[00:00:00] Katherine Druckman: Hey everyone. Welcome back to Reality 2.0, I am Katherine Druckman. Doc Searls, and I are talking to Kyle Rankin. Kyle is, among other things, president of Purism, a company that makes privacy respecting open source hardware, but he also does a lot of things and he is, like we are, interested in privacy. Uh, before we get started.

I would like to remind everyone to go to our website, reality2cast.com. That is the number two, where you will find all of the links to everything we talked about today and a lot more. And also thank you to our Patreon and Ko-fi patrons, and all the people who listen and email us. And we appreciate it.

So. With that. So what are we talking about today? We're talking about cars who doesn't like to talk about cars. Well, okay. A lot of people probably, but in particular, we're talking about cars and privacy and that is a seam that has, uh, is a lot of, uh, material for mining. So what do we think? What do we think?

What started this? Maybe we should start with that. What started this conversation was an article in The Markup that is about all these various entities that are collecting data from your car.

And Kyle tweeted it. Thank you, Kyle, for always giving us show content and inspiration. 

[00:01:15] Kyle Rankin: Well, I mean, I, so this isn't any, any sort of a new issue necessarily either. What what's really great about The Markup article is that they. they as always do really good research and then they they've gone into the ecosystem behind all of this, because it's one thing to say, Car companies have, because now cars are basically sort of rolling smartphones in many ways that they have, you know, all of these computer components within them, that collect data.

It's one thing just to understand that and then maybe think, oh, well, yeah, if I have OnStar, then in theory, someone, if someone can remotely start my car, Then someone can remotely start my car, you know? I mean, that's right. 

[00:01:54] Katherine Druckman: What does that really mean? There's a lot more going on that we have no idea about 

[00:01:58] Kyle Rankin: probably.

Yeah. And so this article talks about some of the data brokers and the fact that, you know, even if you don't necessarily have a fully internet connected car, that because your car is still car, computer's still constantly collecting all of this data about, you know, is someone sitting in the passenger seat, does all of this other stuff happen?

Where are you? Um, how far have you driven all of these sorts of things that it, it collects all those things. And even when you go to get your car serviced, even so even if you didn't have a connected car that was always online. Uh, you could still have this data be shared because when you go to the vendor to get it serviced, they're plugging into the car computer and, and slurping all of this data down.

Uh, and you know, but in many cases, it's not even that there's, there's just remote connections nowadays with a lot of computers to vendors, 

[00:02:43] Doc Searls: uh, every car comes with a cell phone. It has its own number. You never know that number. You don't know what it is. You don't even know what carrier it's with. And 

[00:02:51] Katherine Druckman: that's been the case for a while, but I feel like.

It's different and it has been different in the last couple of years as, as they've gotten way more advanced. So for example, I always had a lot of smart features. I had communication like an OnStar type thing in, in, in the cars I've had probably for the last 10 years, at least, and even, you know, fancy entertainment interfaces that did a lot of somewhat internet connected things.

But my most recent car, which is fairly new. I like a lot of things about it. It's very comfortable. I feel like it's safe. One of the things I like less was that when I turned it on for the first time I got basically a GDPR popup. I'm like, seriously it was weird. Yeah. Yeah. And then I started because it, it has more and more and more, um, and.

Yeah, it's just, uh, I hadn't, I, I immediately gave it a lot of thought more than I would have otherwise because of, you know, just because of that message, I thought, well, why is this necessary? But, um, but it's, it's, it's hidden. It's like, like other privacy issues with regard to, for example, the, the lists of people that data brokers are selling and the se secret consumer scores that we've mentioned before, you know, there was a great article by Kashmir Hill I will link to, um, like those type of things. It's a little bit hidden. It's really hard to find. And that's why things like the, The Markup or this Markup article are so valuable because they really dig into things that are, that are intentionally obfuscated. 

[00:04:20] Kyle Rankin: Yeah. Yeah. What I like about talking about this in terms of how it impacts cars?

Similar to the reason the TVs are a great sort of sort of platform for this in that we, we lived in a world before this, with that same thing. So we lived in a world with TVs before they were smart. And we lived in a world with, with, uh, cars before they were smart. So we have to compare contrast like a lot of the things that smartphones got away.

Um, and are still getting away with, or because they were this new thing. And so the, with the smartphones, everyone, everyone, all the major vendors realized we could rewrite the rules of what a computer can do and what we were allowed to do with a computer. um, whether or not it's in the consumer's interest.

And now later, everyone else is looking at that model and realizing if you follow that model, there's a lot of money to be made. So if it's a smart television, I mean, analyzing literally the video feed and, and figuring out what you're watching via that even if you don't sign up for any sort of subscription service, uh, and now with cars, Everyone realizes if they don't do that, they're leaving money on the table and you could even argue there's a fiduciary responsibility, uh, for them, if they're, uh, you know, a publicly traded C corporation to.

Uh, collect this data within the, within the limits of a law, uh, and then sell it because there's this revenue stream that they, you know, that they would be missing out on. God forbid. 

[00:05:48] Doc Searls: Well, there are so many angles we could take on this thing, but one that's important. And if you look at the markup article, um, a bunch of insurance companies, farmers in Geico and, and a bunch of them are getting some of this information.

And some of that is. Useful, it's useful to car maker. It's useful to the insurance companies. It's useful to, um, uh, and it's not necessarily person. It doesn't have to be personal. It could be anonymized. It could be lots of things could be done with it. Um, uh, and the car makers themselves, you know, they, they can design better cars because they know more about what every one of their cars does.

You know, whether, whether somebody's not comfortable in a, like, if my wife's Toyota, which is a 20, 20, Camry top of the line hybrid. Um, I find the driver's seat pretty uncomfortable and I find the passenger seat very comfortable. Does it know that? Is there a system that knows that's a system that says, Hey, that guy, when he is in there goes to the other seat, cuz he rather his wife drive because his she's more comfortable there.

