It's perfectly legal for cars to harvest your texts, call logs • Hacker News Board

Re: It's perfectly legal for cars to harvest your texts, call logs

#101

Post by bobim » Thu, Nov 09, 2023, 9:18 PM UTC

kaibee wrote: post #72

bobim wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We live on free energy, free as in "dig a hole and voilà": energy. No nuclear, no solar, no wind can replace the sheer amount of energy we extract out of oil and coal. I’m afraid privacy in cars is going to be the least of humanity’s problems unless we make fusion working.

If only there was some giant naturally occurring fusion reactor that we could siphon a bit of power from to power our things.

Exactly! But if it’s energy density hasn’t increased since the middle age it’s probably only good enough to support middle age lifestyle.

Re: It's perfectly legal for cars to harvest your texts, call logs

#102

Post by mistrial9 » Thu, Nov 09, 2023, 9:21 PM UTC

SenAnder wrote: post #50

nonameiguess wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not an attorney, but I think a lot of the Internet misunderstands the law. It is legal to do this, apparently, but that doesn't mean the court is saying it's okay or they should do this, and it certainly doesn't mean anyone would be okay with you doing it. But if you managed to, then yes, it would apparently be legal. The court can only rule on what the law actually says and it says you only have grounds to sue o…

> It is legal to do this, apparently I am extremely skeptical of this, no matter what this judge says. This seems to be a clear case of illegal wiretapping [1]. Having an illegal act perpetrated upon one, whether it is wiretapping or assault, seems a very clear "injury". It is baffling that there would have to be some kind of financial price attached to be recognized as harm by a court. A disgusting reduction of just…

agree and - the crux here appears to be .. when you are in a moving vehicle on public roads then you have no expectation of privacy -> slippery slope -> license plate readers run by govt 24x7; license plate readers run by parking lots or retail shopping malls; interception of cell traffic via stinger units in strategic locations; interception of the driver's cell phone communications.. etc.

Gov Gavin Newsom preparing to run for President, is OK'ing these uses quickly and without public discussion

Re: It's perfectly legal for cars to harvest your texts, call logs

#103

Post by john61 » Thu, Nov 09, 2023, 9:24 PM UTC

One more reason to use the bicycle.

Re: It's perfectly legal for cars to harvest your texts, call logs

#104

Post by olliej » Thu, Nov 09, 2023, 9:31 PM UTC

adrianmonk wrote: post #98

olliej wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, it's saying that because none of the information is transmitted there isn't a privacy violation - the law requires that a privacy violation actually occur, not that it "could". e.g. that fact that there's a local call/message log on the car, and the car also has a mechanism for transmitting some data, does not mean that there's a privacy violation given that the car does not transmit the call/message log . That's…

> the car also has a mechanism for transmitting some data As far as I can tell, the car itself doesn't have a mechanism for transmitting data. It just stores the data. Transmitting only happens if/when someone gets some Berla "vehicle forensics" hardware and physically connects it to the car. The Berla equipment would do the transmitting. From the complaint linked to by The Register[1]: > 26. Third party Berla Corpor…

I thought the original lawsuit (in addition to the Berla/diagnostics tools extraction method) was also trying to claim that the system supported transmission of a data (which seems a thing in many new cars? crashes and what not?) even though it was in no one transmitting any of this information.

Re: It's perfectly legal for cars to harvest your texts, call logs

#105

Post by grepfru_it » Thu, Nov 09, 2023, 9:38 PM UTC

noman-land wrote: post #75

bri3d wrote: post #15

I dug into the technical details here over the last few days and as usual it's not quite as sinister as the hand wringing: * Automotive head units are just embedded computers. Most run Linux, QNX, or Windows CE, with some proprietary UI system on top. * These machines usually store data in an onboard database in flash (sometimes just SQLite). * Sometimes, phone data is captured using standard Bluetooth mechanisms (Me…

Translation: It is 100% legal for car companies (and by extension just about any company) to, when you connect your phone to them, to download your call and text history and then sell it. By extension, that means it is 100% legal for anyone , including any branch of any government to get a copy of your call and text history.

>By extension, that means it is 100% legal for anyone, including any branch of any government

Always has been

Re: It's perfectly legal for cars to harvest your texts, call logs

#106

Post by hilbert42 » Thu, Nov 09, 2023, 9:39 PM UTC

simbolit wrote: post #92

dylan604 wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It should be policy for the rental company to do this. On more than one occasion, I have received a car with a previous renter's personal data still in the system.

When I am out of town, I sometimes print at copy shops. You'd be amazed what kind of PDFs are left open in Acrobat, just because people are too lazy to close the application. I have seen contracts, bank account statements, residency permits, letters of incorporation, private messages logs, .... All without doing any digging, I just get assigned a computer for printing, turn on the screen, and it's there.

"You'd be amazed what kind of PDFs are left open in Acrobat,"

Observation tells us it's a lost cause to teach people about privacy/security of this type and have the large majority of people observe prudent ways of preventing their data from leaking. We've known about this since before the internet when people would chuck old documents in the garbage under the assumption no one would ever bother to go through their trash digging for information. But, we've learned from police, private investigators and espionage accounts that huge amounts of data can be extracted from trash simply because people aren't careful.

We also know there's always been a small percentage of people who have been careful, they're the ones who never throw out old accounts, letters, envelopes or even notes with phone numbers on them into the trash but they're so small in numbers that those who are scrounging for information know that the majority of their pickings will be successful.

