Nope! I have a 20+ y/o car, so mine is not. No touch screen, no spyware, just a car with buttons and knobs that we drive around.
If it’s not your car then it’s your smart phone.
Hard to escape the surveillance machine (i.e. unregulated marketing and their data collection).
I’m in it too…
*cue the GrapheneOS fanatics right… now*
Car companies will tell you themselves if you wade through their privacy policies. The information they harvest can include precise location data about everywhere you go, who’s in the car with you, what’s on the radio and whether you buckle your seatbelt, drive too fast or brake too hard. Some can gather details you might not expect like your weight, age, race and facial expressions. Do you pick your nose? Some cars have cameras on the inside pointed at the driver’s seat. And most come with internet connections that can ship off that data as you drive in blissful ignorance.
All new cars this year are required to have driver monitoring camera (DMC) systems.
Though the two 2024 reports documented some promising technologies, neither report found commercially available technology that detects driver alcohol impairment accurately and passively.”
So what tech are they gonna use? Something that doesn’t exist yet? How does a camera sort a drunk person from someone with a disability? Is this going to deny black people at double the rate just because facial tech has a harder time with dark complexions?
There are going to be so many lawsuits with the inevitable amount of false positives this will produce. A little tired this morning? Well now you’ve lost your job as well because your car wouldn’t start because it decided you weren’t in a perfect emotional state to drive.
Then I’m going to require electric tape over the sensors in my car.
If you own your car (not paying off a loan or a lease) you can remove the sim card/ internet module from your car. It may cause some features to stop working (nothing that impares the vehicle) but it stops the car from actually sending the data it’s collecting
Nope. They’ll jump the air gap when the mechanic plugs it in
everyone should buy/wear these new driving hats I found
I pulled the fuse that runs that stuff in my car. Don’t need anything it disabled, so I don’t give a fuck.
Sure if I ever need service it might be a problem, but I’ll cross that bridge when and if I get to it, and maybe we’ll have better data protections by then.
Which car is this easy to privacy-ify?
Sorry to not reply, haven’t been around for a bit, I have a 2023 chevy bolt EUV, but the EV version is the same, and what I was planning to get if not for availability. Idk about their ice vehicles, ofc, nor any line of vehicles outside the US or non-electric. This was really the only one that checked all the boxes for me (privacy available, decent range, fully electric, cargo space and can* haul short distances. *owners manual says not to haul with it but you can. Should not be used to haul long distances as extra load just destroys the range, but I need 5-10 miles tops, and it can do that fine)
You can actually pretty easily remove the on-star module of you need the gps to work (only really useful over using a phone for pulling a full 12 amps by default from a level 1 (standard plug) outlet with location-based charging, but nobody I know, including me, wants to risk their wiring or get it inspected to assure I can pull that much amperage, so it literally makes no difference, plus when I have an electrician out, it’ll be to install a different plug to use a level 2 anyway which will pull at max, since my garage has an appliance hookup currently), but if you don’t the one fuse kills all of it, and I think maybe the bluetooth microphone as well? I don’t connect my phone to my car at all since that defeats the purpose, but I read something about it. I don’t think it applies to phone calls, just voice controls. Something to look into if it matters to you.
I’d be curious if anyone documented how to privacy-ify it? Like someone who checked that it disabled all the sensors, like microphones, cameras, seat cushons, GPS, etc.
Honestly, it’s a “budget” vehicle, it doesn’t really have bells and whistles (for example, the infotainment system hardly gets used because it has physical buttons, but it does have the legally mandated backup camera on a different circuit, I haven’t seen any cabin cameras), and they are only really highly available because most of the used ones on the market started life as cheap base package rentals, like mine.
I doubt they would bother being nefarious for a vehicle like that, when most people wont bother pulling a fuse even, but I’d also like to see that.
Luckily I drive a piece of last-millenium machinery.
May the japanese engineers that designed it with reliability in mind be praised.
It’s also probably recording the password you typed on your phone.
Don’t give the password to police? They’ll just ask your car.
This is one reason I haven’t bought an electric car.
So what’s the solution? What’s the car where we can opt out or easiest to remove the sensors without it breaking?
