There is a strange sort of symmetry in the world of personal data this week: one new report has identified a company that wants to sell the US government granular car location data from basically every vehicle in the world, while a group of privacy advocates is suing another company for providing customer data to the feds. A surveillance contractor called Ulysses can "remotely geolocate vehicles in nearly every country except for North Korea and Cuba on a near real-time basis,"
Vice Motherboard reports.
Ulysses obtains vehicle telematics data from
embedded sensors and communications sensors that can transmit information such as seatbelt status, engine temperature, and current vehicle location back to automakers or other parties. "Among the thousands of other data points, vehicle location data is transmitted on a constant and near real-time basis while the vehicle is operating," the company wrote in a sales pitch document obtained by Vice. As roughly 100 million new cars are manufactured worldwide each year that are "increasingly connected to the manufacturer, other vehicles, infrastructure, and their owners, it becomes apparent that telematics will revolutionize intelligence," the document adds. Ulysses claims it can currently access more than 15 billion vehicle locations around the world every month, and it estimates that by 2025, 100 percent of new cars will be connected and transmitting gigabytes of collectible data per hour.
arstechnica.com
