I don’t know anything about cars.
Now that we have established that cars seriously undermine our privacy (look at the flurry of posts in this community in the last few hours), what can we do about it?
From a networking POV, if you remove the ability to connect to the Internet, it doesn’t matter what the car is recording as long as you can ensure there is no physical tampering. Depending on who you are, this is a good idea, and doable for the most part (very few people have the technical knowledge to pull out the right chip from a car).
So, how do we achieve this? I implore the community to invite mechanical/car engineers who can help us on this matter, and to form methods to prevent vehicles from accessing the Internet without express consent from the user.
Thanks!
Never thought I’d see a day where people feel compelled to circumsize their cars
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Oh, like updog
Sincerely, the best thing consumers can do is to drive dumb cars and use them for as long as possible (cars aren’t like phones, and can work reliably for over a decade).
I just bike to work.
The best thing to do is to demand better public transportation and walk ability. We’ll always have some cars but we should move away from car dependence anyways.
How exactly are cars connecting to the internet? Cell providers give them free data?
the oems pay for it. some offer basic features for free but charge for features like music streaming.
It’s generally not much data. A 1GB/mo SIM with ten years service can be had for less than a €10 if you’re buying in bulk.
I did something like that with my robot vacuum. I opened it up and ripped the soldered-on wifi card. Now I can’t control it from my phone, but it can’t phone home to Shark either. I was willing to risk it for a $400 robot vacuum, which I also happened to have a second defective one to practice on thanks to their return policy. I’m not sure if I’d attempt this on an electronics behemoth worth several thousands of dollars that I can’t afford to lose.
Wouldn’t it have been easier to block it from accessing the internet through a firewall? And having a firewall helps you see what’s going on with the rest of your network.
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A lot of these devices will refuse to complete setup, or will silently do meshnet type stuff with other devices from the same manufacturer just to get the collected data out
Unsure on the sharks but a lot of the roombas have an open source project (ha980?) that lets you run all the Apis locally and cut it off from the internet fully. Mines managed through home assistant now, it’s not perfect but it beats the heck out of that shitty iRobot app
Wrap the car in a large faraday cage? As a general rule it should be assumed that any device with a direct to internet connection capability has the potential to track the user, even of it’s at a very course level like IP history that in theory could be made more precise if the ISP was inclined to keep tabs on a mac address.
My own vehicle has the ability, if not the subscription, to use one of those manufacturer sponsored satilite connections. Plenty of new vehicles have such things as paid DLC and just lock it up behind software but the hardware is still there. Physical interferance through disconnecting the relevant modules in a clean reversible way has potential for some enterprising sort to either open a school or a specialty repair shop. Now of we could just do something about the phone the driver has with them at the same time.
I thought they would disable my esim after the grace period was over, they gave me the option to pay for a subscription and I said “Hell no!”. But I guess I’m more valuable driving that thing than I thought. So yeah, probably only hacking it to disable the esim.
Probably not without bricking your car. I doubt they are gonna tell you how to disable the telemetry, and with how connected the systems are these days, if you break something the whole thing stops working.
I hate that this is even a consideration, but is that even legal?
As far as I’m aware, so long as you have purchased it fully with no payments left on it or any loans used to finance it, there is absolutely nothing the car manufacturer or the place you bought it from can do besides void any warranty you have on it. And that’s if they figure out you removed the component.
Most vehicle head units are still running a low power version of Java 6 and have difficulty with nested levels of DNS CNAMES. I wonder what other problems that Java stack has that can be exploited?
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Not gonna lie; everyone seems to be over-reacting to what is common practice in law documents; terms are overly broad for a reason, and undoubtedly if you dig in the case histories; you’ll probably find an absurd lawsuit or two on the books.
That said; I doubt the car is capable of collecting this data; but they can collect information you freely volunteer to them.
So how do we go about volunteering less information?
You agreed to tue terms in the contract you signed as part of your lease or purchase contract.
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because I don’t need to be part of the problem. I can go remove the gps module and wrap the esim in lead foil because I see the value in that.
