Wiretaps on Wheels: How Cars (and Rideshare Bikes) Track Everywhere We Go

Recent-model cars are surveillance on wheels. Cars collect sensitive passenger data and share it with a range of companies including their manufacturers, insurers, and even Google and Apple. Passengers’ favorite destinations, social contacts, texts—even their weight and voice recordings—all make their way to company servers, where the data is less than a warrant or data breach away from police and hackers. But transportation surveillance is difficult to avoid. Even public transportation, rideshare bikes, and scooters surveil their users. New York City’s bikeshare program, for example, publishes each ride’s start and endpoint and individual riders’ birth years and gender for anyone to see. Panelists will discuss the passenger data that connected vehicles collect and its dangers to overpoliced groups (e.g., protestors; BIPOC people). They’ll explain the legal double standard that protects the privacy of cellphones but allows police to search the same data on vehicles. They’ll show how “geofence warrants” can be used to expose every person who drove their car along a particular route, revealing people traveling to reproductive or gender-affirming healthcare clinics and other sensitive locations. Panelists will invite attendees to become “allies in practice” by sharing questions and insights about their experiences with travel surveillance, with the goal of enriching S.T.O.P.’s ongoing advocacy to stop travel surveillance.

Register at the link below:

https://www.mozillafestival.org/en/tickets/