I have no idea. And that's part of the problem. It's a big part of the problem. This should be. Our data and not just their is issue, it's our car and an important thing about, and this is a really key point that you made Kyle. We had the experience of the car as an extension of ourselves, you know, as a, as an instrument of our agency on autonomy and capacity to, to operate in this social world called traffic.

And, and we. And we know what that's like and there's, and we romanticized it. I mean, I I'm, I grew up in the fifties and sixties when car culture, especially in California where I wasn't, but I really wanted to be was later. It got huge. Um, Just it, it was, it was a big part of who we were was what we drove.

It was a really great book called you are what you drive that, that came out a few years ago. It was actually a series of cartoons, but it showed what the difference between like a Porsche driver and a, a Buick station wagon driver were. But we, we wore these things. That's this therapist on our bodies that, that had fenders and wheels.

And we thought of that as this is my steering wheel. These are. These are my tires. This is my engine. And, um, you know, Springsteen's, you know, sang in one of his songs, strap your hands across my engine, baby. You know, the metaphor of that is very, very powerful and it's being well. The. This is kinda weird thing where we are given better and better, better cars that are less and less ours.

And, and now they are basically, we are suction cups on the tentacles of giant corporations and lesser ones too. For, for that matter, that are getting this information. We know nothing about it, whatever it is that Katherine had a consent to. And that. My wife had to consent to when she bought her Toyota.

And I really wanted to take screenshots of that. Oh, I think I have one that stuff. And that would be smart if you did. But when I asked at the, at the car dealer, when I looked in the literature and of course the guide book is like, you know, an inch, an inch thick, there was. Very little information about what gets done with the data that's collected in the car.

Um, I mean, it was weird enough just to discover this is going out all the time, over a cellular connection. Wow. And we knew it was Verizon because by I had a T-Mobile phone and my wife had a Verizon phone and. When you have the car for the first two or three months, they give you free. They turn the car into a free hotspot.

And so mm-hmm, the hotspot shows how many bars of coverage they've got and it, and it mapped identical to her Verizon and not to my T-Mobile. And I'm sure it was a Verizon, it was a Verizon phone in the car, you know, and I wanted to ask what's the number. Can I call it? What, what is that? You know? And obviously Toyota had which.

Tied with Volkswagen for the biggest company in the world, you know, biggest car company, at least it's a quarter billion, a quarter trillion dollar company. They could do what they want to a large degree, but my feeling is that the driving, what driving is, would be much better if we had, we knew it was going on.

And I, and that's just the, not just the car companies. This is the phone companies. I want the phone companies to tell me where my phone was. Let me have it, you know, tell. This is interesting information to me. I wanna know where I've been anyway. 

[00:10:03] Kyle Rankin: Yeah. Well, and, and there's no among other problems with it, is that unlike, even on a cell phone where you can argue what level of autonomy and control you have over that.

And we have on the show. Yeah. Okay. Then you're 

[00:10:17] Doc Searls: in the, you're in the business, the autonomy thing, 

[00:10:21] Kyle Rankin: right. To plug in. So all of that's having been. On a modern car, you have less of an ability to either opt out or have to. I mean, obviously it'd be better if you could, if you had to opt into this collection, but you start, but you can't even opt out of it.

It's just sort of baked in and in hidden. So it's not like you can go in somewhere, flip a switch. There's no airplane mode. Like even on a phone, you could. Wow. That's a good point. Yeah. I could, at least with my phone, I could either turn off my phone or I could turn on airplane mode and, and hope that that does what it says it's going to do.

Even without like a, you know, I'm gonna do my purism hardware kill, switch thing here. But, but even without that, you at least have a sense that you could, you could turn on airplane mode or turn off the phone, but you can't your car, especially in electric car is the same sort of problem with a smartphone where you have a gigantic battery and it's always on.

You know, so as long as there's battery power and I guess arguably an internal combustion engine car would be using the same would be using the car battery to power. Some of this, I don't know how much those cars automatically like phone home when you're not driving and when it's not on, because you might drain the battery.

I don't know. Yeah. Yeah, sure. They don't, but electric cars certainly have no reason not to. I mean, they have an, a battery that's so powerful. You can use it to, to run your house off of, in the power. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, Yeah. Yeah. That's 

[00:11:40] Katherine Druckman: um, yeah. So another, well, so this kind of ties into another kind of car related conversation, which is, I don't, I don't know if anyone's been shopping for a car recently.

it's terrible. There, there aren't enough. It's I mean, there's a massive, massive, but a 

[00:11:54] Doc Searls: 16% increase on a used car price till last year. Yeah. 

[00:11:58] Kyle Rankin: That today it's crazy. I, 

[00:12:01] Katherine Druckman: I saw, I saw something where. Car rental companies are paying like way, way over, you know what? We would expect a blue book value just to get car inventory, like old cars, 2018 something, they just need cars.

Um, and that's, you know, that's one of the factors that's driving the prices up and, and dealers even are. I mean, it's a, it's a small group of bad actors, but some dealers are marking cars up insane amounts and manufacturers are trying to crack down on this. And I will, again, I will include a link about this, but so GM has announced that they're going to restrict warranty coverage for people who are suspected of flipping.

Uh, people will buy, buy a car and then, you know, resell it at a profit within a year of buying it. And they don't want people doing that. So they're saying, okay, well you can't, if you resell your car within a year, you can't transfer the warranty to a new owner. Okay. So, but then the speculation goes that, wait a second.

With connected cars. What if they decide, well, you know, the warranty thing isn't working, we'll just shut down your, your software remotely and your car doesn't function properly or, or at all. And, and you kind of go, well, I mean, I would maybe there are laws and regulations to prevent that, but I don't know, because there was the example of a Tesla customer who, who lost range because the battery that they had was, um, Rated higher than what they had paid for.

