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‘ VW wouldn’t help locate car with abducted child because GPS subscription expired ‘
#1
‘ "While searching for the stolen vehicle and endangered child, sheriff's detectives immediately called Volkswagen Car-Net, in an attempt to track the vehicle," the Lake County sheriff's office said in a statement posted on Facebook about the incident on February 23. "Unfortunately, there was a delay, as Volkswagen Car-Net would not track the vehicle with the abducted child until they received payment to reactivate the tracking device in the stolen Volkswagen." ‘


https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023...n-expired/
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#2
WTF?
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#3
My guess is that they reached a low-level employee who is only empowered to enable the service by providing payment information. If they'd reached a supervisor or manager they probably could have flipped the switch more easily. The front-line employees are not entrusted with that kind of power.
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#4
Front line employee should have known enough to escalate it. Hoax? Maybe, but the optics if it isn’t are not good.
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#5
ztirffritz wrote:
My guess is that they reached a low-level employee who is only empowered to enable the service by providing payment information. If they'd reached a supervisor or manager they probably could have flipped the switch more easily. The front-line employees are not entrusted with that kind of power.

Heck, I'm sure this is it. Perhaps none of them can just flip the switch. Managers are just people who have to do more for nothing nowadays, especially in companies that provide support like that (I guarantee they don't work for VW). Nobody wants to do that. Why would they let a contracted company do much more than receive payments?
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#6
Hmmm... I'd like to know if VW's "addressing the situation" with the third party tracking vendor was more along the lines of a session of screaming various versions of "What the hell is wrong with you?!" or a rather sheepish "Yes, you did exactly as we asked, but from now on we'll make an exception when law enforcement is involved".

I'm tempted to go on a long rant about buying a piece of technology then having to maintain a paid subscription to a service to make the technology you already paid for work. BMW's $18 a month to "activate" (unblock access to) the heated seat feature already completely installed in it's cars is just the latest and most egregious example of this trend.

GM's OnStar is a more direct comparison, and was the first of that type of service I recall being installed in an automobile. The initial versions used an off-the-shelf Motorola GPS unit that was wired in and always on, yet as far as I'm aware GM made no provision for the vehicle's owners to be able to track the vehicle themselves once the OnStar trial period ended. I suppose if one really wanted to one could figure out their car's locator code or ID number by using a tracker or scanner, but still.
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#7
I know of a family member who had a kinda similar situation where their car was taken without permission, (but not stolen as they knew who it was and did not want to have them arrested) but the OnStar (or whatever) people would not help since the owner had not registered for the service beforehand.

I suppose you have to look at it from the business side where if a person was trying to trick them into assisting in finding someone else, without consent, it could look really bad. However in this case if the police were the ones trying to contact them, and could provide sufficient proof, then I don't see why the company would not want to help.
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#8
Similar to a situation a few years ago when Verizon throttled mobile data throughput to California firefighters exactly when they needed it most: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018...-wildfire/

You'd think companies would have taken a lesson from the severe PR hit Verizon took from that one.
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#9
I suppose you have to look at it from the business side where if a person was trying to trick them into assisting in finding someone else, without consent, it could look really bad.


That would basically be buying theft insurance after the vehicle is stolen.

In that case it wasn't stolen, and the people didn't want police involve.

So the tracking company wasn't buying it.


The VW case is a horror story.

The woman pulls into her driveway with the suspect vehicle, a stolen BMW, presumably knocked her down, and stole the car running her "extremities" (legs?) but she was still able to call 911.

The detective pleaded, explaining the "extremely exigent circumstance," but the representative didn't budge, saying it was company policy, sheriff's office Deputy Chief Christopher Covelli said Friday.
"The detective had to work out getting a credit card number and then call the representative back to pay the $150 and at that time the representative provided the GPS location of the vehicle," Covelli said.


At the point of impasse, I would have considered demanding a supervisor, and failing that, calling back to try getting someone who was aware of the policy.

"Volkswagen has a procedure in place with a third-party provider for Car-Net Support Services involving emergency requests from law enforcement. They have executed this process successfully in previous incidents. Unfortunately, in this instance, there was a serious breach of the process. We are addressing the situation with the parties involved."

Yes, I wonder what will come of that.

If I were VW, I'd want dude fired, but being third-party and depending on contractual obligations, it's hard to say if that'll happen.

I'd hope it would.

I'm glad it turned out as well as it did.
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#10
I'm glad the SO publicly shamed VW.

That's probably the biggest stick they could swing.
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