Since 2017, Chinese self-driving cars have driven 1.8 million miles (about 3 million km) on California roads, freely collecting detailed data around them using cameras, lasers, and other equipment. This is reported by Slashdot with reference to Fortune (text by subscription).
These conclusions were made after analyzing information from the state's Department of Motor Vehicles. As part of their basic functionality, these cars capture video from the places they move and map the state's roads with an accuracy of two centimeters.
Companies transmit information from cars to data centers, and then use the information to train unmanned systems.
This approach is part of a program that allows developers of self-driving technology to test autonomous vehicles on public roads.
Among the 35 companies approved for testing by the California Department of Motor Vehicles, seven are fully or partially based in China. Five of them drove on California roads last year: WeRide, Apollo, AutoX, Pony.ai, and DiDi Research America. Some Chinese companies have also been authorized to test in Arizona and Texas.
The publication points out that last year, 30 cars owned by Chinese companies and equipped with cameras and geospatial mapping technology moved quietly through the streets of Los Angeles, San Francisco, and San Jose while the attention of Americans was focused on a Chinese balloon in the sky over Montana. They collected detailed video, audio, and location data.
In fact, self-driving cars equipped with cameras, microphones, and sophisticated sensors have long been a concern for privacy advocates.
For example, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a non-profit organization dedicated to protecting digital rights, calls self-driving cars "moving surveillance devices" that passively collect huge amounts of information about Americans in plain sight.
However, in the context of U.S. national security, Chinese data-collecting cars have received surprisingly little attention. At the same time, security experts suggest that, depending on the type of information collected by the cars, the level of accuracy, and the frequency of its collection, the data can provide a foreign adversary with a "treasure trove" of intelligence that can be used for anything from mass surveillance to war planning.
Nevertheless, officials at U.S. state and federal agencies overseeing self-driving car testing admit that they currently have no control over and no procedures to verify what data Chinese cars collect and what happens to that data after it is collected.