They'd gotten it secondhand or even thirdhand. Um, and. At some point in the car's history, Tesla had replaced the battery with a larger capacity battery. And I, I can't remember the details exactly, but Tesla said, oops, sorry, you're not supposed to have that much. We've disabled it for you. Wink. We fixed your problem.

So this guy suddenly can, you know, maybe drive 90 fewer miles than, than before. But if you want that additional feature, it's $4,500. Mm-hmm . So if they can do that, what prevents. Other companies from doing the same thing. 

[00:14:08] Kyle Rankin: Well, and, and I think that's the great example because I don't think as far as will a car company remotely power off someone's car, I mean, I could, I could think of scenarios where that could be, but a more likely scenario and one that's happening now is that in along the same lines, that the, the notion of ownership is now murky with smartphones.

Mm-hmm , uh, the notion of ownership is getting murky with cars because. Because they have the ability now to make features, um, to enable and disable features and software where before, you know, 20 years ago you went to a car lot and whatever you bought in terms of upgrades to the car at the time, uh, was what you had.

And so they would say, yeah, you need to pay. If you want the undercoating or whatever you have the extra stereo system, we would do the math. That it's hard for people to do math in their head going out over months, but it's only $20 a month to do X, Y, Z. Where if you told someone the actual sticker price of adding, upgrading that stereo, they would say, forget it.

I can go somewhere else and get a better stereo. But anyway, Now, what they're doing is there's so many features. It's sort of like the enterprise server market actually, uh, where you would buy this really expensive product that has extra Ram. It has extra ports. It has whatever it, whatever functionality it has, it actually already has, but it's not on.

And you have to go talk to the vendor and get a license key to unlock this feature that physically exists there in, in the software actually is installed and is ready to go, but you have to pay to unlock it. And now a lot of car vendors, because they have this remote control over the car are doing the same thing with, with features in the car.

Um, BMW has headlight assist where, um, when you're driving with your high beams on, it can detect when there's cars coming. Oh yeah. The other way. And dim them and all that nice stuff. Well, when you go, it's a button, you know, and traditionally you would buy a car and then either have that, buy that or not.

Now it's a button that when you press it, You get a popup on your car, uh, computer saying, Hey, this is a subscription only feature. Would you like to subscribe to the, oh, that's horrible. 

[00:16:15] Katherine Druckman: And then you punch your 

[00:16:15] Kyle Rankin: dashboard. yeah. Tesla's, Tesla's even worse about it because they, I mean, they're sort of at the forefront of this and, and solve the potential here.

But the thing that you're describing is them, backporting this new decision they made onto an old customer and people that are now buying used secondhand Teslas are finding this a lot. There's a lot of anxiety over whether super charging will be enabled. This is a, one of the many things that they super charging's a great, great example of a battery capacity and batteries is a, a second example.

And a third example is, um, is auto like any sort of automatic driving self-driving mode. All of those are software upgrades now. Uh, and so you've had people in the past that had a car where they paid for it and it was enabled. And then when they sell the car, the car hardware is transferable, but apparently whatever the one time fee was for the upgrade isn't transferable.

So say you bought a car and you paid $10,000 for, um, self-driving mode or whatever it is right now. And then you sold your Tesla. These new owner of the Tesla would have to pay for that subscription. Again, that one time, even though it's a one time fee, uh, they would have to pay for it again to be enabled.

Once they discovered that you were the secondary owner and the same thing happened for this battery, they clearly are shipping cars with full capacity batteries in many cases, and then simply deducting the price and then enabling it back in software later, when people say that they. And they caught this person.

Who's a third owner and said, Hey, oh, Hey, we fixed this problem where we weren't, you weren't, you didn't have a licensed battery probably because when they did it, they weren't licensing the extra capacity yet. They just sold you the hardware. 

[00:17:56] Doc Searls: It reminds me a little bit of the, uh, old Volkswagens. Like I drove 59 and a 63 rolled to 63, but anyway, they had what they called a spare gas tank.

And you turned. A lever and what it actually did was it dropped the, the pipe that drains the gas tank to the bottom and it was just one gas tank, but it was at least they didn't charge extra for it, but it, it reminds me of that. It's sort of this slight of slight of something, uh, uh, slight of faith. I think it it's, you.

Uh, you know, again, you, you, you want this to be yours. You want these, these outfits to deal fairly with you. A tough thing is that as traffic even becomes smarter, as cars become smarter and more than more of them become electric, the range of. Manipulation that can take place in the cloud and in, at, at the car companies and at, at their third part part, third parties becomes larger and larger and larger while your scope of agency gets smaller.

You know, I mean, it's, it's sort of bad enough for me. I mean, I, my older two kids, I taught to drive on a, on a stick shift car, you know, I could not find a stick shift. To teach my youngest kid on didn't exist. And to me, that's driving you, you have to know yeah. How to drive a stick shift. And then you know how the car works.

You know, you, you have a, a sense in your body of how that thing works. And, um, I have one friend who has a Tesla and likes it, likes it a lot, but says it's not my car. I paid for it, but it's not my car. It's Tesla's car. I, I just, I just rent it kind of, you know, that's and that. That ain't right. . Yeah, but what to do about it is like, I'm not sure I'm not, I'm not sure what our leverage is to do something about it. 

[00:19:51] Katherine Druckman: I what's weird is that there are, I feel like there are certain features where people are okay with it being a subscription and certain features where people are then up in arms because, and it's funny. And it's try, I've spent some time trying to figure.

You know, which, where, where any particular one belongs, but also the reason behind it. For example, like, I, it doesn't bother me that, um, my, uh, wifi hotspot or, uh, something like that is a subscription in my car. I don't care if I don't want it. And I probably don't, I'm just not going to pay for it. And, and there are other, I don't know, maybe, uh, maps or, or traffic surfaces or something like that.

