In China, your car could be talking to the government

Global carmakers are feeding real-time location information and dozens of other data points from electric vehicles to Chinese government monitoring centres, potentially adding to China’s rich kit of surveillance tools as President Xi Jinping steps up the use of technology to track Chinese citizens. Generally, it happens without car owners’ knowledge, Associated Press found.

More than 200 carmakers selling electric vehicles in China – including Tesla, Volkswagen, BMW, Daimler, Ford, General Motors, Nissan, Mitsubishi and US-listed start-up NIO – send at least 61 data points to government-backed monitoring platforms, under rules published in 2016.

Carmakers said they are merely complying with local laws, which apply only to alternative energy vehicles. Chinese officials said the data is used for analytics to improve public safety, facilitate industrial development and infrastructure planning, and to prevent fraud in subsidy programmes.

Critics, however, said the information collected exceeds those goals and could be used to undermine foreign carmakers’ competitive position, or for surveillance.

Under Xi’s leadership, China has unleashed a war on dissent, marshalling big data and artificial intelligence to create a more perfect kind of policing that can quickly neutralise perceived threats to the stability of the ruling Communist Party.