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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

#91

Post by lazide »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #49
lazide wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 .

Yup, though for some things that there is a strong public policy reason to discourage, statutory damages can make a good disincentive.

Easy to argue the good/bad of it, but the California statutory damages lawsuit wave related to ADA accommodations definitely got a lot of business owners to pay attention. [https://www.thakurlawfirm.com/single-post/2020/06/15/ada-law...]

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

#92

Post by simbolit »

dylan604 wrote: post #70
drewcoo wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> * If you use a rental car, Factory Reset the head unit when you leave. That is ridiculously onerous! Just because geeks can share arcane knowledge about how to be safe does not mean that this isn't horribly anti-consumer.

It should be policy for the rental company to do this. On more than one occasion, I have received a car with a previous renter's personal data still in the system.

When I am out of town, I sometimes print at copy shops.

You'd be amazed what kind of PDFs are left open in Acrobat, just because people are too lazy to close the application. I have seen contracts, bank account statements, residency permits, letters of incorporation, private messages logs, ....

All without doing any digging, I just get assigned a computer for printing, turn on the screen, and it's there.

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

#93

Post by simbolit »

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.

This is why such things should be criminal offenses!

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

#94

Post by RandallBrown »

akira2501 wrote: post #57
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…

> This data is cached on the head unit so that finding a contact to call or reading a text message doesn't require 10 minutes worth of Bluetooth nonsense. This is such an early 2000s idea. I'd much rather my car act as a dumb display that shows a copy of my phone screen then an intelligent agent that tries to replicate functionality already extant in my phone.

I spent some time around 2012 working on in car "infotainment" units at a large tech company for a large car company.

I was told that the infotainment systems were where a large chunk of their profit came from and differentiating their experience was important to the car company.

Of course, they wanted to use decade old CPUs and touchscreens to save money, so the experience was horrible. I left shortly after CarPlay was announced and our response was "That will never catch on."

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

#95

Post by lazide »

simbolit wrote: post #93
lazide wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This is why such things should be criminal offenses!

Yup! Or provide statutory damages instead of vague or no statutory penalties.

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

#96

Post by andersrs »

Reading these stories makes me love my shitty old 16 year old Civic. It's modern enough to have cruise control, AC and a fairly decent engine. But not so modern that reliability is compromised in the name of fuel economy and it's also not a "rude-ass car" with dumb features nobody asked for. I could afford a better car of course but I don't drive much and I'm not inspired by these rude-ass features.

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

#97

Post by kleene_op »

> "To succeed at the pleading stage of a WPA claim, a plaintiff must allege an injury to 'his or her business, his or her person, or his or her reputation,'" the judges ruled.

So.. It's okay if I record private conversation from high ranking states officials as long as I don't harm their reputation with it?

It's okay if I stole state intelligence as long as I don't harm my country with it?

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

#98

Post by adrianmonk »

olliej wrote: post #51
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…

No, it's saying that because none of the information is transmitted there isn't a privacy violation - the law requires that a privacy violation actually occur, not that it "could". e.g. that fact that there's a local call/message log on the car, and the car also has a mechanism for transmitting some data, does not mean that there's a privacy violation given that the car does not transmit the call/message log . That's…

> the car also has a mechanism for transmitting some data

As far as I can tell, the car itself doesn't have a mechanism for transmitting data. It just stores the data.

Transmitting only happens if/when someone gets some Berla "vehicle forensics" hardware and physically connects it to the car. The Berla equipment would do the transmitting.

From the complaint linked to by The Register[1]:

> 26. Third party Berla Corporation (“Berla”), based in Annapolis, Maryland, manufactures equipment (hardware and software) capable of extracting stored text messages from infotainment systems in Honda vehicles.

> 27. Berla also manufactures equipment capable of extracting stored call logs from infotainment systems in Honda vehicles.

> 28. Honda infotainment systems thereby transmit stored text messages and call logs to Berla.

And from Berla's web site[2]:

> An acquisition may require systems to be removed from a vehicle and disassembled or be performed in place in a vehicle. In either case, acquisition hardware must be attached to the vehicle or system to acquire data.

---

[1] https://regmedia.co.uk/2023/11/09/honda-infotainment-class-a...

[2] https://berla.co/ecosystem/

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

#99

Post by bri3d »

gleenn wrote: post #88
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…

I don't understand how you think this isn't nefarious based on your own post. I didn't ask my car to basically give a backdoor to all my texts and contacts to law enforcement. If that exists, it is certainly being used. I find it very sad that you have to prove injury despite the fact that is is clearly not in a user's benefit. Laws are always playing catchup to tech and we shouldn't have to play wackamole for every…

Why do I think these features are not nefarious?

* There's an obvious, legitimate want for the vehicle's head unit to ingest this data, in order to display a UI (or provide a voice UI) which allows the user to call a contact by name or read a recently received text message. Is this a poor implementation concept which has mostly been supplanted by better implementations (Android Auto / CarPlay), sure, absolutely but it's not some thing that was added for the express purpose of "stealing" information. It's a long-standing set of features which use obvious, standardized Bluetooth technologies to fill an obvious, straightforward user need. Nothing weird there.

* There's no sign whatsoever that there was any collusion with law enforcement in the construction of these systems. They're just badly implemented, vulnerable software which is exploited by a forensics vendor (just like literally every other piece of hardware and software under the sun).

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