Car is a smartphone on wheels. Here's who's listening

automatictransmission.khoury.northeastern.edu

220 pointslonghaul147 comments

Recent and related:

Automatic Transmission – a data-privacy study of connected vehicles - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49926628 - Oct 2026 (230 comments)

(Normally we'd merge the threads but after 2 days it would mess up the comment rankings.)

They only looked at the domains the car talks to over wifi, not to the content. For a Tesla Model 3 they also looked at the mobile traffic, because it was easy doable.

They played around with the infotainment of the car for 30 minutes, when it has for example a YouTube app, they opened it. When the car talked to YouTube over Wifi they counted it as one ATA (Advertising, Tracking, and Analytics).

When you have less apps in the car, or all data is tunneled trough the car manufacturer it results in less ATA and therefore a better score.

The paper says this:

> 2. Stationary Active: The vehicle was parked and powered on for 30 minutes while we interacted with as many sensors and features as possible. This included opening and closing doors and the trunk, pressing dashboard and seat controls, activating stalks (lights, wipers), and exploring all infotainment menus and apps. https://automatictransmission.khoury.northeastern.edu/paper....

Their repository has the classification of vendors here: https://github.com/nicolegerzon813/Automatic-Transmission-An...

It would be nice to have know which domains were accessed by which car. Even better would be to know which action in the car correlated with which connection.

Yes, I read this report and came to the same conclusion. What did they expect when they opened Youtube for example? Also, there was no implication that the ATA transmitted was any different than what you'd see in a regular browser e.g. the automotive companies aren't sending additional data when you open Youtube in your car.

This is part of the reason why I don't want a new car: I don't want to be involved in this directly. A guy from work got a brand new Hyundai(I think), and the first thing that popped on the navigation was "Create an account with Hyundai now". Nah. Nah. Forget it. I have 3 issues:

1. I should not have to authenticate or have connectivity to a manufacturer unless I want to once I've paid for a physical good(cars being physical goods).

2. I don't want my personal data to be sold off to anyone - I've been in the tech industry for long enough to know that "I don't want my data to be shared with third parties" is worth as much as the power used to light up the pixels on the screen.

3. I don't trust anyone to have done everything carefully and by the books to prevent any potential leaks.

Is there a market for taking newer models and stripping them of their connectivity?

Probably not large enough to pay for all the engineering needed to pull it off. Some of us would be interested, but it's no longer easy. There are too many useful things from connectivity too. My car for example shows me the current speed limit on all roads and when the speed limits change it gets updated because it has connectivity. That is a useful feature but it comes with all kinds of other things I don't want and so just stripping out is a complex work of stripping out just the parts I don't want while keeping the good.

If you'd asked in 2010, well yeah, just pull the fuse for the modem and done. since all it does is a little bit of connectivity and there's nothing else useful from the, from that, I wouldn't care. But now connectivity has useful parts, that I don't want to lose.

> My car for example shows me the current speed limit on all roads and when the speed limits change it gets updated because it has connectivity.

Yours does this via data? Most cars do this with a camera.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traffic-sign_recognition

I don't know. Perhaps it is a camera - but it should be be data because the law changed and the default when nothing is marked is wrong

Both approaches are fraught with issues. Vision based systems fail to read sings properly, don't know about default limits, struggle with or don't evaluate conditional speed limits, etc. And map/data based systems can struggle with locational accuracy, temporary changes to speed, conditional speed limits, etc.

For example, my car's vision based system always shows the limit on a school zone speed limit sign, even when it is not in effect. It also fails to read speed limits which are posted on signs it wasn't trained on, like digital signage.

And map based systems e.g. smartphone maps are often wrong in work zones, and areas with variable speed limits.

I drive a 13+ year old car with retro-fitted android navigation from a now bankrupt Chinese manufacturer so no updates in the last 4 years at least. I have really gone to great lengths to leave the bare minimum (given that I self-host everything except for maps). It easily took a day of fiddling about with the navigation and OpenWRT alone and I don't know anyone else that has gone as far as I have. In fact, just about everyone I know doesn't care. If I had to guess, I'd say the answer is a firm "no".

I'm really curious about this setup. Can you elaborate a bit more on how you're self-hosting and have incorporated OpenWrt with your vehicle?

