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.
Faraday Cage, read my other top level comment…
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
I don’t think I could have set it up. After it was connected, there’s no way to disconnect it, which seems to be a growing tactic. I’ve seen several TVs that have no WiFi disconnect button.
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
check out Valetudo
Never thought I’d see a day where people feel compelled to circumsize their cars
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Oh, like updog
What’s up dog?
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.
If you own the car; I would say it’s completely reasonable to modify it, as long as its still legaly able to drive after. In Germany your car needs to be regulary checked by TÜV to be street legal.
If this is legal probably depends on where you live, but I would be suprised if it’s illegal in any developed country. (Im not a lawyer btw.)
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 if we could just do something about the phone the driver has with them at the same time.
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?
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.
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.
I understand the difference but they never are going to do that for the same reason that they have never and they never will block your phone if its not connected to the internet, there are personal security reasons, they cannot leave you with an unusable phone or car. Even people who dont give a fuck about privacy wouldn’t accept something like that, they would go bankrupt.
I understand the difference
Proceeds to conflate ability and willingness again.
You sound like a corporate chat bot stuck in a rhetorical loop.
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.
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I think they mean it would cache the data and release it if you ever had to remove the screen for whatever reason.
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.
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).
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.
I just bike to work.
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 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.
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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.
