Ford Patents for ultra-surveillance/data collection in vehicles

[23OBX2.7]

I live in the data center capital of the world. They are literally destroying this county, and are now spreading out across the country. I've also financed a couple over the last few years and have written white papers on them. These facilities are as large as automotive manufacturing plants. People say I'm tin foil hat guy, but I promise you I'm not. We are literally allowing this country to follow the China model for social scoring. There will be a file with a number on it (your identification number). Everything you type, everything you say that gets picked up by AI devices, every image of you, will be recorded and put into that folder (that...is the "data" in these data centers). A street camera catches you j-walking, it logs the infraction into your file, and your social score takes a hit. You save kittens in your spare time, you feed the homeless, you save the planet, but you get caught j-walking and your score drops below the minimum required for your job....guess what.. 60 Minutes ran this exact story a FEW years ago as already happening in China. They don't have 3 credit reporting agencies like we do. They have one. And now we have lobbies groups advocating to do just that! The latest - the Mortgage Bankers Association under the disguise of making it easier to get a mortgage to buy a home! Literally, the "American dream" and the most personal possession and #1 creator of personal wealth in this country - 1 credit score.

Call me tin foil hat guy all you want. Don't believe me, don't take me seriously. But....I have seen with my own eyes many many times where I live, US Gov license plates on the back of Chevy SUV's sitting inside the gates of these data centers that are all over the place where I live. Just like it's no coincidence that Amazon's HQ2 location is literally across the street from the US Pentagon, the concentration of data centers in this country all live within a 30 minute drive of every spy agency we know of. Additionally, why do you think there is such a strong push to get everyone to upgrade their devices to be AI friendly? All of these new cellphone plans where they basically give you a free iPhone 17 for signing up. They're just trying to push the AI devices further into your life.

Wherever you live, if you're seeing data center applications pop up in your community, you better get involved with the local planning and zoning folks to block them. They are now spanning out to sit on the edges of metropolitan areas to just sit there and collect data on the community. HUGE money in these things initially. $1.6m per acre purchase price for my area. We own about 500 acres 30 minutes outside of Raleigh, NC that has naturally fed water and power at the street. They're all over us to sell to them. Despite the multi-generational wealth figures they're throwing around, we've had that land in this family since before 1800, and will never sell any of it to a data center. We lease it to local farmers who pay the property taxes only for it. One day soon, as my retirement, we are going to peel off 150 of those acres for our retirement home. There is no way I want to die looking at one of those damn things, while it logs my internet activity via the Tommy & Pam video!

My electric bill in December - $713.

Crazy. Mine was USD 37 and in summer with AC on all the time its 45.

Sponsored

 

[BroncoBandit]

As consumers - I don't think ANY of us wants tracking or reporting in our vehicles - period! Talk about invasion of privacy - my god!

What we NEED is the continued freedom to not be tracked by our autos.

Tell FORD no to reporting.

Tell them no to "auto-stop" too - lol

 

[TPadden72]

As consumers - I don't think ANY of us wants tracking or reporting in our vehicles - period! Tell FORD no to reporting.

Tell consumers no to cell phones in Ford's.

Tom

 

[23OBX2.7]

Its personal choice to participate or not...

 

[Nc211]

Holy crap. The amount of cooling on all those buildings.

Yup! Back in the 2000's when AOL.com and Worldcom ruled, they laid fiber optic data cable everywhere out here. That became the backbone. Then, the data center folks put some people on the county zoning and planing boards, and all of the sudden things were approved left and right. New water pump stations being installed along the Potomac with underground plumbing running miles to what is supposedly a new power substation. But considering it's been under constant construction for the last decade, it looks more and more like a future nuclear power plant. They're all very sneaky about what they're up to as well. For the last 12 months, a huge bundle of cables have been getting installed underground through the area. Nobody seemed to know what was going on, until a local reporter finally figured it out. It's called, and I'm not even kidding here, the "quantum loop". Massive cables running from somewhere in PA down to us and back up there again, in one massive loop, that will connect up many data centers into one massive loop. Kind've like wiring "in series". This isn't for running power. This is for the speed of sending data to each other. Billions in cost. They're not going to make that kind of investment out of the greater good of society. That's not how this works......

These building have dozens of back up generators to make sure they never go dark. The amount of water that pumps through the floors to keep the computers cool is insane. To build a data center, is BY FAR the most expensive commercial real estate project in modern history. By. Far.