Funnily enough, I just wrapped up describing it https://axegon.com/#blog/i-own-you-but-i-dont-trust-you.md

I don't know, but there is a small market for something similar: taking older cars (often oldtimers) and building in a new electric motor. My guess is that those cars will have little privacy problems.

I would love new open source cars by the way, that would be really cool

Its surprisingly difficult or impossible depending on how they set it up. I had an Chevy with firdt-gen OnStar, disabling it was as simple as unplugging the OnStar box under a seat.

In a first gen Chevy Volt that's not possible, the computer and screens are so integrated with OnStar that physically disconnecting it leaves the car effectively useless.

The connectivity may not be fully disabled in a 2025 Acura Integra, but there is a way to disable data sharing. You then have a permanent yellow "nag icon" top right on your infotainment screen, but the spying is "disabled." I mean what this other commenter in this same thread found via GDPR after doing this very step: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49955366

Depending on the car, how you disable it may not really disable it at all. Connecting your phone via Bluetooth or taking the car in for service will often let the car upload a backlog of data.

You generally have to completely remove the power from the DCU - which can have as many as three different power sources (including a backup battery with days of power in some cases!), and often disables features in your car like the hands free microphone, built in gps, etc.

And that's not all. I used to work with a guy who spent a large portion of his career at a famous car manufacturer. I can't say which one cause their operation and output is rather small(niche, hyper-wealthy customers that take their international passport when they go for a drink across the street, "just in case"). From what he told me, their cars have 11 individual computers with full operating systems on them for various reasons. While compute has become more expensive over the last few years, courtesy of slop, small, embedded ARM devices are still inexpensive and incredibly powerful. I also spent a short time in the automotive industry(where I met the guy I mentioned) and modern cars are an absolute integration hell and even their engineering teams can't say fully what's in them in terms of hardware and it's magnitudes worse with software.

Auto manufacturers lost me when they began being so hostile to people wanting to maintain or repair their own vehicle.

Much of my 80s model pickup can be disassembled with a basic set of screwdrivers and wrenches. If my Chevy Volt bricks because the battery has an aging cell, it has to be towed to Chevy to pay $200 for them to turn of a software alert and allow it to charge.

I do like electric vehicles but its insane how absolutely terrible they are when it comes time to work on them.

> I do like electric vehicles but its insane how absolutely terrible they are when it comes time to work on them.

Yep, they are like hermetically sealed devices like a modern consumer phone. The user can get into them and repair if they really want to and have the skills/tools... but it's nothing like the previous era of phones or vehicles.

You bought it, so why shouldn't manufacturers not try to collect some dough for maintenance as well.

Oh there's nothing wrong with them offering maintenance, they just shouldn't put up arbitrary walls to stop me from doing it myself.

The unfortunate reality is we can expect more and more of our goods to spy on us over time, as there are both political and economic motivations to track and collect as much data as possible on everyone.

The best thing you can do is avoid products with trackers while they haven't taken over their entire market, learn to disable GPS, wireless, and cellular antennae once they do, and pray manufacturers take a while to insert dead-man switches as well.

> we can expect more and more of our goods to spy on us

strong disagree, this is complicit and defeatist nonsense given +100 years of active and successful consumer rights protection in lawful markets in the West.

The Patriot Act was passed 25 years ago...

Didn't congress leave it as expired around 2020?

All the fun stuff just got repackaged under another name. Regardless, privacy has been eroding for decades at this point.

Unfortunately it appears that the consumer protection advocates and more importantly the legislators and regulators are already decades behind the curve on these kinds of privacy intrusions and the other risks associated with incorporating more and more tech in everyday devices. I don't know how much of this is because of ignorance, how much is lack of resources, and how much is willing complicity or good old corruption, but the end result for the users of these devices is the same in each case.

yes I agree very much, and also it is important not to roll over IMHO

It's the people who try to stay below the radar who will get most attention.

Won’t your lack of data raise flags?

