I don’t know anything about cars.
Now that we have established that cars seriously undermine our privacy (look at the flurry of posts in this community in the last few hours), what can we do about it?
From a networking POV, if you remove the ability to connect to the Internet, it doesn’t matter what the car is recording as long as you can ensure there is no physical tampering. Depending on who you are, this is a good idea, and doable for the most part (very few people have the technical knowledge to pull out the right chip from a car).
So, how do we achieve this? I implore the community to invite mechanical/car engineers who can help us on this matter, and to form methods to prevent vehicles from accessing the Internet without express consent from the user.
Thanks!
The manufacturer that i work for has esims built into every vehicle they build that cannot be removed without bricking the vehicle. I feel like this is pretty much industry standard at this point. They used to have a removable sim, but there was an esim along side that so you could not completely disconnect.
Edit: added words
Really wish I had the money to start a car company
Jesus. Any idea how old a car I’d have to buy to be realtively certain it wasn’t phoning home?
2003
A lot of cars weren’t connected until 2007-2010 unless they were luxurymodels or had OnStar or LoJack.
What car manufacturer is this?
Then block the signal with a Faraday Cage.
I see I’m getting downvoted for my comments about this, but the vehicle will not fail due to a lack of internet connection. Otherwise your vehicle would brick itself anytime you drive through a tunnel.
Go ahead, look it up. It’s about as simple as wrapping the cellular device with metal screen.
Yeah I like driving my car wrapped in tinfoil
I never suggested any such thing. I mean only to wrap the cellular module in metal screen, not the entire vehicle.
Does it even matter? Your car might disable telemetry, but every other car still reports your every action. You probably don’t even need a car, just walking or bicycling to work means every car manufacturer knows what color your panties are.
Yeah this is true. My partner’s car has a front facing camera that easily has enough resolution to ID license plates. Rear cam too. It could very easily log the plate and an image of every car that drives near it. No amount of (legally) wrapping your car in tinfoil will stop someone else’s vehicle from reporting your movements.
because I don’t need to be part of the problem. I can go remove the gps module and wrap the esim in lead foil because I see the value in that.
So what you’re saying is… don’t wear any panties. Useful advice. scribbles in a notebook
But also the defeatest logic of ‘it is useless because everyone else is accepting it’ is so ew. Think about if nobody ever made adblocking capabilities ‘because it is too late and we are inundated, so why even try’, if nobody ever self-hosted anything because ‘they have all our info already so what’s the point of stopping now’, if everyone jumped for joy at airport security checkpoints with fingerprint, cameras and biometric scans since ‘fighting the system is useless’. shivers
Resistance may not be a tidal wave of change immediately, but if we don’t push back against stuff, we are 100% fucked. And not the fun kind.
Or wear multiple panties so it gets confused.
Oh, no I’m 100% for removing telemetry. It was more of a “better avoid roads altogether” kind of remark.
I wish I were a billionaire. I would literally start a company that made cars, phones, tech of all kinds on the basic premise that I don’t give a fuck about you or your data. Make it private. Make it have no EULA that says anything beyond IP protections. Make it so consumers never have to worry about underhanded bullshit. Sure, I may not make tons of money, but I think I could be happy turning a small profit, paying employees fairly, and knowing that I am selling better products and undercutting all the assholes to send them careening directly I to the ground.
Eh, that might be why you’re not a billionaire
Perhaps. I like to blame my crippling ADHD and lack of generational wealth.
Can you make me a microwave that doesnt’t beep?
They do exist. Mine has a mute button. The keypad is awful though. I don’t remember the brand and not at home, but can look it up later
Bruh. Hold down the setup button. No more single tone screams of your meal is ready.
If that doesn’t work, there should be instructions for your brand online.
Or just open the side panel and pull the lead off the speaker. Hopefully they didn’t do something dumb like wire the speaker in series with the main power supply so to the computer so the whole thing doesn’t work if the speaker is disconnected or dies.
To become a billionaire you can’t have a moral compass from the start so it’s hard to imagine. I wish you well though, hope to buy one of your devices in future
Closest we have to a “unicorn” billionaire with some sort of moral compass is Linus Torvalds, if you ask me.
I think he is far from being a billionaire
They thing to do is buy the rights to old designs, then open source them and sell them. It pisses me off no end I can’t find system diagrams, schematics or source code to think I apparently “own”. It keeps everyone ignorant and throwing stuff away to keep buying new. And now, with all going online, turns everything to a privacy nightmare . When the manufacture moves on to the next shiny, it will become part of internet of infected things botnets.
