The Wall Street Journal reports that authorities are telling military, government, and corporate officials to stop using tech built by a company based in a foreign country, as it could track their movements and provide the data to the intel services of that rival superpower.
The punchline to this is that the government in the Wall Street Journal story is China’s and the tech is American-built Tesla cars, which apparently are pretty popular among the ruling class of the Chinese Communist Party, government, and executives at state owned enterprises. Beijing is worried since Tesla apparently collects a shit ton of GPS and imaging data from every vehicle, likely for purposes related to its development of autonomous driving software. Not sure which possibility is funnier: that the assholes are just being paranoid because it’s what they regularly do to the United States with TikTok and God knows what other tech products and devices developed in China and used in the United States, or that Tesla really is providing the data to the CIA and NSA for surveillance purposes, wittingly or unwittingly. Read more at the Wall Street Journal.