It’s so frustrating that if you buy a modern car you have to give up any semblance of privacy
I appreciate my 12 yr old car for this reason. Also, physical buttons I can hit without taking my eyes off the road
2012 prius-c, physical air-conditioning temp knob, physical buttons for everything. Added CarPlay receiver, and it’s the perfect vehicle. No electronic “syncing” to be done. Just works.
My 2021 Seat Leon has this idiotic panel on the semi underside of the dash on the left side of the steering wheel.
It controls the headlight modes, fog lights, and, most annoyingly, front and rear de-mist, all controlled by touch buttons.
So if you are driving and the windows are fogging up for some reason, you need to take your eyes off the road and carefully touch only the two buttons for de-misting.
I counter the privacy crap with a constant stream of podcasts when I drive…
Yeah I’ve always believed in tactile feedback for driving safety. Which is why I love my Jeep Wrangler without the fancy features. Analog dash, keyed ignition, manual locks, windows, seats. Dials, knobs, handshift. I only have the backup camera since it became required lol
My 2009 Outback Wagon died on me this past summer 😭😭😭
Yep. I’m stuck driving cars from the mid-2000s at the latest because it’s a deal-breaker for me.
I’d love to have an electric car, but because they’re all newer than that (except for some really rare compliance/fleet-only cars from the '90s with NiMH batteries, like the Ford Ranger and first-gen RAV4), I’d have to convert an ICE car to electric myself.
“Privacy researchers at the Mozilla Foundation in September warned in a report that “modern cars are a privacy nightmare,” noting that 92 percent give car owners little to no control over the data they collect, and 84 percent reserve the right to sell or share your information. (Subaru tells WIRED that it “does not sell location data.”)”
Such a statement about not selling data can be very misleading, because the essential statement of saying “we do not share your location data” does not seem to have been made! Please, let us stop falling for the trick of companies saying that they do not sell our data as somehow equating to them respecting our privacy, because it is not an equivalence.
“While we worried that our doorbells and watches that connect to the Internet
might be[are] spying on us, car brands quietly entered the data business by turning their vehicles into powerful data-gobbling machines,” Mozilla’s report reads.“People are being tracked in ways that they have no idea are happening.”
“the minute you hook up your phone to Bluetooth, it automatically downloads all the information off your phone, which is sent back to the vehicle manufacturer.”
“if you want to protect the data on your phone, don’t connect it to the car.”
I assume, “does not sell location data,” is like the government which “does not sell laws,” but ‘our 884 lobbying partners’ can have influence.
the minute you hook up your phone to Bluetooth, it automatically downloads all the information off your phone
But this I’m skeptical of. What data does it get from the phone? Bluetooth you can allow it to have your call history, right? And maybe contacts? At least you can choose, I think?
Someone is going to exploit this to make a great lesbian dating app
"Intercept hot singles in your area! On their way home from work!
No, it’s not creepy at all!"
Remember when hyundais could be unlocked with just a usb cable and a phone? And hyundai wanted people to pay for the fix after breaking into hyundais became a trend on tiktok.
Nobody’s mentioned that the vulnerability was “immediately” fixed (within 24h according to a comment on a related post in the cybersecurity community). Like, the fact that this is even possible to begin with is obviously bullshit, and makes me wish I’d ripped the starlink box out of my car, but this is not the rampant and actively exploited thing that the headline would have me believe it is.
Good to know if I ever need to find out where my lesbian cousin is.
We should all start asking around our local auto shops that handle software and ask if they disable gps or internet services.
It’s not illegal to modify your own vehicle (yet) so jailbreaking these shitty cars would be an awesome service.
I doubt there would be any auto shops that can reliably deal with software side elements that aren’t the dealership, and the dealership would refuse.
True, much easier to remove the antennas and SIM cards.
Until you find out the cars won’t start without them :(
We’re in a scary new world… I’m glad I’m old with no kids and not in great health.
Yeah, Subaru can have the Starlink disabled pretty easily by removing, essentially, a module behind the head unit. The only problem is that module also sends power to the front speakers. There’s been workarounds created, but it’s just asshole design at its finest.
If it’s like “OnStar” where you could call for help, or they’d call you in an accident. I suspect that’s why it was done :(
Yeah, good point, perhaps there is some engineering rationale for having them powered the same, so that the speakers are guaranteed to work as long as the Starlink does.
I assume that it isn’t much technical knowhow to take a pair of wire snips and snip the power or antenna to the OnStar services. Least I assume that is what would be done
You mean stuff like chiptuning? People do that all the time?
