Smartphones with Qualcomm chip secretly send personal data to Qualcomm

A lot of cellular modems have a secondary processor, not surprised that it's phoning home.

I thought it might be something like that, but in this case isn’t it the main SOC doing it?

You seem to be assuming that the only reason someone would downvote you is because they are tin foil hatters, or "nutters". I did not downvote you, but I could understand someone doing so for either or all of these reasons:

1. Your comment was kind of a "me too" comment that added nothing (or little) of substance to the conversation. On HN these types of comments are typically downvoted, regardless of topic or whether the voter is wearing a tinfoil hat.

2. You complained about the downvoting, and in addition added a personal insult to the downvoters. Personal insults are typically downvoted on HN as well.

3. You dismissed and strawmanned the "entire discussion" as "mostly people ranting about things we don't even know to be true." This type of thing is also frequently downvoted as it doesn't add anything substantive.

Sooo what this is nothing new.. What you wanna live in a MediaTek world? No thanks... If you truly know how to manipulate the SoC you can mitigate this as well but people are lazy inherently so, carry on! For a bit of color, the technical manual for the Snapdragon Cortex line is 8,767 pages long, you expect some chinese engineer who hates his life and hates you cause the PLA force him to design a certain way is going to read this manual?

Learn how to mitigate security cause you are not going to win the battle head on, simple truth that is hard to swallow.

I'm not sure if you're aware, but SSH is a flexible protocol of which "terminal emulation" is just one use case (you can implement bespoke command/response actions, I've written an SSH server before FWIW). I don't have the specifics on hand, but even assuming they can get a "terminal to your car", the resulting access is only capable of doing what the environment allows it to do. I highly doubt `spyontheuser -vvvvvvv` is one of the available commands. If it is I want to know too and would also be rightfully pissed.

Yeah. I'm not so naive to try and argue `unlock` is the only thing Tesla can do to your car remotely. Like I've said, they can update your car if you agree. If they can update the car then they can do whatever the hell the hardware allows, in theory. This is true for anything (software/firmware/younameit) that can be updated. Are you reading this on a computer with a modern OS?

I never said we shouldn't be critical of centralization and eroded notions of ownership. I am rebutting the sensationalized "Tesla has a persistent backdoor to your car and is using it to spy on you" spin on the issue. At this point in my life I'm becoming more of a tech pragmatist. One thing that has become clear to me over the years is that people don't want to be single points of failure. Putting people in that position yields poor products/user experiences. I believe there's a way to legislate and lay ground rules for ownership and access to consumer hardware that allows custody to be responsibly shared between a company and a consumer. I don't believe we're socially there yet, but making up fake news about how companies are spying on users and can't be trusted doesn't help progress the dialog. (TFA is another example of not advancing the dialog, which is how this all ties in.)

Trust is always an issue and always present. We have to make trust decisions. What I'm advocating for is making decisions based on facts and evidence, not FUD and slippery slope speculation. What I'm arguing is that it's important whether Tesla is acting in a way that is culpably deceitful and has given users reasons to not Trust them. If the evidence shows Tesla is being dishonest and operating in a way that is not in accordance with their privacy policy, then yeah grab the pitch forks I'll be there right next to you. This goes for anybody asking for trust, not just #companieselonmuskhastouched.

Otherwise name an EV that isn't cloud connected, is somehow innately more trustworthy, and that saves me 5k/year on gas.