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!
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
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
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.
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).
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.
So what you’re saying is… don’t wear any panties. Useful advice. scribbles in a notebook
But also the defeatest logic of ‘it is useless because everyone else is accepting it’ is so ew. Think about if nobody ever made adblocking capabilities ‘because it is too late and we are inundated, so why even try’, if nobody ever self-hosted anything because ‘they have all our info already so what’s the point of stopping now’, if everyone jumped for joy at airport security checkpoints with fingerprint, cameras and biometric scans since ‘fighting the system is useless’. shivers
Resistance may not be a tidal wave of change immediately, but if we don’t push back against stuff, we are 100% fucked. And not the fun kind.
Yeah this is true. My partner’s car has a front facing camera that easily has enough resolution to ID license plates. Rear cam too. It could very easily log the plate and an image of every car that drives near it. No amount of (legally) wrapping your car in tinfoil will stop someone else’s vehicle from reporting your movements.
I’ve had a thought I’d love to have a chance to try one day…
I’d like to see about not only disconnecting the antenna, but also basically wrap the cellular circuit module in metal screen, basically a crude Faraday Cage.
I’ve never had any chance to try such a thing, but I can only imagine it would probably do the trick.
Edit: For those that believe this will cause the vehicle to malfunction or even brick itself, have you never drove through a tunnel and found you lost Internet? Your vehicle won’t stop functioning just because it lost Internet, it literally cannot do that.
That would be like the absolutely most unsafe thing any vehicle could ever do, to stop functioning because of an internet connection failure.
Or the car just doesn’t start one day because it hasn’t connected to its server in a month, forcing you to go to the dealer to fix it. Why do you so fervently believe a manufacturer wouldn’t resort to tactics like this that they already employ for other systems? It’s naive to think that manufacturers would never remotely disable a car in full or in part because it has been modified without authorization. If it profits them, they physically can, and no regulation prevents it, they will. Right to repair is a nice movement, that I fully support, but it’s very very far from a universal right anywhere.
Or the car just doesn’t start one day because it hasn’t connected to its server in a month, forcing you >to go to the dealer to fix it.
You are exaggerating, a manufacturer can’t do that. The simple reason is that lots of people live (or spend part of the year) in places where the only internet access is through satellite, this is specially true in big countries. The most probable thing they do is to save all the data until there is internet connection available to send it.
You seem to be confused about the difference between can and will. I don’t believe every or even most manufacturers would actually do this, but pretending that they cannot do it (or something like it) purely due to market pressure is naive.
So only thing is they might just store all the data locally and send it when they get reception again. Microsoft Word used to do this with “Aria”
Do you not understand what a Faraday Cage is or does? It literally blocks radio frequencies.
Cover the module in a metal screen, block any and all data transmission and reception, without even altering the electronics.
And the vehicle ain’t got much other choice but to keep functioning as expected anyways, as it’s expected to have signal loss at times anyways.
Edit: If you think losing internet connection is gonna break your vehicle, well God forbid you ever drive through a tunnel…
My concern is that Faraday cages have limitations and you should think about mitigations
Driving through a tunnel is a short break in connectivity. These things are probably built in such a way that they’ll brick after not being able to connect for an extended period since not working due to a short disconnect would give the brand a bad reputation after happening a few times.
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
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.