The only effective way around this is to build systems that automatically obfuscate data from anyone but their owner. As we know, this is easier said than done.

Re: It's perfectly legal for cars to harvest your texts, call logs

#107

Post by myself248 » Thu, Nov 09, 2023, 9:42 PM UTC

lazide wrote: post #86

myself248 wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which creates an incentive, if you see a shiny bit of sidewalk that might be ice, to step on it rather than stepping around it. It's perverse and bizarre. If you avoid harm, you deprive yourself of the tools that you might've used to save others from the same harm.

But also don’t actually suffer that harm. Which is good? The tricky part here is when someone is steadily stockpiling things which seem likely to cause truly irreparable harm in the future. But that act is not itself causing harm yet. For example, stockpiling tons of sensitive data. Another example, a mine with a nearly overtopping tailings dam full of toxic chemicals is a disaster that is almost inevitably guarantee…

Worse, you've got a Hobson's choice when it comes to using many of these systems. If you decline to get your data hoovered up, you simply can't participate at all. In this way, the car's contact-download is pretty benign, you can still make phone calls even if you decline the contacts.

But it's worse pretty much everywhere else. A few years ago, my data was in a breach of a health-care company I'd never heard of and never dealt directly with, they were some sort of back-end broker several layers away from us patients. Recently I went to sign up for new insurance, and I asked for a list of all companies that might handle my data, and copies of their most recent cybersecurity audit. Of course I didn't get a useful reply, and as a 'customer', I have no useful levers to pull. I have no useful information to use when selecting an insurer. And I have no recourse unless someone starts siphoning money out of my account AND I notice and can prove that it happened because of a breach.

"Never engage with anyone" equates directly to "Go be a hermit in the mountains". If that's where our privacy laws have gotten us, I think we're doing something wrong.

Re: It's perfectly legal for cars to harvest your texts, call logs

#108

Post by fho » Thu, Nov 09, 2023, 9:46 PM UTC

ShadowBanThis01 wrote: post #90

akira2501 wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This data is cached on the head unit so that finding a contact to call or reading a text message doesn't require 10 minutes worth of Bluetooth nonsense. This is such an early 2000s idea. I'd much rather my car act as a dumb display that shows a copy of my phone screen then an intelligent agent that tries to replicate functionality already extant in my phone.

EXACTLY. This "infotainment" BS harks back to vastly overpriced stock car radios of years gone by. All we need is a place in the dashboard to mount our phones. Phones already have big-ass touchscreens and anything else we want... except of course now the audio outputs have been removed. We should simply have a well in the dashboard with replaceable inserts that snap in to accommodate different-sized phone models, whi…

> no support for audio over Bluetooth

So you rant about Bluetooth in cars ... without owning a car that gas Bluetooth?

Just checking, because we put after market radios (with BT) in our last two cars and, while not a miracle experience, music playback and handsfree telephony worked without problems.

Re: It's perfectly legal for cars to harvest your texts, call logs

#109

Post by neuralRiot » Thu, Nov 09, 2023, 9:47 PM UTC

ShadowBanThis01 wrote: post #90

akira2501 wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This data is cached on the head unit so that finding a contact to call or reading a text message doesn't require 10 minutes worth of Bluetooth nonsense. This is such an early 2000s idea. I'd much rather my car act as a dumb display that shows a copy of my phone screen then an intelligent agent that tries to replicate functionality already extant in my phone.

EXACTLY. This "infotainment" BS harks back to vastly overpriced stock car radios of years gone by. All we need is a place in the dashboard to mount our phones. Phones already have big-ass touchscreens and anything else we want... except of course now the audio outputs have been removed. We should simply have a well in the dashboard with replaceable inserts that snap in to accommodate different-sized phone models, whi…

> All we need is a place in the dashboard to mount our phones. Phones already have big-ass touchscreens and anything else we want...

That might be your personal prefernece, I particularly abhor the phone-centric world not to mention that a 5 inch “big-ass” touch screen becomes tiny when driving and that its UI is meant to be operated sitting down paying 100% attention to it not while operating a machine at 60mph down in the road surrounded by hundreds of people in the same situation.

Re: It's perfectly legal for cars to harvest your texts, call logs

#110

Post by ShadowBanThis01 » Thu, Nov 09, 2023, 9:51 PM UTC

fho wrote: post #108

ShadowBanThis01 wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

EXACTLY. This "infotainment" BS harks back to vastly overpriced stock car radios of years gone by. All we need is a place in the dashboard to mount our phones. Phones already have big-ass touchscreens and anything else we want... except of course now the audio outputs have been removed. We should simply have a well in the dashboard with replaceable inserts that snap in to accommodate different-sized phone models, whi…

> no support for audio over Bluetooth So you rant about Bluetooth in cars ... without owning a car that gas Bluetooth? Just checking, because we put after market radios (with BT) in our last two cars and, while not a miracle experience, music playback and handsfree telephony worked without problems.

I guess you don't think people rent cars, or drive family members' cars, or go on road trips with friends.

Bluetooth implementations are trash. Rented a brand-new Toyota over the summer and its radio suffered from all the same playback defects that Bluetooth has been offering for a decade or more. Playback randomly starting when not told to... showing the wrong info on the display... showing that no songs were available but playing songs anyway (four out of five times; once it did decide to show a song list).