is a part of the vehicle-road coordination system. It is disabled by default at the factory. It cannot be enabled after power off. It does not support remote opening, and the video is not stored.

Second, users must go through a second confirmation before enabling this function; third, Gaohe attaches great importance to user privacy, and all behaviors are legal and compliant, and the “Car-Vehicle Interconnection” function is currently being updated according to the latest national legal requirements.

There are some discrepancies between the statement in the official statement and the actual experience of the car owner. First of all, the premise of the team travel is to form a team first, share the video picture within the team, and each car needs to agree. But Li Mouse did not form a team at all. Since he is not in a team, how can he easily see the pictures of other car owners?

Secondly, the fleet travel is a temporary behavior. When exiting the fleet, the sharing permission should be withdrawn immediately, rather than staying on other vehicles. Finally, since the “Vehicle-Vehicle Interconnection” function does not comply with the latest national legal requirements, why is it delivered to car owners in batches.

This statement also vaguely expresses a meaning: the “Vehicle-Vehicle Interconnection” function is only enabled after the car owner clicks and agrees, and the disclaimer agreement is too long and complicated to read or not. The company level attaches great importance to privacy protection, but the disclosure of privacy is your own consent.

In this regard, a source close to Gaohe told Huxiu that there is indeed a problem with “car-car interconnection”. The permission is only required to be confirmed by the car owner in the first pop-up window, and the subsequent second to Nth times are all turned on by default. If it is not automatically turned off, the function will continue to be turned on.

“The insurance method is to use it once, double confirm it once, and close it after use. Users all know this function, but they don’t really care about this event.” The source said.

Some car owners expressed their views on the matter in the Gaohe APP

Another interesting point is that, according to the owner of the Gaohe car quoted by Bo advocates the resistance, he used the “Car-Car Interconnection” function to inspect the sales girls of Gaohe all over the country, and his appearance is very high. People sit in the car, and beauty comes from the camera.

In recent years, cases where personal privacy is forced to be exposed due to driving smart electric vehicles are not uncommon. In April 2021, Tesla CEO Elon Musk withdrew access to the FSD beta for some owners. The reason is that these car owners did not pay enough attention to the road conditions when using the FSD beta feature.

In response to how Tesla knew these things, Musk said it was monitoring the driver of the vehicle through the camera inside the car.

Afterwards, the Tesla hacker “Green God” shared the footage he extracted from the Tesla’s in-car camera. The video footage recorded by the in-car camera during the day is very clear, including the people in the car, the riding situation, the driving status, and the demeanor. The expressions are clear.

In Tesla’s “Car Owner’s Manual”, the user is informed of the location of the camera, but it does not explain the specific function, only that it is in a “not yet activated” state. In the “Privacy Policy”, Tesla stated that the purpose of data collection is to better improve the self-driving function.

In March 2021, WM Motor released the “Chinese New Energy Vehicle Owner’s Guide”, which shows the image of WM Motor owners across the country by analyzing big data such as car owners’ driving behavior, smart experience preferences and user image characteristics.

The granularity of the data is astounding. Here are a few excerpts: 57% of car owners in Shanghai turn on the fragrance system every day, and the average usage time is nearly 1 hour; 97.35% of car owners in Beijing install an electric heating system; 67.2% of car owners in Heilongjiang Optional red exterior; 58.1% of the owners in Hebei Province drive alone; 56.8% of the owners in Sichuan Province have a co-driver.

In addition to Tesla and Weimar, other new car-making forces are also trying to obtain the privacy information of car owners to varying degrees. For example, Xiaopeng G3 and P7 are equipped with in-car cameras to monitor the status of car owners. The official explanation is that this The hardware is reserved for the automatic driving assistance function; Weilai is equipped with a wide-angle camera and a driver status detection camera in the car. Weilai said in its “Privacy Policy” that the in-car camera is to collect facial information such as whether the driver closes his eyes, etc. Fatigue driving; monitoring couriers opening the trunk or vehicle theft, etc.; triggering related functions after the airbag pops up, and actively collecting in-vehicle image data when the user does not respond.

In front of the increasingly prominent privacy issues, the attitude of smart electric vehicle manufacturers is always ambiguous: let’s say strict protection, the in-car cameras are installed more than one, and the clarity is better than one; let’s just let it go, The length of the “Privacy Policy” is longer than the last, and the writing is not leaking.

Simply put, don’t ask, it’s definitely for your own good. However, it is not as neat as a traditional car factory: In April this year, BYD disabled the “clairvoyance” function that can remotely view the images of the outside cameras, and Dongfeng Nissan announced to close the Nissan Zhilian App’s remote camera function, and the photo sharing and uploading in the DVR on the vehicle side. Features.

When automobiles switch from the era of transportation tools to the era of intelligent travel, user data is becoming more and more important to automobile companies. These real and effective data are the core driving force for driving the iterative service experience of automobile hardware and software. The more authentic and effective the data is, the more private content is involved, and the less effective the protection, the more profound the harm to users.

These privacy not only include the owners and occupants in the car, but also passers-by outside the car, such as those sales girls from all over the country who are patrolled online by Gaohe car owners with cameras. They may not even realize that they are being separated by a thousand miles. A male stares and records.

As a “Pandora’s Box” loaded with a large amount of car owner’s private data, the power is amazing once it is easily opened. Driving routes, entertainment preferences, dietary preferences, detailed addresses, family members, business partners, and other seemingly unrelated points, under the intelligent means, are finally brought together to form a three-dimensional, detailed and comprehensive user portrait.

Huang Peng, deputy chief engineer of the National Industrial Information Security Development Research Center and director of the Information Policy Institute, once revealed that an intelligent connected car collects at least 10TB of data every day. These data include not only the facial expressions, movements, eyes, and voice data of the drivers and passengers, but also the geographic location of the vehicle, the environment data inside and outside the vehicle, and the usage data of the Internet of Vehicles. These data are the basis for the car to realize the personalized experience of “thousands of cars and thousands of faces”.