Wouldn't disabling antennae on your car void the insurance? I would have assumed that was a basic thing insurance policies would have stipulated already over a decade ago.

for tesla insurance, yes. You have to agree for your driving to be monitored to use their insurance. They monitor and grade you based on a number of driving behaviors, then set your premium based on your score. You score determines the next month's premium. Note that the time you drive using tesla full-self-driving enabled, your score is 100% (even with the sometimes scary 12.x version)

You must agree to monitoring, otherwise they won't give you insurance.

SO stupid

Why would disabling an antenna void insurance?

The world IS getting mass surveillance. The havens for privacy are shrinking. We are becoming the ants in the ant farm.

One thing i don’t understand is how pro-surveillance advocates don’t understand that the moment they are not behind the terminal, they are the target.

uniformed services and some kinds of professionals already have agreed to terms on conduct and records. The people who agree to that say "of course" when it comes time to subscribe Everyone Else to the same constraints. That is my own thinking, it might cover some proportion of the cases there...

I've never met anyone who's 'pro surveillance'. I've met ad tech executives and Googlers, though. Have you spoken to them about the world that's been built?

Oh, I sure have. It’s not all ignorance, unfortunately.

To me it feels like there's a flood of pro surveillance stories wherever I look.

https://www.nbcchicago.com/news/local/police-say-license-pla...

https://www.alxnow.com/2026/10/02/license-plate-reader-helpe...

https://www.bakersfield.com/news/bpd-credits-automated-licen...

https://www.kcrg.com/2026/09/17/how-license-plate-readers-he...

https://turnto10.com/news/local/license-plate-cameras-help-s...

https://www.krqe.com/news/albuquerque-metro/albuquerque-poli...

Tail wagging the dog?

everyone who posses knowledge of the level of surveillance they are subjected to and does nothing about it is implicitly pro surveillance

I'm not a big fan of the "silence is violence" view. Are we really going to blame looming surveillance dystopia on people who are working 60 hour weeks to heal the sick, address world hunger, or care for young children because they didn't become privacy activists?

Is that typical of people who hold this view?

Every time I mention working on privacy laws like GDPR on USA level I get heavily downvoted and attacked - so not only you've met people who are "pro surveillance", a lot of HNers that say otherwise will aggressively fight against legal frameworks that punish engineers and business leads that collect unnecessary data.

As soon as you'll put out a concrete proposal, you'll get massacred for being "anti business".

Any opinion online about anything that involves large corporations is almost entirely astroturfing.

I've met "pro surveillance" people before. There's a surprising number of "normies" in favour of it.

I remember being shocked, about 10 years ago, when I mentioned social network spying and my sister in law remarked she thought there should be more of it to keep people inline.

I've also met people who think all internet access should be through government sanctioned id and monitoring, which I also find shocking.

I haven't been able to pin this down to a single political view point, these people come from across the spectrum.

In the political alignment chart, authoritarianism falls on y axis, whereas left/right is x axis. This explains why you find people from both sides supporting it. They're essentially the same side as far as this topic is concerned.

I've often been annoyed by the left/right divide being spoken about as linear. Its always felt more circular to me, you go far enough to the led or the right and its hard to tell the two sides apart.

Authoritarianism as a second axis is interesting, though I don't know what the opposite would be. Communism, the actual idea with effectively no one in charge? If so, in practice those extremes seem to end up in the same place, one or a few people in charge of everyone else with a very tight grip on power.

In the political compass, the two axes are liberal/conservative and authoritarian/libertarian. So it would be “libertarian”. This includes philosophies like anarcho-capitalism (bottom right) as well.

I agree that extremists of all stripes are troublesome for various reasons. The sibling comment by `odo1242` already answers the y-axis question. I want to note that these are idealizations, and may not perfectly map to the parties labeling themselves as such.

> may not perfectly map to the parties labeling themselves as such.

Well that's for sure. In the US I don't see the Democratic as liberal, nor the Republican party as conservative based on policies they promote.

I think it boils down to each individual's personal experience.

If you live surrounded by people who will hurt you, steal your stuff, or act in reckless ways if they think no one is watching; then pro-surveillance sounds more appealing.

If instead you feel that the people around you will behave even if no one is watching them; then privacy concerns take precedence.

I don't necessarily live in an area where I expect people around me to behave. Most people do and I have some good neighbors, but its also a rural area with a drug problem.

