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Cory Doctorow (@pluralistic@mamot.fr)

Feb 28 • 21 tweets • 7 min read

The masked car-thieves who stole a #Volkswagen SUV in #LakeCounty, IL didn't know that there was a two-year-old child in the back seat - but that's no excuse. A violent car-theft has the potential to hurt or kill people, after all. 1/

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

pluralistic.net/2023/02/28/kin… 2/

Same with the VW execs who decided to nonconsensually track the location of every driver and sell that data to shady brokers - but to deny car owners access to that data unless they paid for a "find my car" subscription. 3/

They didn't foresee that their cheap, bumbling subcontractors would refuse the local sheriff's pleas to locate the car with the kidnapped toddler. 4/

And yet, here we are. Like most (all?) major car makers, Volkswagen has filled its vehicles with surveillance gear, and has a hot side-hustle as a funnel for the data-brokerage industry. 5/

After the masked man jumped out of a stolen BMW and leapt into the VW SUV to steal it, the child's mother - who'd been occupied bringing her other child inside - tried to save her two year old, still in the back seat. The thief "battered" her and drove off. She called 911. 6/

The local sheriff called Volkswagen and begged them to track the car. VW refused, citing the fact that the mother had not paid for the $150 find-my-car subscription after the free trial period expired. 7/

Eventually, VW relented and called back with the location data - but not until after the stolen car had been found and the child had been retrieved.

Now that this idiotic story is in the news, VW is appropriately contrite. 8/

An anonymous company spokesman blamed the incident on "a serious breach" of company policy and threw their subcontractor under the (micro)bus, blaming it on them. 9/

This is truly the world of all worlds: Volkswagen is a company that has internal capacity to build innovative IT systems. 10/

Once upon a time, they had the in-house tech talent to build the #CheatDevice behind #Dieselgate, the means by which they turned millions of diesel vehicles into rolling gas-chambers, emitting lethal quantities of NOX.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volkswage… 11/

But on the other hand, VW *doesn't* have the internal capacity to operate #CarNet, it's unimaginatively-named, $150/year location surveillance system. *That* gets subbed out to a contractor who can't be relied on to locate a literal kidnapped child. 12/

The IT adventures that car companies get up to give farce a bad name. #Ferraris have "anti-tampering" kill-switches that immobilize cars if they suspect a third-party mechanic is working on them. 13/

When one of these tripped during a seat installation in an underground garage, the $500k car locked its transmission and refused to unlock it - with the car too deep for its cellular modem to receive the unlock code, permanently stranding it:

pluralistic.net/2020/10/15/exp… 14/

#BMW, meanwhile, is eagerly building out "innovations" like subscription steering-wheel heaters:

pluralistic.net/2020/07/02/big… 15/

#BigCar has loaded our rides up with so much surveillance gear that they were able to run scare ads opposing #Massachusetts's #RightToRepair ballot initiative. 16/

The manufacturers warned Bay Staters that if third parties could access the data in their cars, it would lead to their literal *murders*:

pluralistic.net/2020/09/03/rip… 17/

In short: the automotive sector has filled our cars with surveillance gear, but that data is only reliably available to commercial data-brokers and hackers who breach Big Cars' massive data repositories. 18/

Big Car has the IT capacity to fill our cars with cheat devices - but not the capacity to operate an efficient surveillance system to use in real emergencies. 19/

Big Car says that giving you control over your car will result in your murder - but when a child's life is on the line, they can't give *you* access to your own car's location. 20/