Doc Searls Weblog

Imagine what would have happened had Martin Winterkorn not imploded, and if Volkswagen, under his watch, had not become a datakraken (data sea-monster, or octopus), spying on drivers and passengers—just like every other car company.

What would the world now be like if Volkswagen since 2014 had established itself as the only car maker not operating datakraken? Or, better yet, if Volkswagen became the one car company collecting data for the cars’ owners first—and for insurance companies and advertisers only by the grace of those owners?

Volkswagen would be for privacy what Volvo was (and maybe still is) for safety—or that Apple is (or wants to be) for privacy. It would have been a brilliant position for VW.

But no. Winterkorn went down, and now Volkswagen is just as bad as the rest of them. Maybe worse:

In October 2014 I posted How Radio Can Defend the Dashboard, sourcing Winterkorn’s speech, and saying “There is already one car company on the customer’s side in this fight: Volkswagen.” The post was written to advise Dash (“the connected car audiotainment™ conference”), which was about to happen in Detroit. The post created a stir. Everybody I talked to about it at the time was enthused about what I recommended: integrating broadcast signals with the Net, giving collected data to car owners first, switching to the European RDS standard (which would relieve drivers of needing to retune to other signals just to stay with one station), among other ideas.

None of that happened. The flywheels of surveillance capitalism were already too big. Apple and Google were about to turn the dashboard into a phone display with CarPlay and Android Auto. Broadcast radio is now a distressed asset, a walking anachronism. It is being eaten alive on the music side by streaming and on the talk side by podcasting.

But the bigger thing is that we lost the chance for one big car maker to stake a position on personal privacy. Volkswagen could have done it. But it didn’t. And the datakraken won.

For now.