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.
I have no doubts that my Japanese car would do the same. It’s probably sending my conversations that it is constantly recording through the hands free calling microphone too. The world needs to wake up and realized we lost this battle years ago.
Have to assume that all the info has been fed into some LLM somewhere at this point. Somewhere there’s probably a computer better at replicating people’s voices to other computers than the people they’re mimicking. Existing databases are the new world now in terms of stripping them for resources, and new ways of thinking of chopping them up and packaging them are where all the innovation is.
Next will be injecting fake records into all the databases so another program will think the record as a whole is real. A person won’t be the person, they’ll be the database entry.