New research reveals serious privacy flaws in the data practices of new internet connected cars in Australia. It’s yet another reason why we need urgent reform of privacy laws.
Modern cars are increasingly equipped with internet-enabled features. Your “connected car” might automatically detect an accident and call emergency services, or send a notification if a child is left in the back seat.
But connected cars are also sophisticated surveillance devices. The data they collect can create a highly revealing picture of each driver. If this data is misused, it can result in privacy and security threats.
A report published today analysed the privacy terms from 15 of the most popular new car brands that sell connected cars in Australia.
I mean if you’re mechanically talented enough and sufficiently motivated, you could probably rip out the digital controls and replace them with mechanical analogs, getting rid of the computer entirely. Extremely difficult, but probably doable if you know what you’re doing.
That aside, we shouldn’t have to do that to get out of being spied on.
Bikes are great.
I can’t sleep in my bike
Not with that attitude!
Mozilla Foundation did a deep dive into this. And the results where abysmal. The only brands not completely horrifying where Renault/Dacia because they are European and only serve the European market so they have to follow GDPR.
Any company that serves European customers have to follow GDPR. Any company that breaks it can be fined by the EU. Hence why a bunch of American websites rather just block European browsers instead of changing their cookie/data retention policies.
I’m shocked, i tell you, shocked!
This is why when I get my driver’s license, I’ll buy a car from 2012 that has no Internet. Probably old Skoda Octavia.
I once had a conversation with AI to see what the fastest form of local transportation is, that didn’t absolutely require paying any kind of insurance, like cars do. I did not expect the response at all: the AI told me horseback riding. The thing is, it’s completely right, but it’s something no human would ever have given as a response. Anyways, if anyone has a horse you don’t want…
An eBike would be faster, and way easier to maintain and store. They don’t require insurance.
The AI was doing that meme
“Humans have horses. Don’t ride them. Are they stupid?”
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Horse Outside by the Rubber Bandits
A few years ago, when I cared little about my privacy, I would fancy buying a new car. Thanks to privacy concerns, I became proud to have my old car, which also happens to be highly repairable.
Yep, I have my 2004 landcruiser. I will never get rid of this car
It’s also why repair costs an arm and a leg.
It used to be a bumper was just filled with foam, so getting in a fender bender was a pretty cheap fix.
Now a bumper has upwards of $5000 in technology and sensors sitting in it, and a fender bender can often make the car considered “totaled” because the cost to repair is now more than the total resale value of the car.
Get a bike, ride a bus, fuck surveillance capitalism.
Best part is it’s $5000 because they get to name their price. These sensors, headlights, etc, cost nowhere near that, but where else are you gonna go get em?
So in a few years when your new car has depreciated to somewhere around 10k and you get a massive repair bill? Well most people are scrapping it and getting another car, convenient for them…
Opting out still seems like they’re pinkie promising they won’t spy on you. There’s no guarantee they’re not using all those sensors on your car to keep tabs on you. The only thing they can’t do is sell your data without getting caught. Are there any guides to install a faraday cage on the telemetry antenna? I miss having dumb cheap vehicles.
I have never seen an opt-out work as it should. Operating systems just re-enable everything through system updates. Apps do it through app updates. A lot of updates seem like they’re for nothing other than getting you to agree to a new more intrusive ToS. For websites, spam lists, and that sort of shit, they just create a new mailer program and opt you into that. Sure, they’re not sending you the one you opted out of, but there are 500 more on the back burner. Some of the worst offenders will have dozens or even hundreds of different lists and force you to opt out of each one individually. Then of course there are the spammers who just don’t even capture the opt out. Or put the opt out behind a login that you don’t even have. Or serve the opt out page through an ad-click network which is blocked by your filter list, firewall, ad blocker, or DNS. There are a hundred ways they circumvent the laws and legislators are doing nothing to stop them.
From a cursory examination, it looks like there are at least some models where you can disconnect the antenna, for which you may get a warning you can just ignore. Seems a lot easier than a faraday cage. But a lot worse than a car not outfitted with that kind of tech.
The surveillance is mostly done on the inside of the car, not the outside. Parking sensors don’t really provide useful data for them to harvest, but that is why they cost so much to replace. If you don’t care about parking sensors you can just replace your bumper without them, the car doesn’t really care after you tell it “you didn’t ship with parking sensors”.
