this post was submitted on 29 Feb 2024
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Privacy
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one of the many reasons I don't want to buy an EV (or any vehicle that touts an overly "smart" feature set)
I was thinking about buying a new car right when the Mozilla article about car privacy intrusion came out, and I decided to hang onto what I have forever.
I mean people love the classics for a reason, privacy is just an added bonus of having an awesome classic car.
Mine is definitely not a classic, but it's also probably not spying on me.
Every new vehicle is like this. Why call out EVs specifically?
Because traditional cars were a thing before spying technology was available. EVs only became widely available when spying was already a common practice.
That is - I don't think "buying an older car" is a longterm viable option, older ones would become harder to maintain as years go by. My main hope now is that people would find ways to physically rip the cellular connecticity devices out of cars and/or install privacy-focused OSs on them.
because they're notorious for this kind of data collection. My car is older so maybe I've just been out of the market for so long and haven't realized how bad this problem is. Sounds like I will be sticking to my older car for as long as I can lol
If you have any car with a modern suite of entertainment/nav/tech packages (which you personally do not I get that) you are a victim of this.
https://www.theverge.com/2023/9/6/23861047/car-user-privacy-report-mozilla-foundation-data-collection
ah crap. I don't use all the "Uconnect" garbage on my 9 year old Jeep, but it does appear though the dealer can collect (read: steal) info if I bring it in (I do maintenance myself but I have brought it in for recall fixes before). As far as "smart" stuff goes, I do connect my phone via bluetooth but I run GrapheneOS on my mobile so hopefully this mitigates some stuff. I've always thought it was just cars with data connections and cameras/self-driving modules that were the problem (at least in my understanding of networking vis-a-vis my background in network development, but then again cars run different firmware)
So how do newer cars send this info back? Do they have their own transmitters? Or are they uploading data via my wifi while parked in my garage? If so, can I just block the vehicle's MAC on my network?
They have their own transmitters over cellular network.
If you have a car that uses cellular for in-car wifi or any other services (such as Onstar or competing services) that's the way. And it's possible (though I have no idea if it's done) that they could include a cellular connection that isn't available to you as the customer, but is used only for this purpose.
My e-Berlingo is very basic. It can't get remote update, it has to go to the dealship for them. I don't think it has a data connection. Claims to has some, but you can turn it off and I bet it's only for dealership download when it's in for repairs. It can't even keep time. It loses like a minute a week (which is the worse time keeping I've ever seen and I'm getting to be old now). So not doing NTP!
I count it's basicness as a feature not a bug. I just use Android Auto (originally on a de-googled LineageOS and now GrapheneOS with Google sandboxes. I use Organic Maps).