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

theregister.com

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

#41

Post by bri3d »

zeteo wrote: post #32
Caboose8685 wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could potentially Faraday cage it if you can find the exact spot it's at.

Careful with that or it might just eat up your battery trying to contact cellular towers at maximum power with a short retry interval.

The module should go to sleep, and the battery management should also load-shed it if it detects the battery draining. I suspect this is probably not implemented correctly on some cars (because what is), but it's definitely something that's tested for regularly (since cars can be expected to be taken camping, off the grid, or even just purchased by owners who live outside of cellular coverage).

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

#42

Post by lotsofpulp »

freedomben wrote: post #34
lotsofpulp wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I always connect to CarPlay with a wire, and have never connected with bluetoooth. It has not auto paired Bluetooth either with iPhones. I have not used Android Auto, but if it does auto pair Bluetooth, that would be a shame. I thought the whole point was that the car just provides a screen your phone can extend a display to, and no data ever leaves.

Android Auto can do both wired and wireless. Wired in fact is the only option on cars more than a few years old.

Yes, but the question is does it auto pair (without permission from the user).

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

#43

Post by lazide »

RHSeeger wrote: post #37
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a decision made regarding Washington state law’s “statutory injury requirement” [1]. It says “a plaintiff must allege an injury to ‘his or her business, his or her person, or his or her reputation,’” with “a bare violation” of the privacy law being “insufficient to satisfy the statutory injury requirement.” It is particular to Washington state, not all Americans. And it may not apply to a prosecutor versus pr…

That sounds remarkably like saying "it's ok to drive drunk, as long as you don't hurt anyone"; which, clearly, is ridiculous. If you're breaking the law, there should be consequences even if you didn't _happen_ to hurt someone this time.

Most civil law requires actual damages. It’s the same situation.

If you haven’t actually been hurt yet, suing doesn’t result in anything.

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

#44

Post by hammock »

graphe wrote: post #23

My Toyota asks for permission and if I grant it then it'll "harvest" my texts and calls. How horrible and unexpected. The title and the conclusion are biased and of poor quality. It should be "car manufacturers didn't get fined for the way their old head units worked".

I was in a rental car this week and pure accidentally (1 in 1000) hit “yes sync contacts.” Didn’t know how to reverse/revoke that decision. Wish I did/could

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

#45

Post by forrestthewoods »

I can believe iOS doesn’t offer protection against this garbage. There’s no way to connect a phone to something and on the device side say “this is an untrusted connection; don’t give it shit”.

It’s especially frustrating with rental cars. But I don’t even trust my own personal car!

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

#46

Post by olliej »

If you read the original lawsuit, the issue is that the car's infotainment system is set to forward/display messages and calls from your phone, and that that information is stored or logged persistently, and that can't be deleted/cleared by the user.

The claimed invasion of privacy is that a person with the diagnostic tools and physical access to your car can extract those logs.

Presenting this as "car manufacturers can steal your text and call logs" is disingenuous.

Don't get me wrong, it's clearly not a great thing for the car to be doing (especially in the context of rental cars for instance) but it isn't the catastrophe people are claiming.

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

#47

Post by JohnFen »

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…

My personal solution: I won't own a car that has this sort of capability in the first place, and when I rent a car, I will never allow it and my phone to talk to each other for any reason.

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

#48

Post by bri3d »

forrestthewoods wrote: post #45

I can believe iOS doesn’t offer protection against this garbage. There’s no way to connect a phone to something and on the device side say “this is an untrusted connection; don’t give it shit”. It’s especially frustrating with rental cars. But I don’t even trust my own personal car!

For what it's worth, in the iOS Bluetooth settings, "Show Notifications" is code for Message Access Protocol and "Sync Contacts" is code for Phone Book Access Protocol. It would be nice if they'd add an extra "Pair but Don't Trust" button, though.

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

#49

Post by JumpCrisscross »

lazide wrote: post #43
RHSeeger wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That sounds remarkably like saying "it's ok to drive drunk, as long as you don't hurt anyone"; which, clearly, is ridiculous. If you're breaking the law, there should be consequences even if you didn't _happen_ to hurt someone this time.

Most civil law requires actual damages. It’s the same situation. If you haven’t actually been hurt yet, suing doesn’t result in anything.

To underline why, consider the consequences of letting anyone sue anyone for potential violations. Every minor perceived violation would result in a cascade of lawsuits. You could bankrupt a competitor by baselessly speculating on their wrongdoing.

Generalised lawbreaking is a public concern. It’s prosecutors’ and regulators’ jobs to protect consumers ex ante.

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

#50

Post by SenAnder »

nonameiguess wrote: post #12
SenAnder wrote: post #2

> In other words, it's A-OK for your car to "automatically and without authorization , instantaneously intercept, record, download, store, and [be] capable of transmitting" text messages and call logs since the privacy violation is potential, but the injury not necessarily actual. So it's effectively legal to sell backdoored hardware and software to spy on people. I wonder what would happen if I sold backdoored phone…

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 justice to mere finance, something I would expect from the cartoonishly greedy Ferengi of Star Trek, than a real court.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wiretapping#United_States

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