- cross-posted to:
- tech@kbin.social
- cross-posted to:
- tech@kbin.social
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Build you own GPL GNU car
And get a lawsuit
TAPR or CERN OHL, probably— Kit cars do already exist, though are apparently aimed at hobbyists, and usually just partial cosmetic customizations. “Metal box on wheels with motor” ain’t exactly rocket science, although quality could be challenging and that’s especially important when it comes to safety.
That said, surely the production costs of modern vehicles needed to do their basic job— Efficient-ish and safe-ish transportation from point A to point B— Can’t possibly be worth their increasingly inflated costs? There’s probably something to be said about the marketability of a sub-$10,000 basic OHL car that you can choose to scratch build or kit-build or buy fully built.
cd /code/cars/manufacturers/nissan/altima
make -B
cp -r /* /var/www
Curl https://192.168.1.2/cars/built/altima
Downloaded a goddamn car son.
We need extremely punitive legislation to punish these companies for stealing data from their customers.
No, just need courts to do their fucking job correctly. Making new laws to fix problems only works when they are enforced properly. If courts and governments did what they are supposed to do then we wouldnt be where we are. But here we are
I mean. Most modern cars have GPS and network capabilities. Just that allows them to track your travels and daily behavior.
Probably would vary depending upon the brand, but I wonder how hard it would be to disable the network. At some point would the vehicle refuse to operate without a network connection?
Maybe not even intentionally. When games first became “online only” it was a big deal, now many games just break if they can’t initialize an internet connection. Even ones that don’t use it.
Which is total and complete bullshit that should be illegal.
this is a legit usecase of game cracking
I don’t think so. The risk of a PR disaster because a car refused to start, due to them not having a signal either due to an outage, or being underground, is too great.
Car companies probably don’t want to deal with the headlines of “Man left stranded in parking garage after his car was unable to connect to the internet”, or “Woman marooned on mountainside because her car could not connect with the servers”.
At least, not until connection technology is good enough, or connectivity ubiquitous enough that neither of those are big enough issues for most.
Probably not, I’m sure there’s plenty of situations they wouldn’t have network connections, so we’d have prohably heard about it if it were na issue with existing cars.
Imagine getting lost in the middle of nowhere and your car refuses to start because it can’t get internet
That sounds like a feature to me. Gotta pay extra for that offline start capability. And if you don’t designate this far as your offline remote start car before hand you’re fucked.
At some point would the vehicle refuse to operate without a network connection?
No doubt.
A boring dystopia
This is far from boring. This is outrageous. One of the most vicerally upsetting things I’ve seen all year. I’m more motivated than ever to keep my old reliable on the road for as long as possible. I’ll pay 450 a gallon if it means Nissan has no way to actively track my sex life. Car play is not worth the convenience at all if it’s pulling all the data from your devices and phoning home with it.
is it necessary for our cars to be connected to internet? I mean if you need maps, jus use the phone with a stand.
1 phone is tiny 2 phone doesn’t know what your vehicle charge is at and where to charge
the worst mozillas seen.
… Yet
If experience has taught me anything, it’s that things can always get worse.
Can anyone tell me how these vehicles are getting my data out of the car and into the hands of Toyota, or whoever, if I don’t use their app and never connect the vehicle to any networks?
I imagine the dealerships could probably pull my info out of the car when I take it in for a checkup, but outside of that I can’t think of how my data is getting offloaded.
Not trying to be a turd, I’m genuinely curious
OnStar has been a thing since '96. They’ve been putting antennas on cars to locate or other wise track them for a long time. One of the things that bothers me about this article is that they don’t say what year models or anything. While I’m sure that for the most part not all the automakers started this practice the exact same year, I am sure there was a starting point. Before then they couldn’t track you. After they could. That’s kind of disappointing. There are some people who think there early 2000’s cars are safe. I am not so sure.
They also don’t mention the fact that if they are using 3G or 2G or Edge components chances are they can’t still be collecting data on users driving those vehicles. But anything with a newer onboard modem would be effected I should think.
The cars themselves have connectivity that can be transmitted over cellular networks (same as/similar to whatever OnStar uses). Plus if you ever connect your phone via Bluetooth to listen to music or plug it directly into the car with a cable that can transfer data, standard protocol on a lot of cars is to just download everything off the phone that it can access.
So… hows the industry for stripping all this crap and then some. Cant imagine there isnt one for atleast repair and replacement.
Not gonna go anywhere. At least not in a lot of modern countries. Vehicle safety authorities dont fuck around. And unless you have the bankroll mercedes and volkswagen have you are gonna get sued into oblivion for violating a bunch of stuff. Or just sued until they bleed you dry
I live in California, so long as it passes smog and the check engine light aint on they dont give a fuck. Mostly cause the car modding scene here is somewhat demented.
standard protocol on a lot of cars is to just download everything off the phone that it can access.
First I’m hearing about this capability. How do you figure they’re doing that with a Bluetooth connection?
Key word is access. Not everything on your phone is available to the vehicle, but if, for instance, you allow your car to access your contacts, it downloads all of them with all the metadata which the company can then sell. Or internally run through algorithms to profile you and everyone who uses your vehicle. If you use Android Auto or CarPlay, or just connect to the entertainment systems, they’ll skim whatever metadata they can and phone it home. Even worse if you use a car’s official app, it will use your own phone as the transmission point.
No, it doesn’t immediately transmit an entire backup of your phone over a personal Bluetooth connection, but I was very precise in how I worded my sentence.
