Open Letter to Tesla Motors
Re: Vehicle Safety and Wireless Devices in an Automobile.
We are planning on purchasing a Tesla vehicle in the next two years.
We are very enthusiastic about the opportunity to own a piece of alternative energy technology that will help make the change from fossil fuels to clean electric that can be generated via solar, wind and through other renewable means.
We do have some concerns about your product though. Our concerns revolve around your vehicles' heavy reliance on computers, software / firmware, and wireless communications.
We have both safety concerns and privacy concerns with any device that incorporates the physical electronic hardware that would under some circumstance allow that device to communicate to other electronic devices and through the internet, with or without the knowledge of the device's users.
History has shown that any device that has any capability whatsoever of communicating over the internet can be compromised with malicious intent and be made to operate in a manner that is undesirable and even dangerous to its rightful user.
Additionally, it is a well known fact that our cell phones and wireless computing devices have become De facto tracking devices that constantly transmit our whereabouts to any number of government agencies.
In this day and age: anonymity is truly a luxury. You offer your vehicles for sale as luxury cars, does that luxury include anonymity and the ability to drive your your cars without connecting to the internet or cellular phone network?
We would only purchase your vehicle if it had no built in hardware capable of either transmitting or receiving any type of wireless or radio signal including Bluetooth. We would not mind if you added USB ports and Ethernet ports so that we could attach our own network enabled devices if we so desired. Just so long as we are not stuck diving a vehicle with the capability of being hacked, or being made to serve as tracking device to report our whereabouts to “big brother”.
We too would love to see the decline of “Big Oil” through the use of viable alternative energy technology but we don't want to contribute to the growth of an even bigger menace: “Big Brother” via the superfluous use of wireless communications devices now being built into every appliance from refrigerators to automobiles.
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Open letter to Senator Ted Cruz
Re: Vehicle Safety and Wireless Devices in an Automobile.
Dear Senator Cruz,
Thank You for your response to our concerns about NSA's Surveillance programs.
We have another concern about the proliferation of wireless internet devices being built into many electronic products today.
What particularly worries us is: automobile manufacturers starting to "jump on the band wagon" of superfluous electronic functionality and building cars that are more and more dependent on computers, and then, on top of that vulnerability; building integral wireless internet transceiver devices into these vehicles.
Not only does adding a built in internet connection make the vehicle susceptible to NSA surveillance, it also makes it so that the vehicles' computer's Operating System will eventually be compromised by malicious computer hackers over the internet and made to operate in an unsafe and potentially deadly manner.
It is one thing to hack a computer sitting on your desktop with your financial information on it. It is quite another thing to hack the operating system of a 3,000 lb. vehicle traveling 65 miles an hour on a crowded interstate highway.
We need federal legislation that will prevent automobile manufacturers from building integral wireless internet capable or phone capable devices into automobiles that can not be physically disconnected from the automobile and whereby their absence would not impede its normal and safe operation as a tradition automobile.
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