New With Most 2014 GM Vehicles: Feds, Spies, And Criminals As Standard Equipment

Bertel Schmitt
by Bertel Schmitt

Remote unlocking of your car’s doors via your smartphone , activating horn and lights and remote start, previously part of GM’s paid OnStar service, is becoming a standard feature, GM says. Buy the car, download the app, and the car can be remote-controlled via your smartphone for five years, whether you pay for OnStar, or not. “Thirty-six 2014 model year GM vehicles are compatible with the RemoteLink mobile app,” says GM in a press release, meaning that most of GM’s new cars are permanently on-line, can be reached, tracked, can reveal their locations, OnStar, or not, ignition on, or not.

At the same time, says Time Magazine, “Law-enforcement officials from San Francisco to Washington, D.C., are again sounding an alarm over mobile-phone thefts, demanding that the wireless industry, resellers and lawmakers take new steps to quash the thriving black market for boosted devices.” According to the story, “Cell-phone theft in major cities has become a national crime epidemic, like the car-stereo crime wave of the 1990s. In San Francisco, about half of all robberies now involve mobile phones, and in New York City there was a 40% increase in mobile thefts in 2012. One recent Harris poll found that nearly 10% of cellular users said their phone had been stolen at one point.”

Cell phone theft is estimated to cost consumers $30 billion a year. Imagine the cost, when a car is attached to that shiny new phone.Data theft is much more rampant, and it’s your government that does the wholesale stealing.

A report in The Guardian revealed “that under the Obama administration the communication records of millions of US citizens are being collected indiscriminately and in bulk – regardless of whether they are suspected of any wrongdoing.”

Such information is “a critical tool in protecting the nation from terrorist threats to the United States,” a senior administration official told Reuters. Says the wire:

“The revelation raises fresh concerns about President Barack Obama’s handling of privacy and free speech issues. His administration is already under fire for searching Associated Press journalists’ calling records and the emails of a Fox television reporter as part of its inquiries into leaked government information.”

A day later, the Washington Post revealed that the U.S. Government can pull your data “directly from the servers of these U.S. Service Providers: Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, PalTalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube, Apple,” and has been doing so for years. If those good folks cooperate with the Feds, imagine the willingness of people who still are partially owned, and very much controlled by the U.S. Government.

OnStar data are transmitted via wireless data, which is wide open to the government and criminals alike.

Quite possibly, the only defense is to take the battery out of phone and car.

Bertel Schmitt
Bertel Schmitt

Bertel Schmitt comes back to journalism after taking a 35 year break in advertising and marketing. He ran and owned advertising agencies in Duesseldorf, Germany, and New York City. Volkswagen A.G. was Bertel's most important corporate account. Schmitt's advertising and marketing career touched many corners of the industry with a special focus on automotive products and services. Since 2004, he lives in Japan and China with his wife <a href="http://www.tomokoandbertel.com"> Tomoko </a>. Bertel Schmitt is a founding board member of the <a href="http://www.offshoresuperseries.com"> Offshore Super Series </a>, an American offshore powerboat racing organization. He is co-owner of the racing team Typhoon.

More by Bertel Schmitt

Comments
Join the conversation
5 of 60 comments
  • Icemilkcoffee Icemilkcoffee on Jun 06, 2013

    Your first point contradicts your second point completely. A thief who steals your on-star equipped car would be caught rather quickly. It will be a very short joyride.

  • Summicron Summicron on Jun 06, 2013

    Anyone else here who works in governmental big data knows how little there is to fear about Big Brother's intentions. Big Brother is a hapless bumblef**k with overwhelmed illiterates at the street-level responding to an avalanche of contradictory alerts from competing agencies directed by vendor-corrpted senior managers hopping the ever shifting lilly-pad beds of a shrinking mlitary-security complex that lives in mortal fear of sequestration and the next leak to the media. If you're a bad guy, the more we know about you, the more certain that the SWAT team or the summons will show up at your cousin's neighbor's house. Or be sent to the guy with the Norwegian instead of the Swedish version of your name; or to the owner of what's closest to your text-box truncated last name. Because the more we know about you, the more incompetent users and glitchy, schizoid, tarted-up and top-heavy 90's databases have corrupted it in transmission. That's what "fusion" is all about. I would worry more about lightning than about malevolent government intrusion into your life. Unless you're an outspoken conservative.

    • See 2 previous
    • Burgersandbeer Burgersandbeer on Jun 07, 2013

      @Summicron That was hilarious.

  • CanadaCraig You can just imagine how quickly the tires are going to wear out on a 5,800 lbs AWD 2024 Dodge Charger.
  • Luke42 I tried FSD for a month in December 2022 on my Model Y and wasn’t impressed.The building-blocks were amazing but sum of the all of those amazing parts was about as useful as Honda Sensing in terms of reducing the driver’s workload.I have a list of fixes I need to see in Autopilot before I blow another $200 renting FSD. But I will try it for free for a month.I would love it if FSD v12 lived up to the hype and my mind were changed. But I have no reason to believe I might be wrong at this point, based on the reviews I’ve read so far. [shrug]. I’m sure I’ll have more to say about it once I get to test it.
  • FormerFF We bought three new and one used car last year, so we won't be visiting any showrooms this year unless a meteor hits one of them. Sorry to hear that Mini has terminated the manual transmission, a Mini could be a fun car to drive with a stick.It appears that 2025 is going to see a significant decrease in the number of models that can be had with a stick. The used car we bought is a Mk 7 GTI with a six speed manual, and my younger daughter and I are enjoying it quite a lot. We'll be hanging on to it for many years.
  • Oberkanone Where is the value here? Magna is assembling the vehicles. The IP is not novel. Just buy the IP at bankruptcy stage for next to nothing.
  • Jalop1991 what, no Turbo trim?
Next