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!
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…
Never thought I’d see a day where people feel compelled to circumsize their cars
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?
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Oh, like updog
What’s up dog?
Just ask the dealer to disconnect the modem upon purchase.
Better yet, refuse to buy shit you don’t own and make this known. Go to the dealer force them to stand around while you read the privacy agreement. Use an attorney because they have stupid legal agreements. Waste everyone’s time because they are the ones doing this to you. It must cost profit. Then walk away from this bullshit. Tell them why you are walking away.
All of this exists because people are too stupid to care. If you ignore this, you are one of them, and part of the problem. Legal agreements are theft and slavery. Signing them blindly is the stupidest thing you can ever do in your life. Anyone that needs a legal agreement for you to make a purchase is a worthless criminal. Signing their bullshit is saying you are okay with being their little slave bitch.
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Not noted internet super genius j4k3 though! So smart! Truly owns things! Not subject to any agreements.
Like the other person said, you are confusing the dealership and the manufacturer. This is the equivalent of those people that yelled at the teenagers working at chik filet. The dealership will just say they don’t create those rules and you’d have to take it up with the manufacturer, then ask you to leave. If you don’t leave and act like a jerk, they’ll just call the cops and have you escorted off premises.
Except it’s really not. Most of the dealerships around are thinly veiled fronts for the manufacturers. The salespeople are shills and scam artists who are specifically hired for their ability to pull the wool over people’s eyes. That poor sap working at Chik-fil-A is some minimum-wage kid who is about as complicit in the greater organization than the mop is. Dealerships are a mouthpiece for the very manufacturers who are patenting ways to make your care self repossess and are charging subscriptions for basic functions that are built into the cars.
The comparison is shallow and not at all reasonable.
lol no not at all. They are franchises, not fronts for the manufacturer. Everything you said is as wrong as can be.
To put it simply, this may not even be something they can do legally. For instance, when the mach E came out they were having serious electrical issues. The electric battery has it’s own junction box. So much current was flowing through the contacts that they ended up fusing themselves open or closed. That basically disabled the vehicle. It was fixed with an OTA update. The update works through the same antennas and network you’re talking about. If a vehicle can’t receive an OTA and it affects the security of the vehicle/driver or poses a danger on public roads? Might be out of compliance with NHTSA or other authorities of similar spec in other countries.
https://www.nhtsa.gov/technology-innovation/vehicle-cybersecurity
They have no rights to anything I own. What they ship the vehicle with is what I bought. I don’t give a shit about anything anyone has to say about this. This feudalism bullshit is the absolute antithesis of freedom. I am not for sale.
I didn’t say they had a right to your data. I’m not defending them. I’m pointing out that cars these days (new ones especially) are as much device as they are machinery. And you absolutely do not want someone hacking your vehicle. And neither does the regulating federal authority in your country. As a result they put certain laws in place that may protect you from this possibility (being hacked), but also leave you open to being taken advantage of by the automaker (having your data taken without your permission).
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
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.
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?
Really wish I had the money to start a car company
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.
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.
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
How exactly are cars connecting to the internet? Cell providers give them free data?
the oems pay for it. some offer basic features for free but charge for features like music streaming.
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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.
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.
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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
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.
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
check out Valetudo
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.
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.
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.
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…
The Future: “Hold my beer…”
It would probably be easier and less damaging to find the fuse for the antenna/transmitter and pull it. That being said, it will probably stop the buttons on your keyfob from working. I think the keyless/touchless entry would still work. IIRC, that system works with active RFID near the door handles.
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.
That might help in some situations, but some of the data is stored on hard drives and retrieved later, either at dealerships or when police “request” it. I think it would take some invasive modifying to really render your car private.
One of those big degaussing cables they use to make ships safe from sea mines
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Probably not a “hard drive”, as vibration and shock are common things that cars experience, and not something that a hard drive handles well.
Solid state is still a hard drive.
Most vehicle head units are still running a low power version of Java 6 and have difficulty with nested levels of DNS CNAMES. I wonder what other problems that Java stack has that can be exploited?
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Yes
