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!
You could, but some antenna are printed onto circuit boards so disabling them without breaking the board entirely will be interesting.
With that Mozilla study out I hope some car manufacturers get sent some very pointed questions by government regulators.
Not so easy to rip your dashboard apart to wrap things in screening though. Nor should a person have to considering the tens of thousands of dollars they already paid for something.
Who said the computer components you’re looking for are in the dash? I mean I’ll be honest, I dunno about these modern vehicles, but vehicles I’ve worked on in the past have the main computer in weird unexpected places like under the driver’s seat or in the passenger side cowell area.
I do get your point though, yes such modifications might be simple on paper, but cost quite a bit in labor to actually accomplish.
Regardless, I’ve done dashboards too, even drove my car around for a day with the entire dash completely missing, because I needed to drive it to the store during service that took me two days.
Hooray for dumb cars!
Never thought I’d see a day where people feel compelled to circumsize their cars
I’ve always done this, it reduces the cars sensitivity so it lasts longer
Hmmm… something must be wrong with mine, it’s very vigorous but doesn’t last that long.
All that matters is that you like the car, and that it is trying its best <3
Just ask the dealer to disconnect the modem upon purchase.
Better yet, refuse to buy shit you don’t own and make this known. Go to the dealer force them to stand around while you read the privacy agreement. Use an attorney because they have stupid legal agreements. Waste everyone’s time because they are the ones doing this to you. It must cost profit. Then walk away from this bullshit. Tell them why you are walking away.
All of this exists because people are too stupid to care. If you ignore this, you are one of them, and part of the problem. Legal agreements are theft and slavery. Signing them blindly is the stupidest thing you can ever do in your life. Anyone that needs a legal agreement for you to make a purchase is a worthless criminal. Signing their bullshit is saying you are okay with being their little slave bitch.
Waste everyone’s time because they are the ones doing this to you
I agree with your intentions, but no, the person working at the car dealership is not doing this to you. That person is just trying to get by, they’re not the MBA executive trying to squeeze every dollar out of humanity who you should be targeting
Maybe not, but they are the one who keeps leaving me alone in their office for 15 minutes at a time to “go ask their manager” if our negotiations are ok and they are the one who pretends to settle on a price with me and then tries to hard-sell me on all sorts of useless addons. And at they end of the day they are the one that turns making a purchase into a 4-hour process.
It has to irritate the GM of the dealership enough to file a report and work its way up the chain to the top. Unfortunately this is capitalism. It is no different than the military in that it sucks to be the person at the bottom of the shit pile but they work for criminals. If they don’t like it, quit working for criminals. Yes it is pervasive. But we are the problem. We are funding and enabling these people. You must make it extremely well known that you have money and you are not spending it because of this bullshit. No one else controls the market. We fund the entire thing with what we are willing to ignore and make excuses for. We must burn it to the ground too. That means stop being nice about the person working for the thief. Sorry; not sorry.
It has to irritate the GM of the dealership enough to file a report and work its way up the chain to the top.
I think you think the manager of a dealership is going to care a lot more than you think they will. More likely they’re going to just ask you to leave after you start acting like a dick to their staff.
You must make it extremely well known that you have money and you are not spending it because of this bullshit.
By causing a scene you are going to affect no change, more likely you’ll end up being mocked on Tik Tok. Write a letter to corporate explaining your decisions, sure, or petition for state or federal legislation; otherwise spend your money elsewhere. Only by funding alternatives are you going to impact the market outside of regulation
Like the other person said, you are confusing the dealership and the manufacturer. This is the equivalent of those people that yelled at the teenagers working at chik filet. The dealership will just say they don’t create those rules and you’d have to take it up with the manufacturer, then ask you to leave. If you don’t leave and act like a jerk, they’ll just call the cops and have you escorted off premises.
Except it’s really not. Most of the dealerships around are thinly veiled fronts for the manufacturers. The salespeople are shills and scam artists who are specifically hired for their ability to pull the wool over people’s eyes. That poor sap working at Chik-fil-A is some minimum-wage kid who is about as complicit in the greater organization than the mop is. Dealerships are a mouthpiece for the very manufacturers who are patenting ways to make your care self repossess and are charging subscriptions for basic functions that are built into the cars.
The comparison is shallow and not at all reasonable.
To put it simply, this may not even be something they can do legally. For instance, when the mach E came out they were having serious electrical issues. The electric battery has it’s own junction box. So much current was flowing through the contacts that they ended up fusing themselves open or closed. That basically disabled the vehicle. It was fixed with an OTA update. The update works through the same antennas and network you’re talking about. If a vehicle can’t receive an OTA and it affects the security of the vehicle/driver or poses a danger on public roads? Might be out of compliance with NHTSA or other authorities of similar spec in other countries.
https://www.nhtsa.gov/technology-innovation/vehicle-cybersecurity
They have no rights to anything I own. What they ship the vehicle with is what I bought. I don’t give a shit about anything anyone has to say about this. This feudalism bullshit is the absolute antithesis of freedom. I am not for sale.
I didn’t say they had a right to your data. I’m not defending them. I’m pointing out that cars these days (new ones especially) are as much device as they are machinery. And you absolutely do not want someone hacking your vehicle. And neither does the regulating federal authority in your country. As a result they put certain laws in place that may protect you from this possibility (being hacked), but also leave you open to being taken advantage of by the automaker (having your data taken without your permission).
The manufacturer that i work for has esims built into every vehicle they build that cannot be removed without bricking the vehicle. I feel like this is pretty much industry standard at this point. They used to have a removable sim, but there was an esim along side that so you could not completely disconnect.
Edit: added words
Then block the signal with a Faraday Cage.
I see I’m getting downvoted for my comments about this, but the vehicle will not fail due to a lack of internet connection. Otherwise your vehicle would brick itself anytime you drive through a tunnel.
Go ahead, look it up. It’s about as simple as wrapping the cellular device with metal screen.
Jesus. Any idea how old a car I’d have to buy to be realtively certain it wasn’t phoning home?
I wish I were a billionaire. I would literally start a company that made cars, phones, tech of all kinds on the basic premise that I don’t give a fuck about you or your data. Make it private. Make it have no EULA that says anything beyond IP protections. Make it so consumers never have to worry about underhanded bullshit. Sure, I may not make tons of money, but I think I could be happy turning a small profit, paying employees fairly, and knowing that I am selling better products and undercutting all the assholes to send them careening directly I to the ground.
To become a billionaire you can’t have a moral compass from the start so it’s hard to imagine. I wish you well though, hope to buy one of your devices in future
Closest we have to a “unicorn” billionaire with some sort of moral compass is Linus Torvalds, if you ask me.
They thing to do is buy the rights to old designs, then open source them and sell them. It pisses me off no end I can’t find system diagrams, schematics or source code to think I apparently “own”. It keeps everyone ignorant and throwing stuff away to keep buying new. And now, with all going online, turns everything to a privacy nightmare . When the manufacture moves on to the next shiny, it will become part of internet of infected things botnets.
Bruh. Hold down the setup button. No more single tone screams of your meal is ready.
If that doesn’t work, there should be instructions for your brand online.
