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Modern cars are spying on you. Here's what you can do about it

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Re: Modern cars are spying on you. Here's what you can do about it

#301

Post by tavavex »

gruez wrote: post #32
chasing0entropy wrote: post #17

Remove the antennas. Do not give in to the mirage of convenience. Use a stand alone generic GPS. Vehicle GPS devices are anti privacy for so many reasons. Listen to stored music from an SD card if terrestrial radio (NO SATELLITE). Did you know almost ALL late model cars can play a TURN YOUR PHONE OFF. Your phone does more than track you - the Bluetooth and wifi beacon scanners are always running. When you come across…

>TURN YOUR PHONE OFF. Your phone does more than track you - the Bluetooth and wifi beacon scanners are always running. When you come across another person, most phones track the intersection of your beacon with theirs making a new data point that compromises both individuals privacy. Now consider sitting at a stoplight; you and and the 10 phones around you have now correlated the time and position you were sitting th…

> Moreover all this effort in avoiding being tracked doesn't really mean much when all cars have a very visible and unique identifier that's mandated by law (ie. license plate).

I agree with the first half, but not this. The difference between people seeing your license plate and your car/phone/etc systematically recording and storing your exact position is the same as the difference between someone on the street seeing my face vs. a facial recognition camera identifying me and storing that data point forever. People don't memorize or care about your plates. The police could take note of them or even put it on some record, but the number of cops is so low (and the number of cops that would care about my license plates is even lower) that whatever scraps of data are recorded would probably be pretty useless - and besides, that data isn't sold off to private entities, at least where I am.

Re: Modern cars are spying on you. Here's what you can do about it

#302

Post by tavavex »

rcbdev wrote: post #165
ryandrake wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People are suggesting all over these threads what we can do about it, but we (as a population) aren't. When my 2009 car dies, I'm going to deliberately NOT buy a new trackingmobile, and try to find another 2009 car to keep running. Yea, that means I occasionally need to take 30 seconds to scrape ice off the windshield. Big deal.

Why 2009? I've been driving the same 2003 Audi TT all my life, never failed me.

The number of cars from 2003 is already dwindling and it's only going to keep going down. It's certainly much easier to find cars from the late 00s-early 10s right now if your only priority is not being tracked or bound to a web of different digital services and subscriptions.

Re: Modern cars are spying on you. Here's what you can do about it

#303

Post by tavavex »

meisel wrote: post #133

It wouldn’t be surprising if cars also record audio of conversations to use for ad targeting. It has already been conclusively shown that TV companies have done this.

> It has already been conclusively shown that TV companies have done this.

Can you elaborate? I don't think I've ever heard of this. When did it happen?

Re: Modern cars are spying on you. Here's what you can do about it

#304

Post by stavros »

jimnotgym wrote: post #143
jeroenhd wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Airbag and crumple zone safety requirements for crashes that aren't head-on are much more recent than the 2000s. Many car makers designed their cars to pass those, but will leave you dead or worse if you get T-boned. ABS wasn't even a requirement in the EU until 2004, and American cars could be sold without ABS all the way until 2012, when traction control was also made mandatory (which the EU then also followed). Th…

Of course, just because it wasn't a requirement to have ABS, doesn't mean your car doesn't have it...

There's a difference between "it might not have it" and "it definitely has it".

Re: Modern cars are spying on you. Here's what you can do about it

#305

Post by tavavex »

SoftTalker wrote: post #66
JoeBOFH wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because as soon as you leave a major metropolitan area, not having a car is almost a nonstarter.

It's the same in Europe, but people pushing an agenda don't talk about that either.

People who are "pushing an agenda" aren't arguing that there should be no cars ever, anywhere. Cars are the smallest-scale form of long-distance transport, they are unavoidable in low-density areas or for services that requires complete flexibility. All the agenda-pushers I've seen in real life are just saying that there's better options within cities, at least for a lot of people. Most of the time, most people only move within their cities, myself included. If transit within my city was in any way adequate, I would choose it over the car. I could cover those rare out-of-city edge cases with rentals or train travel.

Besides, it's not even the same in Europe. In a few countries, maybe, but in the majority the inter-city transit or transit within small towns is not even in the same universe as what's available in most of the US.

Re: Modern cars are spying on you. Here's what you can do about it

#306

Post by stavros »

caconym_ wrote: post #141
rconti wrote: post #120

I think it's wild that people spend their own money to surveil themselves every second they're near their car. Maybe I've seen too much lawyering on TV and in movies, but if I'm in a collision with you, I'm definitely asking the cops to pull the SD card from your dashcam. Whenever I point out I think this self-surveillance is crazy, the response ends up sounding something like "oh, no big, if I think I did something…

Why do you think potentially self-incriminating self-surveillance is "crazy" when you also think lying to the cops and other involved parties about what happened is bad? If you believe it's important to tell the truth in these situations, you should have no problem providing your own recordings of a collision, regardless of who is at fault. Or is your point just about the cost of the dashcam being "crazy"? In that ca…

I think they're saying "I don't want to self-incriminate so I don't want to put myself in a situation where I have to lie". I'm not sure it's entirely consistent, but I also don't think it's entirely inconsistent.

Re: Modern cars are spying on you. Here's what you can do about it

#307

Post by stavros »

rglynn wrote: post #281
drnick1 wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, and that's very sad. However the solutions are pretty obvious: Car -> unplug the cellular modem (more or less easy) TV -> used as dumb monitor with a Linux HTPC Phone -> GrapheneOS PC -> Linux Social media -> /dev/null Email/DNS/cloud -> my own The real issue is that most people are not aware of these issues and may even (unintentionally) compromise your own privacy by posting information or pictures of you to F…

> Social media -> /dev/null That made me chuckle, absolutely right though!

I love how these comments are made on a social media website.

Re: Modern cars are spying on you. Here's what you can do about it

#308

Post by tavavex »

Retric wrote: post #21
pixelpoet wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've never had a driver's licence, lived in a zillion countries; don't think I could do that in America though.

Over half of New York City households are car-free. That jumps to 3/4 in Manhattan. Millions of American households don’t have a car, but you rarely hear about it as a viable option.

NYC is the absolute best case in the US, if you're talking about the ability to exist without a car. It's not that no one talks about those millions of households, it's that they are all concentrated on a few standout islands (literally!) in a sea of the nearly identical car-only supermajority of cities. It's the exception to all exceptions.

Re: Modern cars are spying on you. Here's what you can do about it

#310

Post by ErroneousBosh »

calvinmorrison wrote: post #153
ErroneousBosh wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> All cars have 4 unique serial numbers broadcast via radio at all times via the TPMS system. Mine doesn't.

do you have some sort of indirect tire pressure checking like wheel speed?

No, I have a tyre pressure gauge. Every so often I check the tyre pressures and maybe stick a bit more in if it needs it.

Some VWs used to use wheel speed, though, which was fun because they added tyre pressure checking with a software upgrade. Not terribly accurate, but enough to tell you if one was low.

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