Comment by mywittyname | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mywittyname | Hacker News Reader

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Unlikely. Based on the article, it sounds like the data they are "vacuuming" up is telemetry data captured and stored by the car itself. Every manufacture is different, but they all are storing at least some information. I suspect there are regulatory requirements to keep such information for the purposes of public safety (see: analysis of Toyota unintended acceleration situations)

This information has been captured, stored, and made available for analysis since at least the early 00s. I remember the first time I hooked up VAGCOM to my 03 VW, it has data from so many sensors available for the tech to look up and could turn on and off hundreds of different features, it was like going into the VW equivalent of chrome://flags. And this was in a 2003 car!

You'd probably have to go back to pre-ODBII days (mandated in 1996 for the US) to really get away from this. In my experience (which is not comprehensive) 90s cars tended to keep telemetry mostly on engine performance (timing advance, cam/crank sensor positions, throttle position, etc).

Car telemetry, until recently, is still kind of basic and from a surveillance standpoint not that interesting. It's usually just speed, angles, performance, and electricity. It can tell you when the car was started and how long it ran, but not where it went.

On the other hand, the MIB or stereo, has a lot more interesting stuff: contact lists, GPS data, media, bluetooth devices, and even Wifi. The clock is GPS synced and it logs every time you touch the console: change radio, enter POI, phone calls.

And you can stick one of the new Carplay headunits into any old pre-OBDII car and now enjoy the same level of surveillance. Sony, Kenwood, JVC are all running QNX or Linux . And all of them just has a plethora of information behind some very basic security.

> It's usually just speed, angles, performance, and electricity. It can tell you when the car was started and how long it ran, but not where it went.

Assuming that includes wheel speed (and possibly tire pressure) and steering wheel angles, yes, that can be used to compromise where you went (via dead reckoning from your driveway or parking spot).

That data is only available in realtime reading, the only logging ECU's of that era did was fault logging.

>to my 03 VW, it has data from so many sensors available for the tech to look up

There's a lot of sensors and flags, but it isn't really logged anywhere in significant amounts. It just stores log of occurred errors, and dump of selected module parameters at the moment of error entry.

I wonder if you could at least do something petty, like swap the +12v and GND pins with the Bus+ and Bus- pins on your OBDII connector so it would fry their fancy tool when they tried to read your data.

This also makes it impossible for other mechanics to diagnose and fix your vehicle. It also makes it much harder for you to use that port to diagnose and fix the vehicle yourself with readily available tools you can buy. The OBDII port is a blessing, not a curse. There are things you can do to limit the telemetry (this will be on a case-by-case basis for the vehicle and manufacturer, so I'm not going to detail specifics) but that is one of the sillier things you can do.

Smog check will be a problem.

That's mostly a Cali and large city thing.

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