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Internet-connected cars fail privacy and security tests conducted by Mozilla

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Re: Internet-connected cars fail privacy and security tests conducted by Mozilla

#401

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As an European, where we drive mostly stick, it's funny to observe the newfound US love for stick shifts. It's funny because it happened almost exactly when automatics became good! Good dual clutch gearboxes are amazing, but even "classic" ones like BMW's ZF6 or ZF8 are really close. ZF8 is so good BMW uses it in the M3, instead of a dual clutch. With these options, I'd never go back to stick shift. This after having…

Manuals suck in traffic. Americans sit in a lot of traffic. And I say this as somebody who loves manuals (I’m an amateur race car driver).

That’s odd because I like the control a clutch pedal gives me in heavy traffic. And I drive a 15 year old diesel!

Re: Internet-connected cars fail privacy and security tests conducted by Mozilla

#402
post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The manufacturer may have to legally include the functionality in cars they sell but in pretty sure the owner isn’t obligated to use or keep the functionality untouched. By comparison if your seat belts are all frayed and you don’t wear them anyway that’s on you, manufacturer sold you a car with seat belts in good condition and that as far as the “compliance” requirement goes.

Frayed seatbelts won't pass an MOT in the UK. (Don't know about any other country).

What’s an MOT? :)

Re: Internet-connected cars fail privacy and security tests conducted by Mozilla

#403

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The touchscreens are really a dealbreaker on new cars. They’re not just prone to quick obsolescence, they’re dangerous.

[flagged]

The entire reason for touchscreens weren't because touch is better than tactile, it's because different apps will have different UI needs that cannot be predicted by the phones manufacturer. Steve Jobs says as much in the original keynote.

Cars don't really have this problem because they only have one primary job, and all other functions (eg climate control) are easily predicted by the manufacturer.

Re: Internet-connected cars fail privacy and security tests conducted by Mozilla

#404
post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just make sure you do something, like use a resistor to ground the antenna lead, because I did that, and would still get connectivity at times. EG if the cell tower was very close. Was fine after I used a resistor to turn that power into mild heat.

If it is similar to eCall in VAG ECUs, then there might be internal antenna inside the ECU itself.

What the fuck

Re: Internet-connected cars fail privacy and security tests conducted by Mozilla

#405

> The worst offender was Nissan, Mozilla said this is ironic; my wife bought a brand new 2020 model year Nissan 370Z 50th anniversary edition in 2021, and it feels like it is from the late 90s. no touch screen (actually no screen at all!), no GPS/navigation, no tracking, no Bluetooth audio streaming(!!) it does have mobile phone Bluetooth connectivity and a terrible backup camera but those are the only bits of modern…

How can it have no screen? They even forced Mazda to put a back up camera in the Miata - which is beyond idiotic.

Re: Internet-connected cars fail privacy and security tests conducted by Mozilla

#406
post #312

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I own a VW ID.4. For reasons I wanted to reverse engineer some of the API. After authenticating to the account tied to my car, the landing page ( https://www.vw.com/en/owners.html ) makes calls to a lot of analytics trackers. I'll just list what pi-hole defaults block: analytics.tiktok.com sp.analytics.yahoo.com googletagmanger.com universal.iperceptions.com cdn4.userzoom.com snap.licdn.com secure-ds.serving-sys.com…

Just to be clear, these are trackers from the web page , not trackers called by your car, correct? I'm never surprised by the web trackers (which my ad blocker generally filters too), but 3rd-party trackers called from devices/vehicles seems more insidious. Although the car / IoT companies can just as easily outsource the data once they have it anyway.

Our GMC's telemetry showed up on the "list of crap you can delete" in my unused facebook account.

Re: Internet-connected cars fail privacy and security tests conducted by Mozilla

#408

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately lots of people are happy to pay the markups. Some subreddits, including /r/rav4prime , will ban you for speaking negatively about dealer markups or those who pay them. Here's their hilariously condescendingly worded rule 4: > No demonstrations of economic illiteracy. No negativity regarding markups. You are encouraged to post about current prices and markups and your dealership experiences, but please D…

I’m pretty sure most of the car subreddits are managed by dealership employees who benefit from markups via increased commissions. The fact that they make reference to complaining about price markups as economic illiteracy increases my confidence in this hypothesis. I’m tempted to go make a post about rent seeking, deadweight loss and price collusion in oligopolistic conditions but somehow I feel my economic literacy…

> complaining about price markups as economic illiteracy

I mean, I hate dealer markups as much as the next person, but it is true. It's just supply and demand. Dealers wouldn't charge crazy markups if enough car buyers weren't out there paying them; and like another commenter said, in these supply-limited conditions, if price wasn't able to rise to a market-clearing level, you'd have shortages instead, and people would complain about that.

> rent seeking, deadweight loss and price collusion in oligopolistic conditions

Can the car market, both at the manufacturer level and the dealer level, really be described as an oligopolistic one, outside of isolated examples (e.g. you live in Elko, NV and there's only one Ford dealer within 100 miles)?

Re: Internet-connected cars fail privacy and security tests conducted by Mozilla

#409

This type of authoritarian tracking is extremely egregious but the good news is that we are hackers and can detect the RF and other signals with detectors and disable them if we really want to. At any rate, it's a sad state of affairs.

"Data signal has been lost for the last 3 days. Disabling car startup. Please tow to your nearest local dealership to re-activate."

Re: Internet-connected cars fail privacy and security tests conducted by Mozilla

#410

I connect my phone to my 2015 Nissan's bluetooth, but just for music. GrapheneOS lets me prevent its access to my contacts, call history, active calls, text messages - anything but music audio. To me (but not the less tech literate, I know), if you're connecting your car to your phone, it's obvious that it is able to gather things about you. That said, because I don't know much about cars, I don't know if the car is…

One more reason I'm glad I connect my phone with a headphone jack. Just an analog connection carrying audio. The car doesn't even know what it's playing, as far as I know. Though some cars do seem to extract track names and artist names over the aux jack, so I think there's a little more than just an analog signal?

Audio jack can be used for Square payment transactions so it can't be that isolated
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