27 December 2021

AUTO-CONTROL: Your Ride is a Streaming Catch of Profitable Data-Points

Intro: HAVE NO FEAR that tech companies will soon be doing to cars what they did to phones: Tying their exclusive operating systems to specific products to force out competitors and dominate a huge swath of the global economy.
Now, having missed the boat as the tech giants cornered the market on smartphones, some policymakers and regulators believe the battle over connected cars represents a chance to block potential monopolies before they form.
By LEAH NYLEN

". . .Indeed, the smartphone wars are over, and Google and Apple won. Now they — and Amazon — are battling to control how you operate within your car. All three see autos as the next great opportunity to reach American consumers, who spend more time in the driver’s seat than anywhere outside their home or workplace. And automakers, after years of floundering to incorporate cutting-edge technologies into cars on their own, are increasingly eager for Silicon Valley’s help — hoping to adopt both its tech and its lucrative business models where consumers pay monthly for ongoing services instead of shelling out for a product just once. . .

The stakes are enormous. Tech companies and the automakers envision a future where riders can seamlessly blend work, play and chores, easily ordering groceries, scheduling work meetings or watching TV from the comfort of their cars. The data coming off those vehicles also could automatically update maps, notify city workers about potholes and tell brick-and-mortar retailers where customers travel from.

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Brand loyalty or monopoly?

While Silicon Valley and automakers are thrilled about the future of connected and autonomous cars, regulators and privacy advocates are less so.

“These companies have an amount of data on us that they shouldn’t have, and they have a history of not using it in responsible ways,” said Katharine Trendacosta of the digital civil liberties group Electronic Frontier Foundation. “They have a history of going back on promises they have made about that data.”

[...] READ IN-BETWEEN-THE-LINES https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2021/12/27/self-driving-car-big-tech-monopoly-525867

“I know it’s hard to see in the future and difficult to make guesses about what companies should be allowed to do with technology that doesn’t exist. But we know what they are doing with things that already exist,” Trendacosta said. “If we had rules that carry forward to whatever they make in the future, we’d be in a better place.”

 

 

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