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China spying using common car battery monitor?

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VK3DRB:
Someone in Australia discovered by accident his commonly available simple car battery monitor is being used track the user's location and other data to the People's Republic of China by stealth.

The guy's investigation is nothing short of brilliant. It is well written, and it is extremely interesting how he methodically tracked down what and where the data was being sent. His link also shows the device in question: https://doubleagent.net/2023/05/21/a-car-battery-monitor-tracking-your-location. Don't know about you, but I learnt heaps from reading the post from a technical perspective. And it raises big concerns.

Is this a massive breach of trust, privacy and security? Maybe every piece of data is assembled like a jigsaw puzzle as a dossier on individuals? What other devices are being sold that are secretly sending your personal information to foreign entities without you knowing?

SiliconWizard:
As a general rule, do not use anything that requires a mobile phone app. Unless you absolutely have no choice.
The ease with which you can access all the phone resources via Android APIs is, uh... funny. And user permissions? Sure but but if you do not authorize some app to access your location and this app REQUIRES it, you just can't run it. Period. And in some cases, it's not hard for an app to even circumvent the permissions.

And the fact here it's going right to China is concerning, but if you think only chinese vendors do this...

The "dossier" you're talking about, Google and others already have it.

NiHaoMike:
Time to send them a bunch of fake data to make the data collection much less useful?

Berni:
Yep this is a common trend with China

They have laws where companies have to hand over any user data to the government without even needing to give a reason. If they refuse to hand over the data then some heads are going to roll (literally even).

Baking in unnecessary tracking into products that don't even need it likely lets them score some bonus points (literally even) with there local government.



--- Quote from: NiHaoMike on June 01, 2023, 04:11:16 am ---Time to send them a bunch of fake data to make the data collection much less useful?

--- End quote ---

They could probably still clean up the data using IP filtering (Unless you have access to a sizable botnet for the data flood)

mendip_discovery:
I find this somewhat ironic that people like to point out all the stuff China is up to and say how awful it is. Meanwhile a good majority of the rest of the world does some very similar stuff. Yes some of them have some legal framework in place but your data is often open to those willing to pay for it, then there is the police etc that when using the right keywords can get to a lot of that data.

I have always avoided using apps that come with random stuff as you never know what it is sending back to base. I get concerned with some of the programs on my PC that insist on having access to the internet when it has to real reason for it. 20 years ago blocking stuff from the internet was easy but now it's a nightmare.

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