Electric cars from BYD can listen to their owners, how dare they?

We are entering the era of AI and Generative AI, and the current AI model that is taking the world by storm is conversational. This means that it is increasingly designed to talk to you. Additionally, AI is still primarily hosted in the cloud, which means that not only AI-enabled devices like digital assistants like Amazon Echo, but smartphones like Google’s new phones are always listening so they can understand the context of any commands or instructions a question you would like to answer.

So it should come as no surprise that cutting-edge electric vehicles that either have or will gain artificial intelligence capabilities will also listen to you. A good example is BYD, one of the Chinese car companies challenging Tesla. Its software can eavesdrop on your conversations mainly because it, like other devices, needs it to function properly.

So is this a serious problem or just another attempt to slow down the progress of technology? It’s probably a little bit of both. Let me explain.

Dealing with being on stage all the time

We are surrounded by technology that can capture virtually everything we do, visually or auditorily. Our smartphones’ microphones are also always on, and people have been worried about what they hear for some time now. If you have a digital assistant, it is also always listening, so it can respond to commands or provide updates. In this context, this also applies to many people.

Some companies that offer these listening apps, such as Google, sell information to other people, which is a concern. On the other hand, other companies, such as Amazon, may want to use the information they collect to promote new products and services (although there is no evidence that any company misuses this information, that doesn’t mean it doesn’t).

However, it seems that automotive companies do not yet fully understand artificial intelligence and are not known for capturing user data from their drivers to build better cars. I expect that even if it were, we probably wouldn’t mind it, considering we’d like better cars. In other words, it probably doesn’t matter whether these devices are capturing information to give you more pleasure.

A few years ago, the company I worked for conducted a survey and found that most people were OK with having their data captured as long as it wasn’t used against them. And, at least for now, car companies probably don’t know what to do with captured voice information. Even if this were the case, it would mean developing vehicles and services that uniquely suit your needs, so there would be no real exposure.

China’s problem

However, in the case of the Chinese automaker, there are additional concerns that the Chinese government could extract this information from Chinese automakers and use it to manipulate foreign, and possibly domestic, opinion or identify people they want to act against. I would be concerned about this if I lived in China, which aggressively monitors its citizens and has the technical competence to effectively intercept and use the information they receive.

But just because there is a will and method to do it doesn’t mean it is. I still work in the security segment, and it’s usually easier to plant someone’s microphone (or damage their smartphone with malware) if you want to listen to a single person or a specific group. This is because we don’t live in cars, we live in smartphones, so capturing information from your car would only result in a small subset of what you might say throughout the day. While compromising your phone greatly increases your likelihood of capturing what you need both in and out of the car, it makes your smartphone, rather than your car, a much better choice for monitoring.

Finally, if they were caught, the existing tariffs and sales restrictions would seem trivial compared to the consequences, and even people in China might start avoiding Chinese cars. The economic risks are therefore extremely high and the benefits compared to what can be obtained from a phone or dedicated bug are relatively low.

Summary: Looking to the future

Early in my life I worked at Disneyland and one of the things that came out of my training at Disneyland was the concept of being on stage and off stage. When you were in costume, you were expected to behave as if you were on stage, which means you were in character and avoided anything that might reflect poorly on you or the company. Well, now we’re all on stage most of the time. Just go to YouTube to see videos of people behaving inappropriately. In Portland, a driver lost his way when his dash cam went off, and the video was used to throw him in jail for bad behavior.

I expect that the videos and sounds from your car, phone, digital assistant or other connected devices can be used against you if you behave inappropriately, which suggests that we should increasingly act as if we were on stage because we are . Instead of worrying about being monitored, think more about not doing things that could cause problems in the future.

Rob Enderle is a technology analyst at Torque News covering automotive technology and battery development. You can learn more about Rob on Wikipedia and follow his articles on Forbes, X and LinkedIn.