Volkswagen briefly refused to track car with abducted child inside until paid | Hacker News Reader

Volkswagen briefly refused to track car with abducted child inside until paid

neowin.net

53 pointsmikece16 comments

"Volkswagen" aka a random first line support employee who most likely never had experienced this situation before.

Doesn't matter. It was reasonably foreseeable that they would need to coordinate with law enforcement or other emergency services at some point. They should either have had a dedicated emergency centre like other services such as OnStar [1], or at least better training for their first-line representatives.

Luckily the child was unharmed. This situation could have ended up so much worse.

[1]https://www.onstar.com/public-safety/emergency-situations

Should the police be able to enable the tracking of my car without an order from a judge?

This clearly falls under exigent circumstances, so yes in such a case.

They already have that power (or at least in my jurisdiction). Similar to being able to arrest you without a warrant if you are currently committing a crime.

VW is almost certainly outsourcing this to SiriusXM, and SirusXM has a fuzzy marketing oriented first responder page too: https://www.siriusxmcvs.com/safety-security/acn-plus/

And they train and provide the same resources as OnStar: https://publicsafety.siriusxmcvs.com/acnplus-training

And they have a number specifically for LEOs... just like OnStar: https://publicsafety.siriusxmcvs.com/vehiclelocationpolicy#S....

But the reality is, this was an exceptional case with a system that's probably weighted towards the opposite: people falsely trying to get location info.

Honestly while Sirus/VW screwed up here, I'm surprised with an entire child missing no one would have managed to dig up the LEO hotline...

Impersonating law enforcement is a trivial way to steal data from LE-friendly vendors, because the police care more about buying weapons than setting up competent IT processes.

I would actually prefer VW to not add tracking capabilities to the car in the first place.

It's opt in and useful for many things people want to do.

It's only opt in if it requires additional hardware to be installed.

By that logic, is Tesla FSD also not opt in because the capability is already built in, just has to be activated via software?

The hardware that users must remove from a Tesla to disable telemetry is opt-out.

The article explains that it's not opt-in when the police order it.

Volkswagen should not even have this power to begin with. Jesus.

If a car rental place would not have handed out a car, would we see the same article here?

"Why communists say that capitalism puts profit over people?":

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