YES
Even if your vehicle isn’t watching you, your phone is
You can turn off your phone at least sometimes. :) But this of course does not solve the problem.
Not my phone. I dont run spyware on it
The car has its own power generation though so it can do a lot more without risk of killing the battery. They can record and stream the whole time you use it.
What is your point here?
Just what I said. Your phone is watching you and listening to you. If you are driving with it on you are being tracked as well
Not if you install a custom rom like graphene os. Or turn off all privacy invasive features in the settings.
I find it hard to believe that Google phones wouldn’t have a hardware±SIM backdoor no matter what ROM is installed.
This technology already was in place on Intel ME desktops using a operating system on a chip called MINIX
That and phones far exceed surveillance perfection and device count vs PC.
Anything not RISCV and with a binary blob is a vector.
Am using vanilla android 14 and have disable as much tracking software as I can find in it. I truly believe there is tracking code embedded in the os. But since I still owe on this phone from my service I’m not real comfortable rooting and flashing it right now. Looked at a couple "topten list"s of available Roms and the grapheneos was advertised as pixel only. My samsung doesnt fit so…
I like minimalist stuff anyway so went to download the OmniRom but was warned it “may not be compatible with your device” and was prevented from downloading. Just have to wait till this one is paid off before dinking around with it.
The point is people hyper focus on one thing while completely disregarding / forgetting something that as bad or worse.
No shit , this just in said anyone in security.
That’s why I’ll take bus, train, rideshare, carshare, plane with all the cameras and tracking over buying a new personal vehicle. Modern cars can build a personal digital profile of you, they know where you travel, they track your plate, and we found out they track your driving behaviour to screw with your insurance rates.
Also consider getting an ebike, if possible.
Is there any open source/privacy focused connected car software?
There are some open source cars, but they’re very basic
The problem isn’t e.g. CarPlay, it’s the car itself, which is usually entirely custom.
For example with Infiniti they have their own Android based OS and the only way to get a new head unit in the car is to have a full emulator. Otherwise you lose access to anything that the head unit controls.
I don’t know if open source custom car roms will be a thing until we have an LLM that’s smart enough to automate porting the rom to different models of car.
First thing I did when buying my '21 Toyota was remove the fuse giving power to the cellular modem. Is it still recording my data? Of course, but that’s only a worry if I go to their dealership for service. If I ever need to actually do that (recalls for example) I’ll remove the DCM module from the vehicle before bringing it in. There’s a very good local shop near me that I’ll bring it to for normal maintenance before letting Toyota plug in to the car and download my data.
Some vehicles this may not be possible, so if this concerns you, check forums about your vehicle if it is a moving spy machine before trying this because you might end up causing the vehicle to be put in limp mode because of some BS design choices.
I’ll remove the DCM module from the vehicle before bringing it in.
Why don’t you remove it right now then?
Haven’t had the time to tear the dash apart. It’s located below the infotainment screen. It’s not transmitting so no need for immediate action.
Which fuse? And links to a guide?
Pretty simple, there’s a fuse in the fuse box under the dash labeled DCM, just remove it. It’s extremely simple and takes 3 minutes. The DCM has an 18650 backup battery so it’ll stay powered for a short time but should die in a day or two and stop transmitting.
Toyota at least has an opt-out website. (Or at least in the US they do). You lose the ability to do stuff like remote start from your phone though. And emergency roadside service, blah blah blah. I turned off all the mapping saved route stuff immediately that let you see your previous trip average miles/KW and then turned off everything once they wanted me to pay a monthly fee for remote start and such.
I seriously doubt they’re not capturing the information just because you told them not to. They’re just going to treat it differently. But have no delusions that they’re respecting your wishes as you think they should.
Theres still an LTE modem in your car sending data somewhere
So if I were to take one of them cars and drive out to the middle of nowhere in the desert where there’s no cell service, what’s it gonna do? Shut off once it’s roaming? Not start back up and strand me in 115° heat? I just want to be prepared for my lawsuit that’s all
It’ll just cache telemetry locally then send it in when you reconnect to the network
