EV data for China’s government brings “spying” allegations

Electric vehicle makers in China must provide data from their EVs to the government.

That’s prompted media like Quartz to speculate China’s EVs could be government spies after it learned about the data situation during a visit to an EV battery factory in China.

The Associated Press (AP) has reported it found that every EV on the road in China provides as many as 61 data points overall. Some 200 automakers – including the likes of Volkswagen, Nissan, and Tesla – are part of the programme.

In response to AP’s investigation, the Chinese government says it uses the data for “analytics to improve public safety, facilitate industrial development and infrastructure planning, and to prevent fraud in subsidy programs”.

No other country where EVs operate, including the United Kingdom, US, Japan, Norway or Germany, collects such real-time data on EVs and would probably need a court order to do so, media say.

Every 30 seconds, each EV made and driven in China is obliged to send data to the Chinese government including such details as the car’s position, direction and speed, according to the Financial Times.
It says the figures can pinpoint the EV’s location to within a metre, and generate huge amounts of data (about 1 gigabyte per car a month ) for the government.

While EV makers may use data from the cars to improve performance and make over-the-air upgrades, the China situation raises privacy issues among some businesses and individuals.

Apparently, contracts signed buying a car in China include a consent to data collection and the provision to share the data with third parties when required by the law.

A website open to the public, run by China’s finance ministry, gives examples of the kinds of data transmitted first to the carmaker and then to the government’s monitoring centres, AP reports. About 1.4 million electric cars are providing data, including real-time location, battery performance, and charging times.

Quartz points to the likes of the Shanghai Electric Vehicle Public Data Collecting, Monitoring and Research Centre compiling data from more than 222,000 vehicles in the city. It quotes the centre’s deputy director as saying a lot of data from consumers can be provided to the government to help improve policy and planning.

Similar data is extracted from more than 1.1 million vehicles by a national monitoring centre for new energy vehicles run by the Beijing Institute of Technology, Quartz

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