It doesn't bother me too much to subscribe to that. But then when you tell me that I have to subscribe to my heated seats that are just, you know, heating elements that exist in my car that are a, a physical thing that makes me crazy. Then I wonder why that is 

[00:20:45] Kyle Rankin: it's well, it's. There's a difference between a physical thing that's being enabled.

That that is only now being disabled in software for an arbitrary reason to based to charge you versus something that, for example, is providing you a monthly service. Uh, let's take the example of a hotspot. It makes sense that I'm getting a monthly service. So that my car is connected to the internet and I can tether off of it or whatever, so that I could see someone charging for that.

I could see someone charging for, even for updates to maps because right, maybe you pay once and you get it locked in into time. But if you want to get the latest map updates, I could see you paying a subscription for that or integration to like say Spotify or something in your entertainment. Center, but something where you have the wires in the seat and it could work if only you could flip that software switch.

Yeah. So that's, that's why it seems weird because it's not necessary to the. You're not buying software. The hardware's you already paid for the hardware physically is there mm-hmm and 

[00:21:50] Katherine Druckman: also it's because we're boiled frogs and this is what we're used to. This is the subscription model that we're used to.

And I wonder though, if, if you know, in 20 years people will think it's perfectly normal. once you pay a subscription 

[00:22:01] Kyle Rankin: for your heated seats. Well, I suspect, I suspect it'll be more likely in the future now. Here's Kyle doing a future prediction. So watch out. Um, oh, but if, if things continue along the way that they are, I suspect for the most part, you won't have a lot of car ownership here, just have leasing, uh, just because of the nature that, that, unless something changes with how they're building electric vehicles.

There's a planned obsolescence in them in how difficult they're starting to make some of the components that are known to fail eventually, um, how hard they are to replace, for example, certain electric vehicles. They, you know, like I, I'm pretty sure the Rivian has had the battery pack. The, the truck bet is epoxied on top of the battery pack.

So it's, it's not that you it's. Difficult to replace this thing. That's very, that otherwise should be pretty replaceable because we know that while they don't degrade instantly over a five to seven, eight year lifespan, they start degrading enough that some people consider upgrading them. And that I see a future where.

The it's definitely in a car vendor's interest to have everyone, not just people whose lease cars to buy a new car every two, two or three years. And there's certainly plenty of people who already buy a car every two or three years. Um, but there are also plenty of us who buy a car, either new or used and then drive it into the ground.

And, you know, I have plenty of cars that are quite old at this point. Right. And I've definitely gotten my money's worth out of them. They Al also the major component that I would be concerned about, I guess, would be the. Or maybe the transmission, but now the other one that, you know, for a fact will constantly will ultimately need to be replaced regardless is the battery pack.

And unless those are easily replaceable. And also if you do replace them, what happens on the secondary market? You know, let's say I buy a used vehicle that I know, okay. It has X, you know, a hundred thousand miles on it. And I know that, uh, the battery now has about holds about 80%, 75% state of charge. So I don't have as much range.

I know that eventually I have a pretty high ticket item to get that replaced if I can replace it. So I think a lot of people faced with the fact that, well, if I get a new electric vehicle, I have this amount of range for X number of years. I think a lot of people will, will go more to a model of buying a new car within that span of time.

I don't know what happens to all those used cars on the market at that point, but I, it. I see a subscription model for cars themselves. I think basically I see the extension of you're already subscribing for certain parts of the car hardware. I see that, uh, being something that, that car companies push more in general for the car itself, like beyond just leasing.

Yeah, I don't, that's 

[00:24:50] Katherine Druckman: a, it's inter be, what's particularly interesting about that as you were describing this potential future, where, where cars are mostly leased. We're also right now in a moment where people are considering cars. Flippable investments, which is, you know, what I alluded to earlier with the manufacturers cracking down, but people are out there doing it.

And it's it's. So, because you think of flipping an asset as, you know, a house or something that is not does, does not depreciate. So there is a, a, what I'm getting at is there is kind of a greater sense of ownership right now. And, you know, and so I think that's interesting that we are at this kind of inflection point where we're about to go another direction or, or.

[00:25:28] Kyle Rankin: um, I mean, what it, what it's caused me to conclude at least right now is thankfully I'm not in a position where I need to get a car right now is now is not a great time to need to get a car it's not ever . Uh, so I'm not in a position for that. All the, the, the main family car that we use for everything while it's now, goodness, it's 10 years old.

Um, it's one of those kinds of cars. It's not even close to halfway through its lifespan. Yeah. You know, and with a little bit of through Toyota. Yeah. yeah. Yeah. It's like a little Honda, you know? And so it's one of those things that, you know, maybe in another 50,000 miles, I need to, I may need to put a couple grand into it, but then it'll be running for another a hundred thousand miles.

It's one of those deals. Um, but if I did have to buy a new car today, I don't think that I honestly, because of all of the tracking and the fact that I have no control over the tracking and no agency to disable. uh, and, and all of that, I wouldn't buy a new car today. I, I, frankly wouldn't, if I had to buy a new vehicle, it would be an old car.

And if I wanted it to be, it would be a car before all of this. Uh, when is that? Well it's so for example, I think anything, uh, after 19, any, uh, passenger car after 1990, Ish is when the, that ODB two plug was introduced for emissions testing so that you started getting some semblance of a car computer. Now, tho those are pretty rudimentary, but you can hook up, you can hook up and adapter to that and get all kinds of information out of the engine.

And some of that stored now, over the years, they got more and more sophisticated. But cars before that had, had almost had very, very basic basic sensors. And then some like, uh, Commercial vehicles after that, for example, my van, I have a, my RV is after 1996, however it's before ODB two was required on that kind of commercial vehicle.

