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Comment by woleium | Hacker News Reader

They can still get your texts and contacts and call history from your car though. In many cars it syncs.

> They can still get your texts and contacts and call history from your car though. In many cars it syncs

Source? If so, that's a privacy boon for CarPlay and Android Auto.

It’s actually the native integrations that do this. Android Auto and CarPlay basically act as a display for your phone and little data leaves your device. Connect via Bluetooth to many vehicles and that data syncs to the car’s infotainment.

> boon

Whenever I pair my Android phone to e.g. a headset, it asks if I want to share my contacts. And, I suppose, also text messages, and I just checked there's that option with the paired vehicle (and it was unchecked).

it's so frustrating that this can't be disabled permanently so that it doesn't ask anymore.

Here’s one:

https://www.theregister.com/2023/11/09/car_text_harvesting/

Is it possible to enable CarPlay but only for Google Maps? It’s so annoying that it seems to be all or nothing.

It would not really make sense. CarPlay is just your phone using the car’s screen. How would you do that for one app and nothing else?

Many phones let you run a desktop environment on a monitor/mouse/keyboard, while still letting the phone screen act exactly like it normally does.

> CarPlay is just your phone using the car’s screen

Then why does iOS warn me that my car will receive data from my phone when enabling car play? Does this just mean the screen, or does it get the texts/calls too?

Not sure on what exactly this is referring to, but I know contact names are exposed, at least when there’s an active phone call. My vehicle shows the contact’s name on the driver display (which CarPlay doesn’t control)

Oddly enough, there are screen-sharing and/or remote-display protocols which ... are limited to sharing screen-drawing properties and aren't wholesale data vacuums. X11 and remote desktop come particularly to mind.

Several of those can be limited to specific applications, e.g., by setting the $DISPLAY value (X11). For remote desktop that's a bit more challenging but can be managed to an extent using Group Policy settings under MS Windows:

<https://serverfault.com/a/354165>

It is not screen sharing… It is more like plugging a monitor on a laptop. It’s exactly how the phone does it under the hood: it’s a secondary display.

Thanks.

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