Purely theoretical as I don’t have any sources on how cars are doing this, but they could be communicating over low band networks similar to how Amazon home devices make a mesh network. Your car could send data to another car of the same manufacturer, who then phones home that data.
Does the car still send data if you don’t subscribe to the data service? Because my car has lte, and for the life of me I can’t figure out why I would ever need my car to supply data when I already have a phone, that does hotspot and has a faster connection.
Almost 100%
The radios are used to push software updates and I think you can turn on emergency onstar/onstar-equivalent for a lot of vehicles. You are mostly paying to use the radio yourself and to cover additional data overheads.
Depends on the car but I’d hazard that yes it does. If it has a data connection according to some others in this thread and on other posts, they turn it on regardless of whether or not you subscribe for services. So for instance you still can get Sirius XM ads and so on if you have Sirius satellite radio installed as part of your cars package. If they can send you ads chances are they want to know if they’re effective and they want to better target those ads. Easy to do when they monitor which radio stations you have programmed and which ones you listen to most etc.
Following this cause that was my question too
“Mozilla Foundation found that all 25 of the car brands it reviewed had glaring privacy concerns, even compared to the makers of sex toys”
Wait so my sex toys are collecting my data now?
Tesla was the worst-ranked brand in the study, getting flagged in every privacy category — only the second time this happened. Tesla’s AI-powered autopilot was highlighted as “untrustworthy” following its involvement in numerous crashes and fatalities.
Yeah, that does sound untrustworthy.
Huh?! If I look at the source of the article at Mozilla, Tesla is actually ranked as almost least creepy.
So I do not understand where this is coming from. Also the picture of the article only showing teslas is highly suggestive
https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/privacynotincluded/categories/cars/
This is the article being referenced. Specifically, the table listing the brands from “bad to worst”:
It looks to be based on user ratings (for the sort), and could change dynamically
Likely a lot of people dog piled on Tesla, then read the others.
The Tesla one’s main issue is “they grab a lot of data and don’t seem competent protecting it” which is less bad than “we will sell your sexual history if we can grab it from the car, and have a lot of sensors too”
Actual Link to Mozilla’s reviews: https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/privacynotincluded/categories/cars/
For some reason, journalists (or their editor) seem to hate linking to actual sources. But at leastthe article helps point you in the right direction for keywords to look out for with each manufacturer.Edit: The link is there on the second sentence. I just missed it.
Guess I better keep my old shitbox on the road a while longer 🚗💨
If presented with a binary choice between minimizing carbon footprint with privacy-evasive EV or sticking with more polluting ICE vehicle and keeping privacy, what would you choose? Which choice is more ethically sound? What is more important between mitigating human-caused climate change or preserving individual human privacy? 🤔
I chose buying and maintaining older vehicle because at this point I’m convinced a big part of the issue is not what type of vehicle people drive but the fact that so many people can’t keep one longer than 4 years.
Friend of mine has bought 5 EV since 2015, that’s not less pollution.
Good point. Well-maintained ‘02 Honda CR-V here with 186k miles. I bike to work when weather and climate conditions allow which is most days May–November where I live. We got a second hand Tesla last year because my wife commutes a lot for work. With the latest news, I may try and hold onto the CR-V for even longer than next 2–3 years.
We should stop building town and city’s around cars in first place
Privacy. Easy choice for me.
The impact of our cars, though significant, is far outstripped by global shipping (those container ships aren’t carbon-neutral), power generation (EV cars gotta get their power from somewhere), or the simple burning of rain forests to make room for cattle or crops.
It takes energy to smelt steel and aluminum and build a car, or to mine Rare Earth Minerals needed for the latest tech.
Driving and old car that you maintain, repair, and keep out of the junkyard is far more environmentally sound. So far. Hoping that balance will change in near decades.
Dammit! Just when I’m in the market for a car, this Mozilla study comes out.
My wife and I were planning on getting her a new car in October. I guess the first thing I will do once it’s home is pull whichever fuse is connected to the network antenna.
Keep in mind that will likely instantly void your warranty as well as prevent you from receiving OTA updates to your software and the like. Some of which may be safety related.
And that is assuming it doesn’t instantly trip a check engine light or even partially brick the car.
These days, it’s becoming less simple than that.
VW and BMW have it all baked into the infotainment system. Most others are doing this as well. Pull the fuse and you lose it all. No radio, no backup camera, etc. This triggers a check engine light because the computer detects the loss of several functions. With some manufacturers this may include driver assistance safety features.
Can’t just pull SIMs either. VW place the module for that behind the instrument cluster. Which means you have to disable the entire dashboard to get to it. BMW is inside the infotainment system. These are not designed to be taken apart. So once you get it out of the dash, what good does it do you? If you do manage to remove the SIM, the infotainment will display a warning message. It’s a permanent one that won’t go away. Tells you to visit the dealer for service. Put the SIM in and the warning message goes away. Mercedes has an eSIM. Which means it’s non-removable. It’s digital and part of the modem firmware.
Some people have reported success with dummy load antennas. Others have found independent fuses or removed the SIM on select models. YMMV heavily.
Note that when the cellular services are disabled, you lose the following features:
- Remote start (via the app)
- Remote safety (automatically call help)
- Theft tracking
- Misc. Remote features as advertised.
In the case of Toyota, they do offer the ability to opt out entirely. Once opted out, the app becomes useless.
These days it’s inside the head unit. She may not have anything on the dash if you do that.