So when I go to, when I go get my emissions tested, they scratch their head. If they're not, if they're not an old timer, because they have to actually go and take out, go into the engine a little bit to test stuff. they have no idea. Yeah. But, but. So to me, like, even something newer than that, I suppose, if you never take it to the vendor or a mechanic that would download everything and you know, it's not connected, then you might be able to get by with a more recent car that doesn't have any sort of cell phone connectivity in it.

Mm-hmm um, and, and, well, for example, since we know the 3g is pretty much being turned off. Yeah. Any car from the era of 3g and before the era of four. You, you can be rest assured that it no longer can communicate or if it can, it won't be very long before it can. So those could be fair game. You know, the two G's fair game last car was 

[00:28:09] Katherine Druckman: two G I wish I kept 

[00:28:10] Kyle Rankin: it.

but there's also, I mean, the thing that I'm kind of optimistic about a little bit is when I do get another car, I probably will want to get some sort of drive around town, electric vehicle for errands, not road trips. I have a van for road trips, but for just basic going to the grocery types of. I'm strongly tempted to essentially get an aftermarket EV kit.

And they're starting, there's quite a few that are showing up now where you can take a, a, they're more popular for like really vintage vehicles, uh, because there's a whole aftermarket, especially here in California taking, you know, classic cars and then you strip it down and you put 

[00:28:45] Doc Searls: it into 

[00:28:46] Kyle Rankin: yeah. Yeah. I mean, there's, there are drop in replacements for Volkswagens.

You can get full kits where you take an old, like a vintage Volkswagen or Porsche. And replace it all. And with no drilling, no modification of the actual vintage car, like you drop it in and then you could later restore it back to a, to the original stock engine without any drill, holes being drilled or anything.

[00:29:07] Katherine Druckman: So's you could have like a 74 Carmen, GIA. That's an EV basically 

[00:29:11] Kyle Rankin: I, yeah, you could easily. Yeah. You could basically do that. And they, and they're Zippy, you know, I mean, there's, they're pretty fast considering 

[00:29:18] Doc Searls: the, I have to report this, uh, Phil, uh, Phil Hughes who started Linox journal and, uh, and was the man in charge for a long time.

Um, He had, in addition to two Mercedes that he cons Mercedes diesels. I think that he constantly swap parts between in his backyard. He had a Volkswagen rabbit, which is his little funny looking car. I remember in seventies that he stripped down. He made an electric car. He, he, he, he made his own kit and it had a, an engine that was, um, I'm holding my hands up.

You can't see it if you're listening, but, um, it was not the size of a small garbage can. And, um, and it was really cool because he, his batteries were, were, you know, wet cell storage batteries. They were not lithium batteries. They were, and they were in the doors. They were in the trunk, they were scattered around.

And, but there was a lot of room under the hood as well. It, it just took, it was an engine and a transmission and it went on and off. And if it was on, you could, the power curve was more like a straight line. So you could go in any gear. It didn't matter. You know, it was kind of really weird. You could be in first gear and it just going faster, but the, the engine was just spinning and you could hear every freaking noise that car made in the suspension and everything else.

you realize how much engine noise masked everything. Yeah, but it was a, it was a home build kit on his part. So that, but that was my first electric car that I ever drove. Yeah. 

[00:30:47] Kyle Rankin: A lot of the I've I've watched quite a few videos of various conversions because I'm wondering down the road, what, what might be interesting for me?

And in, in many cases they say it like a manual transmission car is, is. Because you don't have to worry about the automatic transmission. You basically hope straight up to the transmission you can shift or not because there's so much power and so much torque that you don't really right shift, or you don't necessarily have to, but that's, that's basically what I'm looking at now.

If, if you. Took away my, my family car now, and I had to buy a, a quote unquote new one. I would either just find some sort of pretty old enough used, uh, internal combustion engine car, or try to find something where there was a relatively inexpensive aftermarket EV kit and make that my EV co a Honda civic with a stick.

Yeah, Honda civic with a stick with a kit. I, I do think that. At least in the next couple of years, you will see more of that. I've seen, for example, like Chevy, small block drop in kits, it looks like a Chevy engine. Even it has some batteries even attached to it. And you, you take out the old engine sort of fits right in place.

Oh, just, yeah. Yeah. I've seen things like that sounds like 

[00:31:59] Katherine Druckman: your next book, Kyle. 

[00:32:01] Kyle Rankin: that's a, that sounds like a fun project. That's a. So it's still pretty preliminary. And maybe, I mean, maybe this will go away when every, when every car is an electric car, maybe the demand will go down for doing these conversions.

But I don't know. I don't think so. I think in many cases, uh, you'll still have people that want some sort of classic vehicle anyway. Yeah. That's I mean, that's what I would do now because in that case, I know exactly what components are in it. I have full control over the elect, the EV conversion kit. I know whether or not it's phoning home.

And if I were, if I were taking part in the conversion, I would know even more, I guess, but, you know, like I have a better sense that it's not phoning home to whatever vendor, uh, that I bought the kit from. Uh, and, and if it did, it would be, you know, it's in a box and where I could turn. 

[00:32:50] Katherine Druckman: Purism EV conversion kit with kill switches.

[00:32:55] Kyle Rankin: Yeah. Sand that's cool. 

[00:32:57] Doc Searls: That's a good idea. Actually, I 

[00:32:58] Katherine Druckman: just had, I wonder how big that market is. I dunno, 

[00:33:02] Doc Searls: going back to the creepy thoughts. It occurs to me that, okay. So let's say the, as things get more and more electronic and the cars are less and less hours and the urge toward public safety gets higher for whatever reason.

