Researchers drove a NIO ES8 electric SUV deep into a Norwegian underground mine specifically to sever its external connections. The car kept attempting to reach servers, most of them located in China. These findings echo broader concerns about hidden data collection, similar to how a surveillance app was built to covertly target users without their knowledge.
That finding sits at the center of Project Lion Cage, a multi-year study initiated in 2022 by Tor Indstøy, a risk management and threat intelligence executive at Telenor Group. Indstøy purchased the NIO ES8 as a dedicated research platform.
The project arrives as Chinese EV brands expand across European markets with assurances about local data processing. Observed network behavior appears to contradict those assurances.
This article is so stupid with the dumbest fearmongering clickbait title -
Anything that calls home will try to call home. Connection or not. You put an LG tv (edit: just found out that when LG and TV are put together without a space, it gets censored?) in a faraday cage and it will try to phone home. There’s no reason it would suddenly stop doing that because there’s no point to adding another line of code to get it to stop when it doesn’t need to.
Not to mention that the important part is this:
The critical caveat: the traffic was encrypted. Researchers could document destinations and data volumes, but not the content of the packets themselves. No evidence of specific personal data exfiltration was found, and the tests do not prove that NIO is transmitting sensitive information to Chinese authorities.
Now compare that to a plethora of other car manufacturers that don’t even bother to encrypt your data and explicitly say that you will be tracked by them and have your data sold.
https://cybernews.com/privacy/mozilla-cars-track-sexual-activity-sell-data/
cars track even sexual activity, sell user data to third parties
Obviously it would keep calling…
The point was likely to see what would happen if they could be 100% sure it couldn’t connect in anyway.
Before deciding if it’s worth attempting to find every conney, you need to verify what happens if you did succeed.
Like, finding out it bricks every vehicle after 24 hrs means it’s useless to bother and they need banned.
As long as it doesn’t brick the thing I’m willing to go hunting with a hammer and chisel to cut the thing off, not like I need more GPS than my phone or anything like that
If I take my cellphone into a cave it too will keep calling home.
Oh no think of our own GDPR compliant surveillance. (it’s still surveillance)
Ni hao
It has a kill switch, too
(I have no evidence other than The Odyssey and everything that has happened since)