Probably not without bricking your car. I doubt they are gonna tell you how to disable the telemetry, and with how connected the systems are these days, if you break something the whole thing stops working.
You could, but some antenna are printed onto circuit boards so disabling them without breaking the board entirely will be interesting.
With that Mozilla study out I hope some car manufacturers get sent some very pointed questions by government regulators.
Faraday Cage, read my other top level comment…
Not so easy to rip your dashboard apart to wrap things in screening though. Nor should a person have to considering the tens of thousands of dollars they already paid for something.
Not so easy to rip your dashboard apart to wrap things in screening though. Nor should a person have to considering the tens of thousands of dollars they already paid for something.
Who said the computer components you’re looking for are in the dash? I mean I’ll be honest, I dunno about these modern vehicles, but vehicles I’ve worked on in the past have the main computer in weird unexpected places like under the driver’s seat or in the passenger side cowell area.
I do get your point though, yes such modifications might be simple on paper, but cost quite a bit in labor to actually accomplish.
Regardless, I’ve done dashboards too, even drove my car around for a day with the entire dash completely missing, because I needed to drive it to the store during service that took me two days.
Hooray for dumb cars!
I have a “differently abled” car as well that doesn’t have Onstar (it came out on the next model year after mine.) but even it has most of it’s electronics buried under the dash by the firewall. You’d have to pay me to replace it with all this tracking crap they stuff in there now.
I’m stealing that from you LOL!
“Differently Abled”…
Not gonna lie; everyone seems to be over-reacting to what is common practice in law documents; terms are overly broad for a reason, and undoubtedly if you dig in the case histories; you’ll probably find an absurd lawsuit or two on the books.
That said; I doubt the car is capable of collecting this data; but they can collect information you freely volunteer to them.
So how do we go about volunteering less information?
You agreed to tue terms in the contract you signed as part of your lease or purchase contract.
I thought they would disable my esim after the grace period was over, they gave me the option to pay for a subscription and I said “Hell no!”. But I guess I’m more valuable driving that thing than I thought. So yeah, probably only hacking it to disable the esim.
What car is this?
Elantra
Wrap the car in a large faraday cage? As a general rule it should be assumed that any device with a direct to internet connection capability has the potential to track the user, even of it’s at a very course level like IP history that in theory could be made more precise if the ISP was inclined to keep tabs on a mac address.
My own vehicle has the ability, if not the subscription, to use one of those manufacturer sponsored satilite connections. Plenty of new vehicles have such things as paid DLC and just lock it up behind software but the hardware is still there. Physical interferance through disconnecting the relevant modules in a clean reversible way has potential for some enterprising sort to either open a school or a specialty repair shop. Now if we could just do something about the phone the driver has with them at the same time.
I’ve had a thought I’d love to have a chance to try one day…
I’d like to see about not only disconnecting the antenna, but also basically wrap the cellular circuit module in metal screen, basically a crude Faraday Cage.
I’ve never had any chance to try such a thing, but I can only imagine it would probably do the trick.
Edit: For those that believe this will cause the vehicle to malfunction or even brick itself, have you never drove through a tunnel and found you lost Internet? Your vehicle won’t stop functioning just because it lost Internet, it literally cannot do that.
That would be like the absolutely most unsafe thing any vehicle could ever do, to stop functioning because of an internet connection failure.
The Future: “Hold my beer…”
Classic tin foil hat… Always gets the job done 😌
Have you not heard of the chip in the hand? It’ll be an aluminum foil glove silly.
Unless you volunteer yourself for unnecessary brain surgery…
So only thing is they might just store all the data locally and send it when they get reception again. Microsoft Word used to do this with “Aria”
Do you not understand what a Faraday Cage is or does? It literally blocks radio frequencies.
Cover the module in a metal screen, block any and all data transmission and reception, without even altering the electronics.
And the vehicle ain’t got much other choice but to keep functioning as expected anyways, as it’s expected to have signal loss at times anyways.
Edit: If you think losing internet connection is gonna break your vehicle, well God forbid you ever drive through a tunnel…
What happens when you send it in for repairs? As soon as the mechanic plugs the ODB unit in, it snitches like a stool pigeon.
What happens when/if we hopefully get our right to repair our own shit back?
R2R, Louis Rossmann!
We should all try to fight the good cause.
I think they mean it would cache the data and release it if you ever had to remove the screen for whatever reason.