Would it be a matter of time before law enforcement says, I, we want the ability to turn off a car that's, uh, like racing down the highway and a danger to others. And we have partnered with these car makers to do that. That's a thinkable thing. Isn't it? I, I would imagine there are shades 

[00:33:39] Kyle Rankin: of that in rental car market already.

You know, they, oh yeah. Yeah. One of the benefits of them adding the on the GPS is that they can keep, they can make sure you don't speed and if you do, they know and they will log it and will, um, you'll get in trouble when you turn it back in. Well, I, 

[00:33:54] Doc Searls: I already had some experience, not with that. Exactly.

And it was quite a few years ago, like maybe, maybe 10 or 12 years ago. Um, we went skiing from Los Angeles to mammoth and so we're going through the high desert and there was a truck in front of us and I think it had a Ford focus. Which I wanted, because you could put an MP three CD in the dashboard. And I had recorded a bunch of stuff like podcasts and stuff on an MP3 CD.

And, but it even said MP3 in the slot. And, um, and we're going along there. I think we're going like 70. I wanted to pass this truck. So I floor it. It gets up to 80 and I could feel it just stop speeding. Mm-hmm , mm-hmm governor what's going on? I can't overtake this truck. I eventually did, but I realized they're not letting me go over 80 and I actually called them and they said, oh yeah, no, we, we put a governor on that car.

So it won't go over 80. And I thought that's so wrong. you know, I understand why they did. But they should tell you that when you get it's 

[00:34:58] Kyle Rankin: a safety issue, in some 

[00:34:58] Katherine Druckman: cases, there are rare cases where you really need 

[00:35:01] Kyle Rankin: to be a owner. Yeah. A lot of trucking agencies do that as well. When, when they're not employing owner operators, but they're, you know, everyone's, they own the trucks.

They will put governors on the trucks for that for a similar reason, really, but that's also underlines this notion of ownership, right? If you who's the owner of the vehicle, the person who can put a governor on the vehicle and can control its speed. Yeah. So if you buy your futuristic electric car and someone else can install a governor on it, then is it really goes 

[00:35:31] Doc Searls: yeah.

When, when my wife bought a 1992 Infiniti, Q 45, that was. Nissan wanted to compete with BMW and Mercedes. They just came out with the Infiniti brand like an 89. So it was like a three year old brand. And this thing was hot. It was like a, you know, it was had a big eight cylinder engine in, it had no mileage whatsoever and, but it was hot and they told us when we bought it, this won't go over one 50.

We won't let it go over one 50. Ask me if I tried doing 

[00:36:02] Kyle Rankin: that did, did you, I didn't, I didn't bump 

[00:36:05] Doc Searls: it out at one. I got, well, over a hundred. I decided there's this will go faster. and I slowed it down. It was on the, on the five in, in California, but yeah, 

[00:36:18] Kyle Rankin: but yeah, I could, I could definitely there's I could see various public safety things once the capability is there.

And in many cases, the capability is already. Where we've already seen how law enforcement will abuse emergency requests with big tech vendors to get information, um, that they want, uh, for various reasons, same thing. I'm sure we've talked plenty about ring and same things there. And I, we may have even talked about this happening with law enforcement and card.

Car telemetry data. In fact, I'm pretty sure there's at least one case. Oh, we did that made the news a couple years ago where law enforcement was able to, um, was able to rule out someone's alibi, who was with a murder conviction, because they said that they were somewhere and then they were able to demonstrate they, by getting the, the tracking information out of the car that no, they weren't where they said they.

That sort of thing. Mm. And I think this'll, I mean, there's why I can't see of an instance where, uh, law enforcement wouldn't be allowed to, to get a warrant, to pull all of that location data out of the car. And even if they couldn't pull, even if you, for whatever reason, it didn't come out of the car as they wouldn't necessarily have to go to the car, that if it's being streamed, they could just send the subpoena or the warrant over to the car company.

Or borrowing that, buy it from the data broker who is selling all this information, because all you have to do is get, you know, buy the location. Like, like we talked about before, if you can buy location data, even if it's quote unquote anonymized, you can start figuring it out who it is based on. Where was this location at?

At midnight, from, from midnight to eight, you know, that's where they, that's where they live, that sort of thing. It would be very easy to just go to the data brokers and have your account, and then narrow the band to a certain area and then say, well, what car is at this location? Which cars are at this location at midnight, um, routinely.

And that's probably where that's probably this person's car or that's where this person lives. And we know whose it is that sort of thing. 

[00:38:34] Doc Searls: Uh, this is almost relevant. I think I remember once when I was in rural Massachusetts, there was a stuck red light and I was sitting at that light thinking, am I gonna go or not going?

I sat there like a few minutes and there's nobody behind me, but on Google maps, traffic turned red on that spot and I knew that's my car. My car is telling Google through my carrier. That traffic is stopped here. yeah. And then I decided I'm just gonna go 

[00:39:07] Kyle Rankin: so yeah, there was a, there was this, this famous story where someone took a, a, uh, little, 

[00:39:14] Doc Searls: a wagon, a wagon.

It was a hundred of Android phones. Yeah, sure about that. Yeah. 

[00:39:20] Kyle Rankin: Yeah. And he just driving down the highway and generated traffic, they just like walked down the sidewalk and generated traffic. 

[00:39:26] Doc Searls: that's hilarious. There was, uh, an experience I had in LA once where. Um, traffic piled up on the, the, uh, the one, 10, the freeway going through downtown LA and all of a sudden we were using Waze.

Waze is the, the one to use in LA. I don't know why, but people like ways more than, um, Google maps or the apple one anyway. We it said, okay. Alternative route or whatever, take the stadium way exit. So we did, and we followed the directions with a caravan of cars. There was a caravan of cars that was all.

