311–320 of 367 posts
I remember yanking out the onstar unit in my 2015 silverado to physically disconnect the cell antenna. This was (is?) the only practical way to disable cellular in that vehicle. Kudos to Rivian for making this a supported user privacy feature.
The user wants to "disable data collection ". The manufacturer offers only a kill switch for all connectivity , with all the unwanted effects (which they helpfully list). I've seen this pattern before. It's a lame cop-out. "Of course you can do that, but you'll have to accept all these negative consequences. There's nothing we can do about it. You brought this onto yourself."
Internet-connected cars are a national security issue when manufacturers are from one country (A) and consumer is in another country (B). For example, the President of country A might wake up in a bad mood and order to disable all A-manufactured cars in B until they reconsider the trade deal. Or, he might order to collect geolocation, plugged for charging smartphone data, audio and video recordings from cars in B bel…
Do it like china does with iphones. Apple sells them but icloud in china is controlled fully by a chinese company owned and operated by chinese citizens. While this does not fully prevent backdoors and hacking it does raise the bar quite a lot.
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What about using ForSCAN? It allows anyone with the software and a dongle to monitor and to update modules in the ECU AFAIK. I paid under $100 (can't remember) for a dongle and downloaded the free software and it is extremely handy working on one of my vehicles. The other two Fords I own are both pre-OBDII so there is less bullshit on them to begin with. Ford forums are full of owners who use ForSCAN to modify their…
ForSCAN is awesome but it's an orthogonal conversation since it's a reverse engineered diagnostic tool rather than a first-party one. If we expand the conversation to that space there are tons of options with varying capabilities depending on manufacturer, including also pirating the OEM tools directly. Also worth noting that ForSCAN also doesn't _quite_ support all common operations, for example Remote Keyless Entry…
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What are these on the us market?
The boring ones. Things like Bolt, Niro, Equinox, Lightning, etc. Not every EV is like Tesla.
Once again, are there any that work functionally like my airgapped ICE car? It is only 8 years old. I’m worried there aren’t.
Props to them. I'm holding onto an old car partially cause of this. Aside from semi theoretical problems like privacy and attack vectors, car tech is constantly annoying.
Are either privacy breaches or remote attacks really still in any way theoretical dangers? There have been numerous demonstrations of vehicles or their occupants being monitored, disrupted, or stolen as a direct result of the modern remote/online tech they usually come with now. I know quite a few people - myself included - who are wary of buying any new car that has all this junk tech built in and prefer to stick wi…
That and for me in particular, my car isn't any more secure, it's a P71 so I was able to buy a spare key on eBay.
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The boring ones. Things like Bolt, Niro, Equinox, Lightning, etc. Not every EV is like Tesla.
I just did a search on the bolt and apparently users are having to modify their antennae to stop onstar telemetry. Kia also collects telemetry. Equinox also with the onstar issue. Ford also collects telemetry. Once again, are there any that work functionally like my airgapped ICE car? It is only 8 years old. I’m worried there aren’t.
BMW was one of the best for privacy the last time I checked.
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I just did a search on the bolt and apparently users are having to modify their antennae to stop onstar telemetry. Kia also collects telemetry. Equinox also with the onstar issue. Ford also collects telemetry. Once again, are there any that work functionally like my airgapped ICE car? It is only 8 years old. I’m worried there aren’t.
Price / fanciness has nothing to do with the amount of telemetry (if anything, there is a weak negative correlation). BMW was one of the best for privacy the last time I checked.
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Do it like china does with iphones. Apple sells them but icloud in china is controlled fully by a chinese company owned and operated by chinese citizens. While this does not fully prevent backdoors and hacking it does raise the bar quite a lot.
Or, here's a crazy idea: Maybe cars don't need to connect to the internet at all.
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EVs and luxury cars tend to have more fancy features that enable these issues than ice or hybrid cars. That’s changing as more advanced tech filters down.
This is the part that's seriously sucks. We need greener alternatives (current state of things especially highlighting that) and car dependency has crushed us, so instead of just giving us the basic EV most of us want, they've taken the capitalistic approach of giving us massive luxury cars with premium features often cloud-tied, that happen to also be EVs. You can count the exceptions to this on one hand.
You need government support to make EVs a preferred option. Poor folk buy cheap cars, and they mostly rent. The whole scenario around EV charging is a shitshow, and the tax incentives were insufficient to fix it. I had a Model Y for awhile and really liked it, and now have a fancy Japanese hybrid SUV. It's much less of a pain in the ass then the EV was.