Automatic Transmission – a data-privacy study of connected vehicles

I currently drive a mid 2000s Ford truck, which runs great and meets my needs, but lately I got interested in minivans/people carriers. I pretty quickly realized that newer vehicles seem to not just record, but export a lot of driving data.

The minivan market is small. There are really only 4-5 available and every single one sends telemetry data from the car and makes it hard/impossible to opt out of selling your data. Additionally, without pretty extensive work there is no means of physically disabling the telemetry, which forces you to trust they'll honor your opt out request (vs re-enabling it with some update).

I'm clearly in the vast minority on this, but it's so frustrating that there are no options beyond buying and installing a third-party bypass to disable this type of tracking. Worse, I'm aware that the absence of data is data itself. Is my insurance going raise my rates because my vehicle won't provide telemetry for them to buy?

May be relevant: noticed a new car dealer today, entered to inquire. Full "gadgety" monsters, pointless bothersome tech just for any-tech thirsty customers.

Salesman told me that it does not work without a smartphone.

And that it requires the dealer - the vehicle is a still statue without a whole infrastructure behind it to let it work (must be network connected and exchanging with some servers in China, he said - I do not know to which extent; the company greenlights the links to your other gear, and without that the car will not work... Things like that).

Interesting to see how this has evolved. Mozilla had conducted a detailed investigation on this topic by carmaker a few years ago: https://www.mozillafoundation.org/en/blog/privacy-nightmare-...

  if an owner decides they are uncomfortable with the data sharing described within them, they are faced with (arguably) unfair choices:
  - 01 accept the agreements regardless of their concerns
  - 02 stop using their car's connected-vehicle features - which includes remote start, the app, and other very useful features
  - 03 stop using the vehicle entirely

Easy, I take #2. Is that it? This whole time I thought the article was talking about telemetry the car sends regardless.

Hope to see a new market for disabling telemetry and phonehome features from cars. It should be legal to do so, if you own the car I suppose. I'm thinking that rigth now few pople even know how much spying their new car does to them but this will change and as awareness grows more and more people will want to do it.

> As one notable exception, Honda improved its data collection practices to prevent sending precise geolocation to a third party associated with user tracking.

I know what my next car will be.

Ha ha, you fools! No one is collecting my data from my 22-year-old Scion while I drive past Flock cameras every day.

Wait...

The ongoing theme of all these responses was shifting the blame to the consumer.

As expected. I think consumers also need to push back on these practices, but the problem is, majority of consumers are tech savy but not privacy savy.

This seems like something that needs legislation to address.

I was gifted a 90's ford pickup from a family member and plan to get caught up on maintenance and keep it forever. It runs fine and has been a good project. No telemetry and easy to work on.

Still driving my GR Corolla with the data communications module fuse pulled.

While the researchers noted Tesla as having privacy options that can be enabled in the car’s settings, they didn’t seem to test how this changes the # of ATA results. Would have been interesting to see how enabling privacy features changes things.

It's sad that the paper does not mention even once a straightforward solution, which is to pull the cellular modem's fuse or to outright unplug it.

I'm not surprised the Mercedes has the best privacy...

I've been on GrapheneOS for over 3 years and won't look back.

What is the situation like for people who rip out the entertainment system out of older cars and install Android Auto? How "bad" is that?

And this is without even looking at any Chinese manufactured vehicles...

When I buy an EV, one of the first things I intend to do is disable or block the chips using Wi-Fi and/or cellular from broadcasting further. If that means a faraday shield around the computers in question, so be it.

Everything I need can be handled via CarPlay or physical dials/buttons in the vehicle. All this surveillance - on post-COVID priced vehicles no less, averaging ~$50k - is absurd, and I refuse to engage with it.

I don't trust any of my devices anymore (including/especially my car). At the very least I figure that they're spying on me. In the most extreme cases, such as Israel's terrorist pager attack, they may even kill you.

I wonder if this is going to create a market for older tech/vehicles that were made prior to ease-of-malware integration? I imagine some sort of cyberpunk future where people are scouring landfills for old 16-bit video game console chips that haven't been backdoored.

So except for Tesla, which sends lots of telemetry regardless, other manufacturers send little if you don't use their companion apps. The companion apps already seemed excessive to me; even more reason to kick them to the curb.

It's so annoying, actually. I’d rather not switch to a newer car because of it.

...Adobe? What interest do they have in data harvesting so much from vehicles?

Not to take away from the point but wow absolute ai slop of a website

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