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What does this button do? – My new car has a mysterious and undocumented switch

blog.koenvh.nl

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Re: What does this button do? – My new car has a mysterious and undocumented switch

#51

Post by jhugo »

Xenoamorphous wrote: post #39
hedora wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At that point, you could point out that you have no contract with them, and that they’ve abandoned their property on your place. The last time I checked, US property rights made it clear that you cannot just store stuff on other people’s land without permission, and then complain when they throw it away. They could try to argue that whatever contract the previous owner signed still applies, but for that to be the cas…

FWIW this was not in the US.

Regardless I would have carefully taken these down and put them in a box on the day I moved in. And then called them (or better, written to them) and given them a reasonable amount of time (maybe a couple months) to collect their property, making it clear that I would dispose of it after that time expired.

Re: What does this button do? – My new car has a mysterious and undocumented switch

#52

Post by semi-extrinsic »

caseyohara wrote: post #14
janstice wrote: post #9

I wonder if it’s a tracking off switch or a panic button? I used to work for a fleet tracking SaaS, and some customers with unionised workforces needed a way to disable tracking, and panic buttons were common too (although less so in Europe).

What would a panic button do in this context?

Signal to HQ "I'm being robbed" or something like this, I would guess.

Around here, such a button in this place would be for the 20 000 lumen extralights. Typically for cars with xenon headlights, like this Opel, the extralights are powered via a relay that takes control signal from a can-bus adapter that extracts the high beam signal, via a manual switch like this.

Re: What does this button do? – My new car has a mysterious and undocumented switch

#53

Post by Xenoamorphous »

bean-weevil wrote: post #38
Xenoamorphous wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This can be difficult to grasp. I bought an aparment 3.5 years ago and it had an alarm installed. I called the security company to transfer ownership but that couldn’t be done without authorisation from the previous owner, which probably makes sense. The problem is, they were unreachable, and I was living on a house that I now owned, and which had cameras the previous owner could take pics from at any time . My patie…

They own the cameras. You can still take them down and give them back if requested.

The thing is, first of all I’m hardly a handyman, I wouldn’t have known where to start. Second, I was dealing with moving to a new place, which can be very stressful (to add to that, my girlfriend was 6 months pregnant and my dad had passed away unexpectedly less than 2 months earlier). And third, I wanted the alarm, just with me in the contract and with the access to the cameras, not the previous owner.

I simply covered them. The threat was just me running out of patience.

Re: What does this button do? – My new car has a mysterious and undocumented switch

#54

Post by sellmesoap »

mitthrowaway2 wrote: post #49
afh1 wrote: post #25

The scary part is not the GPS installed by the fleet company that previously owned the car, which in all likelihood was just forgotten there, but the GPS and eSIM that comes with most (all?) new cars and that in most (all?) new cars cannot be disabled. Apart from privacy concerns of your data being used or sold by the car vendor, government outreach is also a concern. There was a bill announced in the US for all new…

What does any of that have to do with a car being electric?

Let's find a list of electric cars without some form of network connection!

Re: What does this button do? – My new car has a mysterious and undocumented switch

#55

Post by ziddoap »

ilikeatari wrote: post #47

So this was a gps tracker that was installed by a fleet and never removed. The larger issue is that most car companies in the US are reselling your data on newish vehicles (2016+) anyway. I am still amazed that this is not a larger issue.

>The larger issue is that most car companies in the US are reselling your data on newish vehicles (2016+) anyway.

A fun read related to this: "Privacy Nightmare on Wheels: Every Car Brand Reviewed by Mozilla - Including Ford, Volkswagen and Toyota - Flunks Privacy Test"

https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/blog/privacy-nightmare-on-...

Small excerpt:

>The very worst offender is Nissan. The Japanese car manufacturer admits in their privacy policy to collecting a wide range of information, including sexual activity, health diagnosis data, and genetic data — but doesn’t specify how. They say they can share and sell consumers’ “preferences, characteristics, psychological trends, predispositions, behavior, attitudes, intelligence, abilities, and aptitudes” to data brokers, law enforcement, and other third parties.

Re: What does this button do? – My new car has a mysterious and undocumented switch

#56

Post by cyberpunk »

Xenoamorphous wrote: post #24
TomK32 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even though the SIM was part of the car they bought, the SIM's contract is not in their name which means using the contract would be theft.

This can be difficult to grasp. I bought an aparment 3.5 years ago and it had an alarm installed. I called the security company to transfer ownership but that couldn’t be done without authorisation from the previous owner, which probably makes sense. The problem is, they were unreachable, and I was living on a house that I now owned, and which had cameras the previous owner could take pics from at any time . My patie…

Sorry. But I have to ask.

What the actual fuck?! Why would you have cameras inside your house to begin with, let alone ones that upload to “the cloud” and let alone ones that upload to users you don’t control?

I’m totally shocked by this.

Re: What does this button do? – My new car has a mysterious and undocumented switch

#57

Post by Etheryte »

mitthrowaway2 wrote: post #49
afh1 wrote: post #25

The scary part is not the GPS installed by the fleet company that previously owned the car, which in all likelihood was just forgotten there, but the GPS and eSIM that comes with most (all?) new cars and that in most (all?) new cars cannot be disabled. Apart from privacy concerns of your data being used or sold by the car vendor, government outreach is also a concern. There was a bill announced in the US for all new…

What does any of that have to do with a car being electric?

Electric cars are essentially black boxes. When you take it apart, you have largely no idea what any of the chips do, even if you chase down what they're connected to. Is this the infotainment system or is it the infotainment system and a data gathering system that sends all my data off seas? There's no way to know. Old cars don't have that problem. Here's an engine, here's a gearbox, add a radio if you'd like, but by and large it's possible to grok what's in your car. With newer vehicles in general, and electric cars especially, it's near impossible to tell.

Re: What does this button do? – My new car has a mysterious and undocumented switch

#58

Post by cyberpunk »

Xenoamorphous wrote: post #53
bean-weevil wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They own the cameras. You can still take them down and give them back if requested.

The thing is, first of all I’m hardly a handyman, I wouldn’t have known where to start. Second, I was dealing with moving to a new place, which can be very stressful (to add to that, my girlfriend was 6 months pregnant and my dad had passed away unexpectedly less than 2 months earlier). And third, I wanted the alarm, just with me in the contract and with the access to the cameras, not the previous owner. I simply cov…

I can’t believe this is true. How can you have so little care over the privacy of your family? They have microphones too.

Re: What does this button do? – My new car has a mysterious and undocumented switch

#60

Post by nlawalker »

realityking wrote: post #33
hoistbypetard wrote: post #10

> “can I get free data from the SIM card embedded in the device that I now technically own?” That seems like the next-most-interesting question now that you've determined what the device is. Possibly followed closely by "can I use that free-to-me data in a fun way that might teach the people who installed the SIM to deactivate their devices when they sell them?" i.e. Could you send and receive enough on the connectio…

It’s surprisingly common for SIMs in IoT devices to not be locked down. If the data usage spikes enough above the noise it’ll probably be detected & deactivated. Here’s an example from a few years ago: https://scootertalk.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=1370

Nice. Thought this was going to be https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22085089
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