Driven by ways through these side streets, which nobody, nobody knew about these side streets. Okay. That just took you that way. And, and that was really interesting cuz you know, a few miles down, it gets you back on the highway and you've bypassed the traffic with an accident or whatever it was that happened and you're back on the road and, but you could almost feel the puppet strings.

[00:40:28] Kyle Rankin: Being being pulled. 

[00:40:30] Katherine Druckman: And if everyone's taking the same detour it's disaster. 

[00:40:33] Kyle Rankin: Yeah. I mean, and you could apply this to, you know, what people can do with this. What could be done with this data? Let's say that in the future. That, you know, there are certain, there are certain things that are illegal in one state that aren't, that aren't illegal in another state, or let's say we have prohibit abortion.

Sorry. Let's say that we have, you know, let's say prohibition is back and you can get in trouble, uh, for buying and, and buying alcohol in your state. But you know that you can go across state lines. Well, that was, you know, that back when there were dry counties in dry states, mm-hmm , you could typically go other statements, but let's say we're in the future and you can't do that.

It's very easy now and would be easy in the future for law enforcement to know the location of all of the liquor stores across state lines and keep track of all of the people in, in their state who went across state lines and went to that said liquor, illegal liquor store, and, and then came back. Or the closest 

[00:41:34] Katherine Druckman: abortion clinic in Colorado to Texas.

Feels like a pretty real, although I don't think Texas is, has, gosh, I feel like I should know this as a Texan, but has Texas threatened the, the, um, To prosecute people for leaving the state. I know, I think Mississippi did. I can't remember which states are, are rattling. The, the swords a little bit more loudly about people crossing state lines to get abortion.

But that seems like a really obvious risk when, when, if they can just pull your car data. 

[00:42:05] Kyle Rankin: Yeah. We have the capability now, you know, 50 years ago you would have to have someone tailing, someone, you know, a physical, human being tailing someone, right? Yeah. Pull that off. Right. But now. The capability there to know which places everyone within a state is going and, and to do a pretty quick filter to, to find out which you know, which vehicles are, are going to this location.

[00:42:29] Doc Searls: Well, there are cop TV shows that show this stuff too. I mean, we're, we're watching, um, killing Eve that takes place in the UK mostly or partly, but one car's following another car at some distance, but the hacker working for I six or I five or whatever it was, is busy looking at both of them somehow. The assumption is this is public.

This is knowable information. They could be hacked into mm-hmm yeah, no, no AR no helicopter, aerial surveillance or anything else required kind of, kind of 

[00:43:02] Kyle Rankin: creepy. Well, yeah. And, and with guides that are saying things along the lines of, well, if you're going to go across state lines and, and go to the liquor store, You shouldn't bring your cell phone or you should use a burner or you should do whatever, right?

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's like, that's great. But what about what vehicle are you using the car to, to go to the liquor store? Yeah. Um, and is that a modern vehicle? That's connected and. Has a friendly relationship with law enforcement, that turnover location, or just turns it over to data brokers who then have a, have a friendly relationship.

Yeah. You don't 

[00:43:34] Katherine Druckman: even, that's the thing that nobody needs a warrant anymore, that you can just buy it. Exactly. Just 

[00:43:39] Kyle Rankin: buy it as a marketer. And that's where all of this data, I mean, that's, what's great about this, the turn it back, go full circle. This market article talks about not simply that these, the car vendors are doing this, but that there's this whole industry behind that data brokers who are buying this data.

because of how valuable this in particular, the location data is, but everything else. And so I, as long as there is a someone asked me the other day, um, well, what's the solution to this sort of thing. And, and my response, I mean, besides the fact that I found challenging that is I, I said to me, it's twofold.

One, one way that you can, one path solution is. Consumer demand. If people are voting for their, with their dollar, for alternatives, that creates one side of this, one side of it, but the other, but that's not sufficient by itself. You also have to, uh, have some level of regulation because without regulation, it's still profitable to sell the data.

And so as long as it's more profitable to sell it than it is to not, it, people will, companies will continue to do it. So you have to make it not profitable on one side by regulating it and make. Not profit and make the alternative more profitable by having people demanding it. But of course, in the car market, the first part doesn't work very well right now, because there are really no alternatives, you know, right.

In other markets you can say, well, I'm going to buy this product instead because it protects my privacy better. But in the car market, no, one's marketing on privacy because you know, only a handful of us are really thinking about that issue right now. Mm-hmm, concerned about. Hm. 

[00:45:15] Doc Searls: Yeah. I was thinking too that I don't know where the deal is in Europe, but when I've been there, I've noticed there are no old cars on the road.

They don't want 'em. They don't. I mean, I think you're even required after a certain point must be to unload cars. I'm just amazed at how I mean here. You're gonna see. It's not like it used to be where you'd always see some junkers on the road, but you still see many more of them in the us than you see there.

I got to that thought by thinking about how people used to be able to hot wire a car. Remember, you know, like mm-hmm, the bad guy or the cop or the guy who's super smart, or the mcg driver type, you know, gets in. He reaches outta the dashboard. He yanks out some wires behind the ignition and he wires 'em together and he hot wires the car and takes off.

Uh, it's not even thinkable with a newer car. At this point. You can even get into the car. You don't have the. key fob thing. You not nothing's gonna happen. 

[00:46:04] Kyle Rankin: Yeah. Now you have to be a hacker instead. So yeah. Instead, instead, the, the, the new movie, instead of showing them rip under the dash and put two wires together, they have their phone and they press a button on their phone and then the phone, and then they sit in press another button and the car starts.

Yeah. 

[00:46:18] Doc Searls: Yeah. It's there probably is a movie already where that's happening. I would 

[00:46:23] Kyle Rankin: imagine. I'm pretty sure. Yeah. I imagine it feels, it feels familiar. yeah, it does feel familiar. 

