Nissan LEAF leaks position, speed information via its RSS reader
The Nissan LEAF all-electric car is full of technological firsts. One of which is a GSM cellular connection to the internet for providing voluntary telemetry information to Nissan, new charging stations, competitive driver rankings, and even RSS feeds. This is called Nissan CARWINGS.
Apparently when CARWINGS checks RSS feeds, it sends a bunch of parameters in the query string. Parameters like these:
“lat” and “lon” variables contain the current position of the vehicle, “speed” is the vehicle speed, “car_dir” is the direction of the car, and “lat_dst” and “lon_dst” is your destination configured in your navigation system”
All of these lovely values are being provided to any third party RSS provider you configure: CNN, Fox News, Weather Channel, it doesn’t matter!
Oh dear.
On the upside, this post does contain a demo of a cool location-based weather RSS feed, so uh, I guess it’s not all bad news for Nissan. (It’s all bad news for Nissan.)