One of the richest guys in all of Washington, DC is named Charles Kuhn. He owns a local moving company called JK Moving. But Charlie figured it out years ago. Started buying up raw land for about $25k an acre. Then ole' Charlie got folks placed on the zoning and planning board, and had that land approved for data center usage. All of the sudden, that $25k an acre, sold to Google for $1.6 million an acre. True story, repeated multiple times. He didn't even have to buy the land himself, he just put it under contract, did the quick rezoning, and when it came time for him to close on his deal to buy the land, at the same time, he closed on his other deal to sell it to Google. Literally, the same day, same meeting, same closing.

 

[TPadden72]

Yup! Back in the 2000's when AOL.com and Worldcom ruled, they laid fiber optic data cable everywhere out here.

It's simply bandwith limits. Before that it was running out of OTA frequencies, then hard wire limits, then geo stationary sat comm, next will be low orbit saturation. All told, I'm pretty happy with fiber optic.

Tom

 

[Koss_co]

Yup! Back in the 2000's when AOL.com and Worldcom ruled, they laid fiber optic data cable everywhere out here. That became the backbone. Then, the data center folks put some people on the county zoning and planing boards, and all of the sudden things were approved left and right. New water pump stations being installed along the Potomac with underground plumbing running miles to what is supposedly a new power substation. But considering it's been under constant construction for the last decade, it looks more and more like a future nuclear power plant. They're all very sneaky about what they're up to as well. For the last 12 months, a huge bundle of cables have been getting installed underground through the area. Nobody seemed to know what was going on, until a local reporter finally figured it out. It's called, and I'm not even kidding here, the "quantum loop". Massive cables running from somewhere in PA down to us and back up there again, in one massive loop, that will connect up many data centers into one massive loop. Kind've like wiring "in series". This isn't for running power. This is for the speed of sending data to each other. Billions in cost. They're not going to make that kind of investment out of the greater good of society. That's not how this works......

These building have dozens of back up generators to make sure they never go dark. The amount of water that pumps through the floors to keep the computers cool is insane. To build a data center, is BY FAR the most expensive commercial real estate project in modern history. By. Far.

One of the richest guys in all of Washington, DC is named Charles Kuhn. He owns a local moving company called JK Moving. But Charlie figured it out years ago. Started buying up raw land for about $25k an acre. Then ole' Charlie got folks placed on the zoning and planning board, and had that land approved for data center usage. All of the sudden, that $25k an acre, sold to Google for $1.6 million an acre. True story, repeated multiple times. He didn't even have to buy the land himself, he just put it under contract, did the quick rezoning, and when it came time for him to close on his deal to buy the land, at the same time, he closed on his other deal to sell it to Google. Literally, the same day, same meeting, same closing.

They're reopening 3 mile Island nuclear to supply this stuff supposedly.

 

[Sunday Money]

One of the richest guys in all of Washington, DC is named Charles Kuhn. He owns a local moving company called JK Moving. But Charlie figured it out years ago. Started buying up raw land for about $25k an acre. Then ole' Charlie got folks placed on the zoning and planning board, and had that land approved for data center usage. All of the sudden, that $25k an acre, sold to Google for $1.6 million an acre. True story, repeated multiple times. He didn't even have to buy the land himself, he just put it under contract, did the quick rezoning, and when it came time for him to close on his deal to buy the land, at the same time, he closed on his other deal to sell it to Google. Literally, the same day, same meeting, same closing.

And for the rest of the story to put it in some sort of context...

That same guy has also placed over 22,000 acres of land in Northern Virginia into permanent conservation easements to protect them from future development, which includes huge land donations to non-profits and local counties for parks and outdoor recreation.

And also stuff like this: Loudoun nonprofit farm marks 5 years with 1 million pounds of donated food

Here's a question @Nc211, if you had an opportunity to sell 10 of your 150 acres in rural North Carolina for $16,000,000 ($1.6 million an acre), would you?

P.S. I just want White's Ferry to reopen! It helped cutdown time for those of us that actually get off pavement

 

[Nc211]

And for the rest of the story to put it in some sort of context...

That same guy has also placed over 22,000 acres of land in Northern Virginia into permanent conservation easements to protect them from future development, which includes huge land donations to non-profits and local counties for parks and outdoor recreation.

And also stuff like this: Loudoun nonprofit farm marks 5 years with 1 million pounds of donated food

Here's a question @Nc211, if you had an opportunity to sell 10 of your 150 acres in rural North Carolina for $16,000,000 ($1.6 million an acre), would you?