I also don't want surveillance to protect me though. Its my job to protect myself, and ideally to be part of a community that looks out for each other. It isn't the governments responsibility to protect me if said protection comes at the expense of my own freedoms.

I don't want to be a rat in a cage just so I can feel safe.

protect-the-children and catch-the-criminal is a lot more tangible to most people than the concept of privacy in public or digital spaces

they may not be asking for it.. but once you make it a yes/no question and the public has to decide, they will support it blindly

Looks at the current president/federal gov’t - that used to be the case, but doesn’t seem to be anymore?

I've met at least 1 pro flock camera person. On the grounds that they helps police fight crime.

In my experience, the pro surveillance people are many times just rural folk that are extremely right wing. They think that these technologies will narrowly be applied to whatever minority they dislike while having a huge blind spot about how this will directly apply to themselves as well over a longer time span. That exact scenario is how it also plays out currently with social welfare where they will demonize minorities that use social welfare while sucking on the teat of the government for everything from their farms to their healthcare.

That's sort of wildly stereotypical.

You can find a ton of urbanites/suburbanites who want surveillance to ticket speeders, reckless driving, loud exhausts, etc. And they're out buying Ring cameras and alarm systems because they're worried about house/car break-ins and theft.

And if you take a radical online urbanite leftist and start talking about right-wingers sending rape and death threats to women/minorities, and the kind of online communities that breed those kinds of people, you will likely find sudden enthusiasm for surveillance.

I tend to assume that regardless of political affiliation, pro-surveillance mindset comes from blind trust in the institutions doing surveillance, whether that's the government or google. This is often driven by ignorance and/or a failure to reason about implications of large-scale systems, rather than any particular political ideology. I think at least in the US, the cold war and our electoral system and culture's totalizing nature has conditioned us into drastically overemphasizing ideology as a factor in people's decisions and reasoning, especially of our outgroups. This tendency, kind of a groupwise variant of what's called the Fundamental Attribution Error, is a common failure of human reasoning, but this culture has exacerbated that tendency to a large and I think detrimental degree. It's why you see so much propaganda focused on painting various preferences, beliefs, and even inborn traits as inherently ideological in nature

I don't know that it is blind trust in institutions.

I think the problem is primarily what you wrote about "outgroups", where once it is the "other" that is targeted, then people support it. They just don't do the math about how that is happening, what institutions are doing it, or how those policies and methods could eventually be turned against them.

And yeah, there's Fundamental Attribution Error at work. Still, I think there's some more narcissism-spectrum-related logic at work where people don't have the self-reflection to consider that conditions they impose on others could wind up getting imposed on them.

With your feet in the air and your head on the ground ...

Larry Ellison? Alex Karp?

Ad Googlers: Who was the guy sitting next to Trump and Musk lately? The title AI Zar goes to whom exactly?

It's typically labelled "tough on crime" or "pro police"

I really dislike such politically motivated names. People do generally use those terms to promote surveillance, but I can 100% support strong policing (meaning well funded police investigations and community outreach) without abandoning my own rights.

I do want police to be able to investigate potential crimes that our society collectively agreed we don't want to happen. I don't want to give up my rights to privacy, protections against search and seizure, etc.

Both perspectives are inherently political in nature, the nomenclature used is simply representative of the origin perspective.

"Pro police" and "tough on crime" don't accurately describe a view that is actually pro surveillance.

The two former terms are political in nature because they don't accurately describe what they are supporting and instead attempt to put lipstick on a pig, as it were. Sure you could argue that "pro surveillance" is political, and technically any term can be made political, but it does describe the actions being promoted.

I agree, because we share a desire to protect privacy rights. But the topic itself is political, regardless of position or the supposed validity of that position. Fighting for privacy rights is a political position.

That would depend on how you define "pro surveillance." I've talked with plenty of people who support surveillance cameras in public space, are fine with government agencies purchasing private data that would require a warrant for them to collect on their own, and regularly prefer convenience features even when I have tried to share the privacy concerns with how they work.

People can choose whatever they want, my goal isn't to make people want more privacy. I rarely talk about privacy issues with someone and hear them agree or be concerned enough to think twice, they tend to just laugh it off when they talk about something and then immediately see ads for it.