According to the “2022 Joint Survey on Chinese Consumers’ Smart Connected Vehicle Data Security and Personal Privacy Awareness and Concerns” issued by JD Power (Jundi), a market research and consulting agency, up to 77.4% of smart car users are very concerned or somewhat concerned about personal sensitivity Information is collected, used and shared by intelligent and connected vehicles, and is particularly sensitive to geographic location and route information, as well as information captured by in-vehicle cameras, and is most worried about personal information being collected and resold to third parties. Nearly half of the car owners surveyed said they had never been prompted by car brands or dealers to collect personal information.

In the single indicator of information sharing, 30% of the respondents are completely unwilling to share sensitive personal information, 18.5% of the respondents are only willing to share a small amount of personal information, and 34.8% of the respondents need to consider whether they are willing to share after understanding the purpose of use. Only 1% of respondents said it didn’t matter.

In order to enhance the protection of users’ personal privacy when using cars, the “Several Regulations on Automotive Data Security Management (Trial)”, which will be implemented in October 2021, regulates the rational development and utilization of automotive data, and clearly stipulates that the data adopts the principle of not collecting data by default. Unless the driver sets it independently; the data should be desensitized, anonymized and de-identified as much as possible.

It is stipulated that in the actual use process, there are many edge cases that cannot be solved temporarily. If the user is very concerned about privacy and refuses all permission request options, the result of privacy protection is that even the car may not be able to drive. If you agree to all options in order to use all the functions, you will end up standing naked in front of the car company without any cover.

In terms of the granularity and personalization of privacy transfer, Chinese new car manufacturers are not doing enough. In this regard, Apple is a good teacher with a conscience.

In May 2021, Apple announced at the iOS 14.5 system launch that it will implement a new user privacy collection and use permission policy. Apple has handed over the choice of whether to allow APP data tracking to users: if APP tracking is allowed, these APP developers can obtain your advertising identifiers, and combine their daily usage habits to place advertisements accordingly; if not, APPs Developers will not be able to collect data, at least on the surface. Apple is also introducing a privacy label, where apps must describe what information they are collecting and why.

On Apple’s scale, one end is the huge business with APP developers, and the other is the user’s massive privacy. Apple has chosen to overweight the user side rather than the business side, and Apple CEO Tim Cook once likened companies that sell privacy to “quick-money hawkers.” Such a description could not be more appropriate for some of the new Chinese car-making forces that particularly use privacy.

sneaky, no need

On the second day after the hidden danger of the “Car-Vehicle Interconnection” function was exposed, Li Mouse was surprised to find that “this function disappeared overnight”. He was unaware and did not receive text messages or app notifications.

For this situation, Gao He did not give an official answer. There are many technical means for a car factory to make a function disappear, such as hiding buttons on the front end, closing the background API interface, and closing the cloud server. But ordinary consumers do not understand these technical methods, and there is no need to understand them. They only know that this function was there yesterday, but it disappeared today, and it disappeared silently.

Some new forces always build cars like this, no matter whether the owner knows it or not, whether it has the permission of the owner or not, a function can be turned on and off when it wants to. Since they are all user companies, why can’t they inform customers in a fair and open manner.

Gaohe’s off-line “car-to-car interconnection” does not affect driving in essence. After all, there is still a wrong demonstration made by Weimar and Aian secretly OTA lock electricity, and directly reach out to the cruising range that users care about most. In China, there are only OTAs you can’t think of, no OTAs that product managers can’t propose, and no OTAs that CEOs dare not approve.

In 2021, China Central Broadcasting Network reported that GAC AION will lock a large number of AION S without consumers’ knowledge. In March this year, Xinhua News Agency reported that after going to the 4S store for maintenance, the electric car of Weimar could only run for 120 kilometers with a range of 200 kilometers.

Before the Xinhua News Agency report, 173 car owners jointly sent a lawyer’s letter to WM Motor, asking to admit the fact of “locking the electricity” and apologize, and to clarify compensation, compensation and service solutions.

A senior product manager who has worked for many new car-making forces told Huxiu that the practice of secretly OTA gives users the illusion that “you think the car is yours, but it’s not”.

In order to curb the chaos of OTA, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology issued the “Notice on Carrying out Online Automotive Software Upgrade Filing” in April this year. Information such as duration, upgrade impact, precautions, etc. will be notified to vehicle users after the upgrade is performed.

The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology’s OTA upgrade filing is a norm and constraint on the behavior of car manufacturers, as well as a guarantee for consumers’ rights and interests. The question is: how to monitor and enforce it.

To bypass the filing, there are many ways for car manufacturers, such as packaging OTA as a technical adjustment, or directly starting with a cloud server. The number of companies and models involved in supervision is large and difficult, and in most cases, supervision will lag behind the decline of user experience.

write at the end

Privacy and knowledge are the two “two sides of the coin” that smart electric vehicle users have to face. Unexplained reasons and weird product logic can become a valve for revealing personal privacy. Being close to the user was supposed to be a buff for smart electric vehicles, but now it’s a bug. The previous fuel vehicle was a tool, and it was enough to be safe, reliable and stable.

But smart electric cars are different, they have to be smart to attract consumers. Dazzling functions, inscrutable technology, and roundabout nouns, in the end, no actual experience can beat Apple CarPlay and Huawei Hongmeng OS.

At the end of the day, I would like to advise the product managers of China’s auto industry: do more enterprise-level understanding on the core user experience, and don’t keep doing some useless work on the non-core experience.

Hashtags: electric vehicleselectric vehiclespersonal privacy