P.S. I just want White's Ferry to reopen! It helped cutdown time for those of us that actually get off pavement

Not calling him a bad guy, just illustrating the opportunistic and the insane demand for the space. He’s done a lot of good, 100%, and came up the hard way in life too. I have much respect for Charlie. But it’s also very obvious that there are notable influences that are letting these things get built the way they are, and there is a growing anger about it, but no way to stop it. Heck, they even wanted to convert part of a historic battle field into one recently. That, did get rejected but was a fight .
No. We will not sell any of our land to a data center. Not us, not our neighbors, and the community development board has recently stated they have no intentions of approving any applications for such a development (basically, go away, move on, nothing here to see). The land owners made it clear a couple months ago that they will replace the board if they ever did. Nobody wants one of these things in that area. Thankfully there are other areas they can look towards and keep our area out of the mud of political garbage and ultimately legal costs.

 

[HotdogThud]

If you haven't read it yet, I can't push this book hard enough:

Enshittification

It's why Ford thinks they can do this. It's why Flock Safety *exists*. It's why Windows 11 just gets worse and worse with copilot. It's why Spotify can't seem to figure out how to not shove AI slop into every playlist. It's why this very site throws errors in Brave and refuses to load unless I agree to let ads get stuffed down my effin' throat, *CONSTANTLY*.

This isn't the gradual change of things over time so that we're nostalgic about things from the past, these are conscious *decisions* by platforms to make themselves worse and cannibalize their own userbase chasing the finite amount of money and eyeball time that each human has.

My present solution to things like this recent Ford announcement? Every time I have to go into the dealership for a part or warranty service or anything, I find the manager/owner, and politely light them the everloving fuck up. I know they aren't the ones making these decisions, but they're the ones that talk to the ones that do. They feel the pain, make them deliver it on up the chain.

And on a personal note, every time an ad slips past the gates on my pi-hole'd, privacy badger'd, ad-block'd machine that tries to sell me a cpap machine or penis pills on this site, I just double down. I'm here to talk to people that I enjoy talking to and interacting with, not to make sure I buy whatever regurgitated crap from the latest vowel-challenged amazon vendor do jour.

 

[Bronco4Joe]

You are 100% correct. I have the place i will never move from. I'm not ever in need of a loan. I have my own water, power and food supply.
Once I retire in July I'm throwing my smart phone in the river. My hat size is 7-5/8......takes almost a whole roll of Reynolds wrap....

That is one big melon!

 

[the quietman]

My 10 gallon hat is more like 20....

 

[broncobase1]

Anyone seen this one yet?

Big Brother will be watching.

This is nothing new, vehicles have been equipped with data recorders ("black box") for decades. With a court order they can download everything. For connected vehicles like the Bronco and most new vehicles you can turn it off if you're worried about it. They used data from Alex Murdaugh's Chevy Suburban to help convict him of two counts of murder. Not only were they able to track his whereabouts leading up to the murders, they were able to ascertain his proximity to his vehicle at the crime scene. The guy was a famous injury lawyer, ambulance chaser extraordinaire! How did he not know? Pro tip --if you plan on committing murder get a classic car, or at least turn off the tracking! Honestly I'm not a killer and not going to loose any sleep over it. Obama already knows my blood pressure and when I flush the toilet, so what if he knows where my Bronco is?

 

[Nc211]

To validate the OP’s original post - Google this:

“Section 24220 of the 2021 Infrastructure Bill”

Ford is reacting to the US Gov requirements.

 

[Ape Factory]

Was it this? https://www.newsweek.com/cars-could-spy-your-speeding-1930637

It does explicitly describes the system as intended for law-enforcement applications, specifically vehicles such as the Ford Police Interceptor.

License Plate Reader (LPR) technology has already been used for years by private data-collection companies that gather vehicle-location data and sell access to law enforcement agencies and insurance companies. A large number of traffic cameras are also privately owned and operated, with collected vehicle data often shared or sold in similar ways.

The reality is that many local law-enforcement departments do not have patrol vehicles equipped with mobile tracking systems because the cost is high. Installing the hardware, paying third parties for maintenance, and supporting the back-end data infrastructure can be expensive.

What this appears to represent is Ford leveraging sensors and technology already built into its vehicles to offer similar capabilities - likely with greater sophistication and more data-driven intelligence. That could include identifying unique electronic signatures emitted by nearby vehicles, such as signals from tire-pressure monitoring systems to ID passing cars on a street for example.

Could this technology be installed in, or simply activated on, normal consumer vehicles? Technically, yes. But in practice, that seems unlikely. There would be significant legal and privacy hurdles, including operator consent, data-retention concerns, and liability issues. Beyond that, it would be difficult for law enforcement to justify taking enforcement action based solely on evidence collected by an unaffiliated private citizen’s vehicle.

Law enforcement gets around this by purchasing the data from a neighboring force where such restrictions aren't in place.

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