> One thing i don’t understand is how pro-surveillance advocates don’t understand that the moment they are not behind the terminal, they are the target.

I think it's three things; (a) They're just being paid not to care, (b) short-termism, and (c) are naively hoping they get to stay in the club on the other end of the surveillance. Hard to convince nearly anyone to give up short term profit for long term societal benefits.

Cynically I worry we are seeing the decline of democracy and our new overlords are seeing that too (many accelerating it). Surveillance is necessary for control. The AI, mass surveillance, and drone combination is getting pretty scary TBH.

"I have nothing to hide"

Pro-surveillance people were not born one fine day. They were conditioned for a decade making them believe sharing everything about their life is normal.

"What's on your mind?"

Spot on. I've continued to be astonished at how publicly many people choose to live, especially considering all the inevitable negative results which have been well documented for decades and continue to increase.

Except for those in power, of course.

According to some, every generation is insistent to learn the negative results for themselves, which can be counted on to advance the erosion of privacy.

Despite this I do have hope for the current gen who seems more aware.

> Except for those in power, of course.

The horrifying thing is that those people are the real targets. Most people do what they're told and eat their slop. The juiciest fruits of spying come from being able to keep someone out of power, being able to put someone in power, and being able to control people who are in power.

Even when they're targeting consumers, they're targeting the consumers who control the purse, and the wealthiest are the most valuable. Mass surveillance attacks power that poses a threat established power.

Tapping everyone's phone is something that even with AI costs far more than it is worth. That's why you look for other, rougher indicators in order to make lists of people who get expensive surveillance. While "expresses opinions online" might get you on the list, "being a congressperson" is also definitely one of those indicators, or "being an executive at a medium-large business."

We're pretending like the real problem is that they're going to be able to find out that I really like hot dogs and then collude to charge me more for hot dogs online (which definitely is a problem) but the real problem is that you can tap the car of a senator, figure out they're cheating on their husband, and use that to get permission to murder a bunch of people in Ecuador (or Arkansas.) It's a complete loss of power except for the people at the top of the chain.

You can use someone's driving habits and/or phone info in order to set them up to be framed for a murder, or any sort of crime. Accusing people of sexual assault has always been a tool because there's no hard evidence that can be asked for by law enforcement, it's just mind-reading and deciding who you like; and you can trash somebody in the media without ever charging them. Now you have the full gamut of crimes with very convincing circumstantial evidence, and actual data forensic evidence, which can easily be planted.

The West has been run by graft networks, and since WWII it's been gradually flipping to be run by extortion networks. Graft networks are at least bottom-up - you pay for better; extortion networks are top down - you pay to avoid worse. It's a movement from a caricature of democracy to a caricature of dictatorship.

The person who is at the top will not have any cameras pointed at them. There will be no way for you to determine who they are. Their lieutenants will be the most blackmailed people on the planet. Having things that can be used against you, and having the ability to convincingly lie about why you're doing things will be the most valued quality that one can have in your career. We're mostly there already.

They will complain that their kids get threatened online and then demand id verification for everyone. Basically, they cannot and will not take responsibility for their own actions.

Some are conditioned, but I think there will always be a subset of people that just feel like they are the “right people” that everyone else should emulate. The system feels like it’s there to protect them, strong authority makes them feel safe, and they have a strong instinct to conform. They’ve never been on the wrong end of a political witch hunt, colonized, or felt like they were being attacked for wrongthink, so they don’t understand why everyone else can’t just be “good, law-abiding citizens” like them. Seems utterly alien to me, but I’ve known more than a few.

I can’t even imagine the dystopia of the future where you are always on camera and due to LLMs you are constantly being monitored- your actions, your purchases, your social relationships, and you are graded as such constantly. We have the technology for this now, so if someone wanted, they could implement the above dystopia today.

It would be like creating an always present omnipotent God.

It feels like resistance to all this money is futile. Just look around here. All of this shit was built by programmers while we bicker over privacy, security, and surveillance endlessly. You can't fight the obscene big tech compensation.

The pro-surveillance advocates are the ones in government or running these companies. They can put rules in place to exempt themselves from being watched by their own hardware.

