Many of us know how bad modern cars are for privacy. Yet many of our friends and neighbors do not realize how intrusive it really is. I linked a blog entry from Mozilla’s investigation about car privacy. In that blog is a link to their make-by-make analysis. The amount of very intimate information a modern car collects is honestly appalling. It includes health data, real time mood information, weight gain or loss, and so on. And it does so even for passengers.
The web has many resources talking about this problem, but almost no resources on what to do about it. I know the simple thing is to say, “just drive an old car bro!” That’s fine if you can, but not everyone can. Also it has drawbacks like more maintenance. Sometimes less safety if it’s older than certain safety features. For the purpose of this thread, it is more interesting to focus on newer, surveillance enabled cars which are the majority of what people drive on the road today.
Some people have figured out how to bypass the surveillance package on some cars. One way is to uncouple the antenna it uses to phone home. Other times you can bypass the telematics module or remove a fuse that powers it. I feel like we really need a central model by model repository of information.
Past that, how do we prove it has worked, if we do it? Has anyone reading this tried to use an RF detector to see if their car is still trying to phone home, after they have bypassed telematics? What are your experiences? I want to buy one and use it to test my own car, but the info on the web seems sketch.
I wish there was a solution for this, but it sounds like the only way to fix the problem is regulation.
Good luck with that, we can’t bribe this administration as well as the auto lobby can.
I mostly agree. But sometimes if a single jurisdiction gets regulation in place, it can be cheaper for companies to produce a single model to comply with all of them, rather than make multiple models. Even if they do make multiple models, it still means there is a supply of privacy-spec cars.
California in the USA has been more privacy friendly than most states. If California would crank up some car privacy regs, maybe work with the Europeans and Canada on a common legal standard, that is a huge foot in the door! It means people in other US states could buy a California-spec car. If the momentum builds enough, maybe companies would say screw it and sell the privacy-spec cars everywhere. That happened in the past with car safety regs. It went from auto companies whining about it, to the same companies featuring it as a selling point. Look how well our cars do in crash tests!
I agree car privacy is going to be a hard fight. Auto companies will fight dirty to avoid privacy regs. But we can push on this. A groundswell of public support can’t hurt.