Driving through a tunnel is a short break in connectivity. These things are probably built in such a way that they’ll brick after not being able to connect for an extended period since not working due to a short disconnect would give the brand a bad reputation after happening a few times.
My concern is that Faraday cages have limitations and you should think about mitigations
Seal it in lead then, what you want from me?
I’m just spitballing a possible solution here…
20 euros and patience for other people
Or the car just doesn’t start one day because it hasn’t connected to its server in a month, forcing you to go to the dealer to fix it. Why do you so fervently believe a manufacturer wouldn’t resort to tactics like this that they already employ for other systems? It’s naive to think that manufacturers would never remotely disable a car in full or in part because it has been modified without authorization. If it profits them, they physically can, and no regulation prevents it, they will. Right to repair is a nice movement, that I fully support, but it’s very very far from a universal right anywhere.
I hate to have to give you this upvote 👍
You’re not wrong.
Hopefully they just haven’t thought about that yet
Or the car just doesn’t start one day because it hasn’t connected to its server in a month, forcing you >to go to the dealer to fix it.
You are exaggerating, a manufacturer can’t do that. The simple reason is that lots of people live (or spend part of the year) in places where the only internet access is through satellite, this is specially true in big countries. The most probable thing they do is to save all the data until there is internet connection available to send it.
You seem to be confused about the difference between can and will. I don’t believe every or even most manufacturers would actually do this, but pretending that they cannot do it (or something like it) purely due to market pressure is naive.
I understand the difference but they never are going to do that for the same reason that they have never and they never will block your phone if its not connected to the internet, there are personal security reasons, they cannot leave you with an unusable phone or car. Even people who dont give a fuck about privacy wouldn’t accept something like that, they would go bankrupt.
I understand the difference
Proceeds to conflate ability and willingness again.
You sound like a corporate chat bot stuck in a rhetorical loop.
Sincerely, the best thing consumers can do is to drive dumb cars and use them for as long as possible (cars aren’t like phones, and can work reliably for over a decade).
I just bike to work.
The best thing to do is to demand better public transportation and walk ability. We’ll always have some cars but we should move away from car dependence anyways.
I did something like that with my robot vacuum. I opened it up and ripped the soldered-on wifi card. Now I can’t control it from my phone, but it can’t phone home to Shark either. I was willing to risk it for a $400 robot vacuum, which I also happened to have a second defective one to practice on thanks to their return policy. I’m not sure if I’d attempt this on an electronics behemoth worth several thousands of dollars that I can’t afford to lose.
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I don’t think I could have set it up. After it was connected, there’s no way to disconnect it, which seems to be a growing tactic. I’ve seen several TVs that have no WiFi disconnect button.
A lot of these devices will refuse to complete setup, or will silently do meshnet type stuff with other devices from the same manufacturer just to get the collected data out
Wouldn’t it have been easier to block it from accessing the internet through a firewall? And having a firewall helps you see what’s going on with the rest of your network.
check out Valetudo
Unsure on the sharks but a lot of the roombas have an open source project (ha980?) that lets you run all the Apis locally and cut it off from the internet fully. Mines managed through home assistant now, it’s not perfect but it beats the heck out of that shitty iRobot app
Never thought I’d see a day where people feel compelled to circumsize their cars
Bad analogy, removing network capabilities is actually beneficial to you.
Oh, like updog
What’s up dog?
I’ve always done this, it reduces the cars sensitivity so it lasts longer
Hmmm… something must be wrong with mine, it’s very vigorous but doesn’t last that long.
All that matters is that you like the car, and that it is trying its best <3
Even if it’s a Morris Marina?
I hate that this is even a consideration, but is that even legal?
As far as I’m aware, so long as you have purchased it fully with no payments left on it or any loans used to finance it, there is absolutely nothing the car manufacturer or the place you bought it from can do besides void any warranty you have on it. And that’s if they figure out you removed the component.
If you own the car; I would say it’s completely reasonable to modify it, as long as its still legaly able to drive after. In Germany your car needs to be regulary checked by TÜV to be street legal.
If this is legal probably depends on where you live, but I would be suprised if it’s illegal in any developed country. (Im not a lawyer btw.)
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Yes
How exactly are cars connecting to the internet? Cell providers give them free data?
It’s generally not much data. A 1GB/mo SIM with ten years service can be had for less than a €10 if you’re buying in bulk.
the oems pay for it. some offer basic features for free but charge for features like music streaming.
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