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.
Chinese ev bus behaves like every John Deere tractor, Tesla, amazon ring doorbell, windows pc, mac, smart tv, iphone and android device , and probably every other car made since 2020.
“But China bad” is getting pretty old and frail in comparison to the domestic and international predations and privacy invasions of US tech businesses and government
If I take my cellphone into a cave it too will keep calling home.
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 removed 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
this. I seen people try to just use hostnames to block the LG telemetry, and the result is it just phone home harder, the logs just show it spams thousands of requests per second. Only way to stop it is to relay it to a fake server to return a fake response.
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.
Like the Polish trains that were remotely disabled when taken in at a competitor’s maintenance shop https://hackaday.com/2023/12/14/polish-train-manufacturer-threatens-hackers-who-unbricked-their-trains/
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
LMK your test results. Mod IS LIfe!
Lol wut. What kind of scaremongering BS article is this?
Telemetry system attempts to phone home during connectivity interruption
“FIRE UP THE PRESSES!”
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.
The point was to try what happens when the telemetry system fails to contact home for a prolonged time.
So they proved that a telemetry system attempts to phone home in areas with limited connection? Truly groundbreaking. Nobel Prize incoming.
So if I take my phone into a parking garage, and I see the little icon for roaming, have I suddenly done an experiment worthy of publishing?
Are you being purposely obtuse? It was to see if ANYTHING would happen specifically after it has been “offline” for an extended period of time. Its really not that hard to understand.
And nothing happened… This whole attempt a gotcha is self-defeating at best, vacuous at worst.
If you have had a reason to assume that the phone might get bricked by you doing that, yes. How is that not obvious?
If you have had a reason to assume that the phone might get bricked
I don’t have any reason to assume this.
Then why would you even make that experiment in the first place?
Oh no think of our own GDPR compliant surveillance. (it’s still surveillance)
Ni hao
Oh NO! China might harvest the kind of data that Google, Meta, Tesla, and other US companies have had a monopoly on stealing.
Whatabout the US? Uigher death camps? Whatabout ICE? Single-party rule? Whatabout neither top 2 party in the US being socialist?
The thing is, you agreed that google and meta could have that data. Nobody signed any terms for the bus…
In the US, cars collect all kinds of data on everyone in them including passengers and manufacturers claim it’s okay because getting in the vehicle counts as consent…
I’m thinking to mod my garage to be a faraday cage, that is, after I build my garage. Maybe it should be portable, too.
“You agreed that Google and meta…”
You sure about that? Did you read every term and condition? Did you agree that they would keep a complete record of your exact location? Did you agree that they will record your voice using the Bluetooth hack? Did you agree that Facebook should be able to buy your medical data off the data market and combine it with your profile?
Gee, no, I didn’t agree. It’s a major part of why we are talking on this platform, and not Meta nor Alphabet’s platforms.
I remember reading that meta tracks you even if you don’t have a Facebook account. It collects information on you from any photos your friends add with you in it or by taking your contact information from your friends phone or the wide net of meta trackers that are spread around the internet. Meta collects that information to create a shadow profile of you without you even knowing.
So meta does the exact same thing as the bus.
It’s weird that they didn’t use a Faraday cage which should have been way cheaper.
Cheaper than driving it into a mine?
How is that weird? Do you know how much metal costs these days? The man hours to build a bus sized faraday cage and make sure it’s 100% secure? What do you do with your massive cage when you’re done, how much effort to scrap or resell it or store it?
They just had to spend a few bucks on petrol with this solution. It’s elegant, cheap, wastes almost nothing. Repeatable. Works with any size vehicle. It’s perfect.
Few bucks of petrol eh
Oh right it’s an EV lol 🤦♀️
No, but how did they get it into the underground space? Elevator? Or there’s a way to drive in which still prevents all signals getting out?
Yes, mining tunnels tend to have ways to drive in.
Also, they are inside mountains.
There are doors in mines to seal off areas(and keep balrogs from disturbing crews), so drive it deep, close to the doors and you got signal isolation
It’s Norway, we love tunnels and tunnel accessories. I’d not be surprised if they had to turn down offers of places to do it.
Petrol you say? Is this not an EV bus?
They could probably just drape the whole bus with a bunch of chicken wire (or wrap it) for a makeshift Faraday cage. I doubt that would take more than an hour or so.
Certainly cheaper and easier than building up a bus-sized Ferriday cage.
Faraday cage has to be designed with the wavelength in mind. Chicken wire makes a remarkably shitty faraday cage.
What do you do with your massive cage when you’re done
I’ve seen big Faraday cages in large companies when I was young. It’s never a one-shot project and it doesn’t cost that much.
Telenor ASA (Norwegian pronunciation: [ˈtêːlənuːr] or [tɛləˈnuːr])[2] is a Norwegian majority state-owned multinational telecommunications company
Net income is multiple billions. Hence my question.
it doesn’t cost that much.
It does not cost much, but it costs many times more than just driving a bus into a mine.
Do you think they mined out a mountain just for this project?
I highly suspect they used and already existing mine. Which is cheaper still. Unless it said somewhere in the story about them digging the mine specifically for this.
It has a kill switch, too
(I have no evidence other than The Odyssey and everything that has happened since)