If this tech was being used for traffic enforcement then I'm all for it. Unfortunately it seems like people will still be able to browse their phone behind the wheel and run over kids on bikes despite the surveillance

> If this tech was being used for traffic enforcement then I'm all for it.

that would create hell on earth.

The people whose job to do this are the police, and it should not be delegated in this dystopian way, let alone by your own possessions.

The world has collectively agreed to let the kids die. Old are eating the kid's earnings and putting them in more debt than any generation ever. Then there is the world itself is boiling and we are the frogs

Why would it be okay for traffic enforcement?

The issue with privacy violations isn't how it is being used today, its how it may be used later and the precedent it sets for future invasions of privacy.

This is why I really want self-driving vehicles to take off.

It has been demonstrated repeatedly that modern cars can be remotely hijacked and controlled as well. We really do live in a dystopia.

That would be quite shocking. Links?

>Cybersecurity experts hack and take remote control of SUV (2015)

https://youtu.be/DoP71LeQt3o?si=eSWRTaBYmzAOPWEz

Old article: https://www.wired.com/2015/07/hackers-remotely-kill-jeep-hig...

Fast forward to today: getting access to the canbus (e.g. via headlights) allow you to steal the car: https://www.theregister.com/security/2023/04/06/how-thieves-...

Given the integration of these modules, is it that weird that you could send signals the other way?

> Given the integration of these modules, is it that weird that you could send signals the other way?

No, but there are simple solutions to this: a firewall, which is how this has been fixed on some cars.

You trust car makers to get that right?

You trust state actors to not force them to not get it right?

I don't trust any of them -- I simply commented on the fact that it is a solvable problem.

Shocking?

Why would it be shocking?

It would be shocking if it weren't possible. Being a car does not confer any sort of magical protection against hacking because "it's just a car" or something.

https://www.ioactive.com/remote-exploitation-of-an-unaltered...

https://blackhat.com/docs/us-17/thursday/us-17-Nie-Free-Fall...

https://i.blackhat.com/Asia-25/Asia-25-Evdokimov-Remote-Expl...

Discussed 2 days ago at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49926628

is anyone aware of a public db where you can check how much info a car shares with the manufacturer,insurance etc based on make, model, year?

Even just knowing whether the car has a wireless connectivity device (i.e. modem or Wi-Fi chip) would be useful, since those were probably added at different times for different manufacturers.

These articles are useless because where is the search bar that lets me plug in my make/model and look at the specific results like cool research guys thanks for burying the lede in 3000k words

They talk about each manufacturer is different and the cars they make are all different. You can’t test a Lexus 350 and assume it’s the same as a 350h or 350h+. They tested a handful of cars and it cost a million usd.

Their point is that relying on consumer privacy groups to foot the bill for data collection is hard and we (at citizens) are owed transparency from auto manufacturers

These tests never cover the actually interesting cars: chinese models. Yes, western companies are wallowing in a swamp of ad sueveilance, but what's the data on companies like BYD? Because I read their EULA and it sounded pretty okay. They also didn't come preloaded with youtube or other distraction apps that tempt you to have video running for the driver. (if you can install them at all, considering the model I saw couldn't, but was clearly android)

1790689980 | Car is a smartphone on wheels. Here's who's listening | https://automatictransmission.khoury.northeastern.edu/ | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49893296 | 0 comments

1790695765 | Car's data privacy problems are worse than you think | https://www.theverge.com/transportation/1001463/car-data-pri... | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49895015 | 1 comment

1790707497 | Car Is Sharing Data with Big Tech | https://www.consumerreports.org/electronics/personal-informa... | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49898395 | 1 comment

1790886207 | Automatic Transmission a data-privacy study of connected vehicles | https://automatictransmission.khoury.northeastern.edu/index.... | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49926628 | 219 comments

1790886283 | 19 Out of 21 Late-Model Cars Tested Shared Data with 3rd Parties | https://www.roadandtrack.com/news/a73941763/personal-data-ve... | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49926641 | 1 comment

1790928399 | Cars Are Sharing Data with Big Tech Companies, Study Finds | https://www.consumerreports.org/electronics/personal-informa... | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49931034 | 0 comments o

Related report of polish think tank, focused on Chinese surveillance: https://www.osw.waw.pl/en/publikacje/osw-report/2025-12-17/s...