[00:46:29] Katherine Druckman: It reminds me of the, all this talk reminds me of the, um, the car hacking village at DEFCON. So Kyle was there for my first DEFCON experience I had don't, you know, I'd never been, I had always been afraid of it, frankly.

I'd always thought we should go there as, you know, put our Linn journal hats on and go to DEFCON and, and write some things and meet some people. And, but I was, I was scared. I was like, oh, someone's going to steal all my data. I'm an idiot. I don't know what I'm doing. And, uh, finally I sucked it up and went.

The car hacking part. I mean, there were, so, I mean, I could go on, there were all of the, the village at the, the medical device thing, the election, the voting machines and the car thing though were the two, the three most eyeopening experiences for me, I think. Yeah. It was totally an aside and anecdote, but it's just, um, yeah, and I, I, I am a fairly technical person.

I, I think I hope, um, and, and yeah, to that, it's so minding to me, I can only imagine how. Most people don't really understand the, uh, nature of, of the smartphones we're driving. 

[00:47:33] Kyle Rankin: Yeah. I, I mean, as far as cars go along those lines, it's really like you, you took a, um, something that had the sophistication of the, of the computer control systems for industrial, um, For industrial computers, which are not very secure by the way, um, traditionally, and then plunged it into the smartphone era and put it on the internet.

Uh, so you have cars now that the, the original sort of computer interfaces are very rudimentary from a security standpoint and really closer to like control systems for, for industrial applications. And now they have, and then they've been turned into smartphones over the course of a handful of years.

You know, and, but without this, without the security, um, knowledge necessarily in between, so that's, so people are having like hackers having a heyday. If they have budget to get a car for research purposes, if their research budget includes car, then , if they're fortunate enough for that, then yeah. They're having a great time.

[00:48:34] Katherine Druckman: Well, I hope they don't have mine. I hope they do. I hope lots of researchers have my car and they're, , they're working on making it super secure, but it's totally not gonna be private so 

[00:48:44] Kyle Rankin: well, I mean, there's that, there's that famous diehard four scene where they need to, they can't, their hot wire scene was instead of using a smartphone to hack it.

Uh, the car had OnStar. and so they, oh, my, they triggered like a, a, a airbag deployment or something like that. And then our OnStar came on and they socially engineered them to like, oh my, I, we just had an accident. And so, and so is, is injured and they're gonna die. Could you please, you know, and that sort of thing, and socially engineered them to start the car.

So you also do it that way, I guess. Clever, 

[00:49:18] Katherine Druckman: clever, cool. Um, uh, yeah. I think I, is there anything we haven't covered? I, I think, oh, there's a lot. I'm sure. Well, yeah. Yeah, there always is. But about the, the original topic, is there anything else we want, we, we wanna make sure to mention before we wrap up, 

[00:49:37] Kyle Rankin: you know, one little other thing that we could tie in, cuz we've also talked a lot about right to repair.

Oh yeah. Oh yeah. Huge. And this ties heavily into right to repair because one of the, the big pushbacks in the automotive industry. About, uh, some right to repair legislation has to do with this data and, and the ability for PE for outside vendors to have ACC, either access to this data or control over this data, the ability to turn off this data, uh, and that sort of thing.

There's, it's definitely in the benefit of if, if you know that in addition to the streaming data, if you, if I go to an auto dealership to get my car worked on and they can plug something in and get a full dump of everything, mm-hmm, , you know, it's in their interest to wanna do. and it's also in interest to not allow people to want to disable it.

So if you have, if right to repair legislation for automobiles happens in a stronger way, then I could see an aftermarket show up for people who say, well, if you want to disable all of this stuff, flash it with this firmware that we got from Ukraine or whatever was like John Deere, um, or this wire, this jumper, this thing, this here, you do these sorts of things and you can actually have a private.

Uh, car again. Hmm. Yeah, I, yeah, 

[00:50:53] Doc Searls: I think it be before we close, I wanna give, uh, I wanna point out that that latest piece in, uh, in the markup is part of a series they have called the breakdown and it reminds me of, um, Julia GUI is one of the people who started the markup. I believe she's still there. Mm-hmm um, but she came indirectly through pro Publica from the wall street journal, which that's the.

It was her work and her team's work in 2010 that made me think and say, and write up how I thought that, uh, that the tide was turning against surveillance. mm-hmm because they had this really great series back then, which of course is now to some degree disappeared from the wall street journal, um, along with she and her team, but they're at the markup or she's at the markup and it's a good series.

The breakdown. 

[00:51:39] Katherine Druckman: Yeah, I'm a fan. I think the markup does a lot of really, 

[00:51:42] Doc Searls: really good work. Yeah, they do. They do. 

[00:51:46] Katherine Druckman: Um, spirit of the type of journalism that I like to see. 

[00:51:49] Doc Searls: you are the purism of journalism. I put it out. Yeah. 

[00:51:51] Kyle Rankin: Maybe that's a compliment. 

[00:51:55] Katherine Druckman: Well, maybe, maybe the tide will turn eventually for real. 

[00:51:58] Doc Searls: I think it will think it will.

I think it's getting even out to some degree. Yeah. It's not gonna be easy and it's not gonna happen fast obviously, but 

[00:52:08] Katherine Druckman: the more we talk about it, I hope the more people are aware of just how much their car is collecting. Maybe, uh, yeah, maybe. Well, cool. Well, thank you so much, Kyle, as, as usual. Thank you always for coming on, especially the last minute when I'm like, Hey Kyle.

[00:52:23] Kyle Rankin: That was 

[00:52:23] Doc Searls: great. I thought we gonna get Sean, but we got Kyle 

[00:52:26] Kyle Rankin: you're Kyle. 

[00:52:27] Katherine Druckman: That's great. Both are welcome anytime. Um, yeah. Thank you. And thank you everyone for listening. I hope this one has been eye opening or, or at least fun. Um, and until next time.