Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Carmakers Will Give Your Location to Police Without a Warrant, Senators Say

thedrive.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 198 posts

Re: Carmakers Will Give Your Location to Police Without a Warrant, Senators Say

#101

Post by kristopolous »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #9

Your location isn't that big a deal. They can easily get that from License Plate Readers. What will be interesting, is if they ever use the data to give you tickets. I know that there was a discussion of a plan to use the New Jersey Turnpike tollbooths/EZ-Pass to judge speed between two points, and mail you a ticket. I don't think it ever made it out of the starting gate.

Those aren't equivalencies. This method can be done at scale, zero cost, reliably and indiscriminately.

Tracking plates is a lot more work.

The problem with police is their power asymmetry and potential for abuse. Tools like this increase that. Additionally, they aren't just random people from the public, they're the people that desired to do policing for motivations which may or may not be healthy.

Re: Carmakers Will Give Your Location to Police Without a Warrant, Senators Say

#102

Post by CivBase »

hiatus wrote: post #59
exe34 wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the issue is that eventually they'll just make the car not start without it. it's like your inkjet printer refusing to print black and white because it's run out of yellow.

That sounds like it would have profound safety implications.

Pretty hard to get into a vehicle collision if you can't start the vehicle.

Re: Carmakers Will Give Your Location to Police Without a Warrant, Senators Say

#103

Post by JohnFen »

ru552 wrote: post #36
JohnFen wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> As far as I know, there is no (legal) way to deactivate OnStar or similar GPS trackers built into cars. I'm not aware of any law (in the US) that prohibits you from disabling these things in a vehicle you own. Is it actually illegal?

It's not illegal, it's just that it doesn't allow it in the UI. Who do you call to have that service disabled? No one knows. The best you can do is talk to someone and have the auto renewal turned off. That doesn't turn off the existing service until the renewal period hits though.

It doesn't matter what the UI allows, I'm talking about physically disabling it. I wouldn't trust a software setting about this.

> Who do you call to have that service disabled? No one knows.

If you're not too squeamish about this sort of thing, you could likely find out how to disable this yourself in your vehicle with a web search.

If you aren't comfortable with that, I'd bet that any serious motorhead would likely be able to help, as would any independent auto shop.

Re: Carmakers Will Give Your Location to Police Without a Warrant, Senators Say

#104

Post by bingguistics »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #85
placatedmayhem wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the other hand, Tesla has some notably, egregious incidents, including the reportedly-regular sharing of videos on internal messaging until at least 2022. https://www.reuters.com/technology/tesla-workers-shared-sens... Mozilla report has more: https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/privacynotincluded/tesla/ It's troubling that basically every major auto maker has some flavor of privacy invasive tech that can't be turne…

I'm not going to boil the ocean in a single thread, but recognize that there is nuance, lots of work ahead, and that consumer rights must be robust with punitive costs for willful negligence. There will always be control failures. If you're fine losing the functionality, pull the RF on your Tesla until laws catch up. I have managed the risk within my threat model, and accept the remaining risk. If all else fails, I w…

[dead]

Re: Carmakers Will Give Your Location to Police Without a Warrant, Senators Say

#105

Post by neuralRiot »

moduspol wrote: post #68
ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From what I understand, LPRs are very precise; especially the car-mounted ones that I see around here. The biggest issue with LPRs, is the private corporations that run the infrastructure, sell the data to non-law enforcement people. Basically, license plates were designed to give authorities the ability to match the car with an owner, and are designed to be public, but the matching data is supposed to be behind a lo…

A LPR will tell you when a car was at a specific spot, but it won't tell you where a car is at all times. The difference may be inconsequential in dense urban areas, but it's not where I live.

Another thing that people usually forget is that a phone or a car are not a person. “Your” car being at some place doesn’t mean “you” being there. Same as a owning the murder weapon doesn’t make you directly guilty of the crime only a suspect.

Re: Carmakers Will Give Your Location to Police Without a Warrant, Senators Say

#106

Post by 83 »

tjohns wrote: post #80
toomuchtodo wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tesla does not divulge your location to law enforcement without a warrant, and stands out amongst other automakers who simply hand it over. They also were one of few automakers who wasn't selling your data to LexisNexis Risk Solutions for insurance pricing. https://www.tesla.com/legal/privacy https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/11/technology/carmakers-driv... | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39666976 https://www.ft…

> They also were one of few automakers who wasn't selling your data to LexisNexis Risk Solutions for insurance pricing. I don't understand how this practice is legal. There really should be a way to request that my driving data is deleted, or at least opt-out from having it sold. I've also been trying to get LexisNexis to share a copy of my consumer file with me - which they refuse to do because of "identity verifica…

I've encountered the same difficulty trying to get my data from LexisNexis Risk Solutions, and I too suspect this is intentional. Though my recollection is the form allowed me to enter some identity verification info like ssn or dob, but whatever I entered wasn't sufficient for them.

Re: Carmakers Will Give Your Location to Police Without a Warrant, Senators Say

#107

Post by SoftTalker »

eichin wrote: post #28
ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #9

Your location isn't that big a deal. They can easily get that from License Plate Readers. What will be interesting, is if they ever use the data to give you tickets. I know that there was a discussion of a plan to use the New Jersey Turnpike tollbooths/EZ-Pass to judge speed between two points, and mail you a ticket. I don't think it ever made it out of the starting gate.

With MA ez-pass, the enabling legislation specifically forbade the use of it for speed patrolling. (This may have been limited to i-90 which was the only thing that used it at the time.)

Wnen they implemented seat-belt laws, they (in at least some places) said that it would not be used as the primary reason to pull you over, it would be a secondary infraction. That changed. They can tell you whatever you need to hear to get you to vote for it, then change the law later.

Re: Carmakers Will Give Your Location to Police Without a Warrant, Senators Say

#108

Post by JohnFen »

HeatrayEnjoyer wrote: post #62
PaulHoule wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's got to be a fuse to pull.

IIRC in some vehicles it is part of the ECM and can't be disabled without also effectively disabling the entire engine.

There still has to be an antenna somewhere in a location where it can avoid all the EM interference. It seems like disconnecting that would be sufficient.

Re: Carmakers Will Give Your Location to Police Without a Warrant, Senators Say

#109

Post by adamomada »

Zigurd wrote: post #35
steelframe wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can probably just enable Airplane Mode on your phone and expect that to work fine.

It's been since 3G that I delved into baseband specs in any depth, but I would not trust a powered up phone not to be commanded to connect to a network.

Couldn’t this easily be proven by monitoring transmission power from the device? There are all sorts of people who go on vacation and use the switch to avoid roaming charges. It would be plainly obvious to those people that their supposedly offline phone went online when they look at their bill. Or is there some secret apn bypass?

Re: Carmakers Will Give Your Location to Police Without a Warrant, Senators Say

#110

Post by kevin_thibedeau »

jstanley wrote: post #41
worik wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> As far as I know, there is no (legal) way to deactivate OnStar or similar GPS trackers Naively... Is it illegal to cut the power to the GPS unit? I do not see why a car needs a GPS built in. So why can I not simply disable it? What am I missing?

It's inside a complicated box that you can't reach.

That complicated box has an antenna. Disconnect (and ideally terminate) the input and no more spying.
Post reply on HN