What is interesting, title is exactly the same

I obtained my data via GDPR request from Audi. Despite having disabled telemetry and location services, remote access and so on on certain date, the car kept sending every destination address I wrote on the navigator to the motherbase. Other location tracking services did stop (i.e. no live positioning).

I'm still clarifying the purpose of this before making a complaint to the data authority.

My car infotainment UI clarifies that it has offline routing and online traffic-aware routing. The latter sends destinations to the mothership.

Reasonable explanation. Why would they store them though once the traffic info is provided? I was hoping it has a "purpose", i.e. making the voice assistant more intelligent/helpful. But I need to ask about it.

It's another revenue stream for the car company. Data brokers love car telemetry and GPS data and the car companies know it. Both parties have struck up a rather cosy relationship: https://www.forbes.com/sites/adamtanner/2013/07/10/data-brok...

Can you describe the process of the GDPR request?

You write to the email address in the privacy policy and ask for your data. Your LLM can assist in making it sound formal.

There are no specific opt outs. Either you allow everything or navigation doesn’t work etc.

Why rely on your car's built-in software for navigation? Smartphone navigation is going to be a lot better (in my experience) and Google, Apple privacy terms are greatly superior.

Navigation is one example. There are music/front/rear cameras/controls/others. Not all controls have physical buttons.

Huh? My 2019 vehicles have GPS that works completely without data uplink. Trouble is map updates (distributed on SD cards) are being discontinued in favor of cellular subscription services that don’t work in the desert.

> works completely ... Trouble is map updates

Do you hear yourself?

Until last year I had a 2014 car that was like his. Not having map updates is fine. The tech companies have conditioned us to believe that if we don't have streaming maps with details updated every three minutes, we'll all get lost and die.

99.99999904% of roads don't change that much.

People used to navigate with decade-old paper maps stuffed in their glove boxes and nobody died because of it.

The few times when I found myself driving on I-11, which my car didn't know about, it was a novelty, not a crisis. I didn't drive off the road because the screen told me the road didn't exist. I used common sense and followed the signs.

I don't know if the above post had an edit, but it says "distributed on SD cards" now. My cheap ~5yo car is the same, I can only update the maps via USB. The navigation still works, but is a lot worse/more out of date than any smartphone app where I live. Although even google maps barely works around here.

I was looking at Renault electric cars recently.

I was pleased to that you can use the navigation with a data collection opt-out. I was less pleased to see that they sneaked a "safety and maintenance" clause into the terms. The information they gather for that gets shared with insurance companies, social networks and data brokers.

There's no hiding in modern car it seems. I was hoping for better from a French company operating under GDPR but no.

You can't win, with all the car companies pulling this crap it's like fighting a surveillance cartel.

The only thing to do is keep my old car for as long as possible.

I don't think it's legal in EU. ePD essentially forbids reading information from the terminal equipment (like car) unless it's "strictly necessary in order for the provider of an information society service explicitly requested by the subscriber or user to provide the service". Even "safety and maintenance" would be hard to classify as strictly necessary for navigation.

Of course to enforce it you would need to complain to regulator in your country who then likely just tells them to stop it and that decision becomes effective years later after appeals. Many countries don't even fines for ePD violations.

A great opt-out would be "no screens".

I don't want a lit-up screen in the car.

I'd like to have a radio kill switch be required on all devices. The reason is that eventually, things that emit RF energy could be targeted by drones. That scares me.

You envisage a world where drones are flying around shooting at cars and you're more scared about being targeted yourself than such a world?

Unless you drive an vintage diesel car, there's a lot more RF coming from other parts of your car than the cell radios.

My car still uses 3G, so not much listening to it anymore.. although oddly enough, when I drive into the dealership, they automatically download vehicle statuses.

I'm the same in my car but luckily for us they can grab the data over the OBD2 port when they do the servicing. :(

On a BMW a lot of stuff is synced on the key, and the rest of the information can be pulled over ODB2.

At first I bought used cars because I was young and didn’t have any money. Later, I bought used because of the savings, and because it made getting a manual transmission easier. Now we still buy used, but avoiding this kind of thing is top of mind.

