Unless it has escaped your attention, USA is not an ally of EU a

it has not escaped my attention, both are equally bad.

Traditionally EU has allowed USA a lot of leeway to spy on us through their technologies, under the assumption that USA was an ally,

and now they’ll keep allowing it for the chinese out of fear that it would significantly worsen chinese relations.

We do not have evidence of similar Chinese spying.

how, don’t those have a cellular connection too?

in this article the byd boss doubles down on this by saying they use google cloud services to store and process the information… now, do you think that somehow that protect us from the usa?

then its another thing what type of data they collect. facebook does most of its business in a GDPR compliant way, and that means nothing as users just sign away their consent for all kinds of data to be collected, otherwise they can’t use the service.

Unfortunately, the mozilla privacy not included team did not review byd, but maybe you are not surprised that I doubt they are better than any of the European brands.

as an American,

I’m not an american. I live in the EU, and I think this is the least bad place when looking at digital rights.

that however does not make me trust volkswagen, renault, or whoever other EU car companies either for nearly the same reasons as chinese car companies.
we could say I’m allergic to any car that can be remote controlled and interrogated over a network.

for instance, this is how renaults fare: https://www.mozillafoundation.org/en/privacynotincluded/renault/

They do, like the rest of the car brands, collect a lot of personal information about you like your name, address, and your vehicle’s VIN number. They also collect data about your driving and what you do in your car: When you accelerate, pump the brakes, or use multimedia. They also record all your interactions and conversations with them. Again, for car companies, this level of data collection seems pretty standard.

So for example, Renault collects “Data related to your personal and/or professional situation (family situation, socio-professional category, etc.)”

how do they even get access about any of these two?? if we are fortunate, only by a question on the registration form or shortly after registration.

More on those commitments, Renault sometimes shares your personal information in ways that don’t seem totally necessary, or in their words, for “explicit, legitimate and determined purposes.” For example, they say then can share it with “[a]ny associated or connected motor manufacturer from whom we purchase or hire goods (and their group companies)” and “partners.” It’s also not clear to us whether they will only share your personal data with law enforcement when they are legally obligated to, according to the language they use in their UK Privacy Notice.

It’s not looking amazing for one of the “good ones,” we know. Yet we still have one last beef (or should we say beouf?) with Renault. They’re part of a strategic alliance with privacy-monster Nissan, one of the worst car companies we reviewed a privacy. What does that mean exactly for the fate of your personal data? Well, probably not much thanks to the strong legal protections in place. Still, given these companies’ cozy relationship, we’ll take it as a cautionary tale for what Renault might do if they could.

and then remember what they said about data sharing with partners: “[a]ny associated or connected motor manufacturer from whom we purchase or hire goods (and their group companies)” and “partners.”

their conclusion? that it’s standard levels. and that even in the EU, they are among the better ones! but that does not make it acceptable.

and you could say that “but you can just remove the entertainment system’s fuse!”, and that would be right. kind of.
until the car gets to the service, where even the diagnostic tool that uses always online DRM will be able to transfer whatever information it just wants, or if I sell the car, the next owner replaces the fuse and all the recorded information gets uploaded.

with byd, it also does not happen to help in ignoring chinese spying that my government leans to china (besides russia), they are installating face recognition capable chinese camera systems against EU law, and installing huawei network equipment for important infrastructure left and right.