In keeping with the expansion of electronics in automobiles, Toyota Motor Sales in the U.S. has hired Ned Curic from Microsoft to a newly created role of vice president and chief technology officer. Curic reports to North American chief information officer Zack Hicks. He is responsible for developing and “clear architecture standards, while maintaining a vision of future technology that aligns regional and global efforts.” Curic will also oversee technical security and business intelligence.
“Curic was a “platform strategy adviser at Microsoft,” where he sold the “business value” of Microsoft platform and cloud services. According to Curic several years ago when he was at Microsoft, security was the number one priority for Microsoft software architects.That statement came at a time of global hacking of Microsoft products by producers of malware, a problem that continues to this day.
Recent revelations of broad invasions of privacy, illegal wiretapping, searches and seizures by the Obama Administration and government agencies such as the NSA, TSA, IRS and U.S. Customs, among other taxpayer funded agencies that are violating the Constitutionally guaranteed civil rights of U.S. citizens, are now very much an issue for vehicle owners whose data is being used by auto companies for undisclosed purposes. (OnStar Reverses Tracking of Ex-Users after Privacy Uproar)
Troubling revelations by whistle blowers reveal that corporations including automakers routinely comply with illegal requests for data without telling their customers they are doing so. Under U.S. law, customers do not own their own data, companies are free to do with it – sell, snoop, market, trade – whatever they please.
As only one example of systemic violations of privacy, license plate readers mounted on police cars, road signs and bridges, use small, high-speed cameras to photograph thousands of plates per minute as federal and state governments continue their relentless pursuit of spying and abusive data collection, according to critics. The TSA is subsidizing the technology under the Obama Administration through grants to buy the readers.
The information captured by the readers – including the license plate number, and date, time, and location of every scan – is being collected and sometimes pooled into regional sharing systems, according to the ACLU. As a result, enormous databases of innocent motorists’ location information are growing rapidly. This information is retained for years or even indefinitely, with few or no restrictions to protect privacy rights. ACLU is calling for legislation to curb the privacy abuses.
Automatic license plate readers have the potential to create permanent records of virtually everywhere any of us has driven, radically transforming the consequences of leaving home to pursue private life, and opening up many opportunities for abuse. The tracking of people’s location constitutes a significant invasion of privacy, which can reveal many things about their lives, such as what friends, doctors, protests, political events, or churches a person may visit, according to ACLU. The NSA controversy has now heightened public awareness after the Edward Snowden revelations.
In addition to funding state and local purchases of license plate readers, some federal agencies maintain their own networks of license plate readers across the United States. They are conducting data sharing on a national level.
According to a growing number of critics, little is known about how the federal government uses license plate data. ACLU has filed Freedom of Information Act requests with the Departments of Justice, Homeland Security, and Transportation, but not surprisingly received few voluntary responses. A federal lawsuit is now pending that could force the departments to respond.
