from the you-spent-45-minutes-at-a-brothel dept
Again in 2023 Mozilla issued a report indicating that automakers have some of the worst privacy and security standards in all of tech, routinely hoovering up oceans of client conduct and cellphone information then failing to adequately safe it. Senator Ron Wyden has been on the forefront of requires Congress to shake off corruption and, you recognize, truly do something useful about it.
The U.S. Congress is simply too corrupt to perform, in order that by no means truly occurs. As a substitute we get a rotating crop of avoidable scandals by firms that see no monetary or reputational incentive to vary.
Living proof: a new report by German magazine Der Spiegel discovered {that a} flaw in Volkswagen, Audi, Seat, and Skoda car software program uncovered the non-public information of greater than 800,000 homeowners, together with person e mail addresses, cellphone numbers, and addresses. The flaw within the firms’ software program configuration and cloud storage additionally allowed intruders to trace the situation of some car homeowners to “inside ten centimeters.”
Politicians in Germany, who have been amongst these impacted, aren’t amused:
“I’m shocked,” says [Nadja] Weippert when SPIEGEL exhibits her her location information from the previous few months. As a state and native politician, she is uncovered to hostility and threats. “It can’t be that my information is saved unencrypted within the Amazon cloud after which not even adequately protected,” she says. “I count on VW to cease this, acquire much less information general and anonymize it in any case.”
Common readers in fact know that “anonymizing” is a gibberish terminology that doesn’t truly imply your information is safe. Common readers additionally know that automakers acquire approach extra information than they really want, routinely fail to clearly inform automobile homeowners this information is being collected, promote entry to quite a few dodgy information brokers, and infrequently fail to guard information integrity or encrypt delicate client information.
Right here within the States there’s, once more, merely no significant incentive for change. Volkswagen is presently finishing losing a $3.5 million appeal associated to the leak of data from more than 3.3 million present and potential automobile homeowners. If automakers do see fines, they’re a tiny fraction of the cash being made out of information over-collection and monetization, and might routinely be litigated down even additional.
With the U.S. getting into an unprecedented period of senseless deregulation by the hands of corrupt authoritarians (with regulatory independence on the immediate chopping block), you possibly can completely count on these sorts of scandals to worsen. At the least till there’s a scandal so huge in scope (possible exposing the dangerous habits of highly effective individuals) that Congress is incentivized to shake off corruption.
Filed Below: automakers, cloud, hackers, location data, mozilla, privacy, security, surveillance
Firms: volkswagen
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