Our three family vehicles are 2016, 2016, and 2007. Somehow we live without built-in nav, CarPlay, and hundreds of square inches of screen space. At the rate things are going, I’ll probably live out my life without getting anywhere close to a new vehicle.

Think about it please, everyone. Do you need this stuff? Really need it?

Carplay in the beater is nice. My 2002 Acura feels great with it. Gonna drive it into the ground. Atoto makes an okay head unit for the cost.

I think I squeezed a few more years out of my girls Camry by adding a backup camera for her. Not too expensive, $150 bucks maybe…

May you beat your beater for many miles!

I’ve been constantly telling everyone I know about this since the patriot act was signed and basically 100% of people don’t care in my experience

They just want to be able to connect their phone and have their music/video available and think that because they are “not doing anything wrong” they don’t “have anything to fear”

I’m glad this site exists so I can just send it to people directly

Nice work but I wonder whether the methodology is sufficient (and, yes, I skimmed through the paper's Section 3.2).

Well, just the fact that you don't pay for the monthly cellular subscription these cars use should tell you all you need to know about who's the product in this situation.

Even if you pay, that doesn't change anything.

Implying that payment will stop the tracking is a red herring.

If you do have control over paying for it then you could conceivably stop and cancel it. I don't think they want to take that chance.

Most of these services do have paid subscriptions, but the connections are active regardless of whether or not you pay.

Ergo, you don't pay for the celular link.

It doesn't need to be or should be though.

I recently sold my Lincoln Navigator and bought a used 2005 Honda Odyssey (single owner before me, 115K miles and well taken care of). Good luck trying to spy on me. It doesnt even have bluetooth let alone all the other smarttech crap. Good old CD player and Radio.

Good luck trying to spy on me.

Unless your Navigator doesn't have tires, they're still spying on you.

The only way to mitigate that is to not use credit cards in the same place you drive. Especially malls, strip malls, and drive-through restaurants.

It was a tongue in cheek comment. No one can win the surveillance battle with today's tech. I have given up on that a while ago but I do try to protect whatever I can.

>No one can win the surveillance battle with today's tech.

It's remarkable to me how many brilliant people here refuse to acknowledge this, believing that a zillion hacks and work-arounds can keep them off the surveillance grid. That ship sailed a long, long time ago.

Cash is great for small purchases while out and about, and it feels good to not leave a digital purchase paper trail. Use cash before it gets outlawed!

how can i buy some of this data? i want to know who is driving on specific roads at specific times.

This is why I buy cars older than 2015.

Perhaps you should choose an earlier cutoff date:

>Cybersecurity experts hack and take remote control of SUV (2015)

https://youtu.be/DoP71LeQt3o?si=eSWRTaBYmzAOPWEz

It's funny you including your tracking token so Google can associate your with a graph of everyone who clicks on the link (?si=)

You really need to look up the car and a lot of people sell replacement harnesses to terminate the built-in modems with resistors.

Sometimes if you hit the sweet spot, the car has a built in modem but its on 3G or EDGE networks that have been dismantled. There are several Subaru's like this. They no longer can connect to a network or transmit data.

Personally, I'd like to see someone salvage one of these modems and try to reverse engineer it for free Internet. It will probably be low speed and they might be locked to certain hosts, but I bet you could find some way to tunnel traffic on them.

>It's funny you including your tracking token so Google can associate your with a graph of everyone who clicks on the link (?si=)

You/HN: That's important to know

Normies/non-techies: Not only do we not understand your above-quoted statement, it might as well be written in Urdu.

My 1997 Range Rover has no screens and only 195,000 miles on the clock. I'm good for another decade or so.

My 1999 was so rusted that I had to junk it. My 2024 is about the same yearly costs to have because nothing is worn out or rusted away. (EV is also a lot cheaper fuel)

I've never seen one with a bad boot floor, but I need to do mine. Extra hassle because the propane tank needs to come out.

With diesel the price it is, driving a 4.6 litre V8 that runs on propane is like driving a diesel that gets over 45mpg.

Currently enjoying, and keeping alive, my 2001 Dodge Grand Caravan...

I might never connect my phone to a car again. It's easy to use a fan stand for the phone instead, and it works more reliably too. I would uninstall or disable the associated apps.

[dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49926628

Reply on news.ycombinator.com