How can this be stopped, from a technical perspective? Can I wrap the comms in a Faraday cage?
Obviously it would be better to have this action be illegal. But with legal privacy protections eroding in the US and other countries, it seems prudent to have a better understanding of the systems involved in the immoral surveillance.
> How can this be stopped, from a technical perspective?
It can't. Not realistically.
It can be stopped by legislation. But that would require politicians who have our interests as a priority rather than the various industries. So not going to happen anytime soon.
I've had good luck with pulling service manuals, finding the telematics antenna connectors, and unplugging them. It's popular to pull the telematics module fuse, but that typically disables internal microphones and GPS that are used by android auto and carplay. This severely degrades features spouses expect to just work. The antenna pulling is a much lighter touch.
The amount of times I see "I'd like to do the right thing but my spouse isn't on board" is mind boggling.
It's wild how convenience trumps everything and then we look back to say, "we should have done better."
Okay it's a red herring here. I also like to use carplay and the phone's GPS is truly awful to use. I also like to dictate texts and take calls in my car. These are things that don't need to be sacrificed if a scalpel is used in place of a butcher's knife.
Sometimes it helps to have someone with their priorities in order keeping a reality check on people who don't always stay grounded.
The convenience here for you is CarPlay though. You could instead use a different more accurate gps device you plugin that doesnt have the data leak issues concerned in articles like this one. Then if you really needed you could pull out a sort of external monitor stick it over the other display when carplaying and when needing car-vital features you need the car display for, pull over and temporarily do that thing then pull your extra monitor out again and keep going.
I think maybe being grounded has changed - I would be comfortable doing what I described but I imagine your comfort with your preexisting solution means your ground has shifted and a reality check means you woudl rather give away your data than take the higher friction option?
I think most people would not be on board with your solution, but in general to your point I would say everyone draws the line somewhere different.
Yes there are many (maybe most) who will not give up their comforts or risk modifying their vehicle in order to make it more private... but trying to play the judge in a made-up internet game of altruism olympics is not going to convert many people either.
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> features spouses expect to just work
Never underestimate the risks of spousal dissatisfaction.
You should be using a 50 ohm 1 watt dummy load / termination. It's better at attenuating the signal than leaving the antenna unplugged.
You're implying the stub of an exposed coax inside a faraday cage is capable of establishing a link with cell towers. This doesn't really pass fermi tests and I've never observed it myself, just read the paranoid concerns of people online.
Regardless, taping some foil around the connectors with the foil making okay contact with the metal chassis is more than enough attenuation at sub GHz microwave to remove this concern without having to source specialty terminations and crimpers (or worse, non-reversible damage to the OEM cable assemblies by repurposing their terminations). I've done the foil+tape on some of my vehicles, but it hasn't made a difference in binary "does it connect or not?" testing.
Best to use a termination, to avoid the power that would have gone into the antenna from reflecting back into the transmitter output and damaging the output driver transistors. Damage is no bad thing if you do want to permanently disable the transmitter, but not so good if you want it to be reversible. Chances of damage due to reflections is probably low given the relatively low power being transmitted, but best not to take the risk if it can easily be avoided with a termination.
I agree it's a good practice. However in this case I consider the possibility of frying the amplifier a knock-on benefit. The fucking thing should have never been made.
If a hypothetical future owner feels strongly about it then replacing a telematics module in the dash is much easier than replacing harness runs. I somehow doubt I would sell one of my vehicles to someone who would do that though.
I wonder if this increases or reduces the value of the car???
If your buyer is an institution like Carmax or similar, lower.
If your buyer is the end owner, probably increase a little bit unless they are surveillancemaxxing.
A good question. I'm not really concerned with the answer since I don't plan on selling my cars. I'm sure a good population would pay to not have their car spy on them and I can think of very few that would pay to have it turned on.
Easily reversible mods only affect price for suckers anyway.
To whom? The owner of the car, or the manufacturer and "their partners"?
It is possible to remove the hardware itself that is responsible for this, but depending on the car it can very involved: https://arkadiyt.com/2026/05/13/removing-the-modem-and-gps-f...
It definitely can be stopped. For example, China sells cars internally at cheaper prices, but they are locked to prevent using them outside the country. However, there are people who can hack and unlock them allowing operating in any country. But maybe it would be illegal in the West, I don't know. Removing the modem is an easier task.
What sucks is that at least with my car, if you pull their access, you also lose all your remote access as well, and the ability to receive updates.
Why does a car need "remote access" and to "receive updates?" I'd consider this a bonus side effect.
People who live in cold or hot places like to prestart the climate control in their car.
When I was a lad we walked out to the car and did that with the key. In the snow. It wasn't that bad and, despite what you may have heard, was not in fact uphill both ways.
Why do you need remote access to your car? What updates does your car need?
> What updates does you car need?
These cars are more software than hardware now. And like everything else in the software industry, every product gets released incomplete and patched later.
Although the correct solution would be a USB port somewhere to insert a patch file rather that over-the-air updates that might happen while driving.
It’s practical to see battery level so I can optimise the electricity price at which I charge it.
Although it wasn’t worth the cost of the 3 year subscription so I now just estimate the charge status based on the charge’s power consumption.
If the car is at 10% battery, it may be worth charging at .15 or .3€/kWh. If it’s at 70% charge, I’ll wait until the price drops to .005€/kWh. The whole thing is automated in HA.
You can do stuff like like turn it on to heat or cool the cabin, live track it's location, lock/unlock doors, open/close trunk, and updates are mostly for the infotainment systemn and driving assists.
Their is a cell modem in the car, so all these features are available anywhere the car has cell service.
> You can do stuff like like turn it on to heat or cool the cabin, live track it's location, lock/unlock doors, open/close trunk, and updates are mostly for the infotainment systemn and driving assists.
Are any of those things more important than your security (e.g., against hackers) and privacy?
You learn animal husbandry and join the Amish.
Remember that story a week ago „everything I own, owned“? That’s one way.
Simple: don't own a vehicle with this capability.
Much like owning a home without an HOA attached, it is becoming harder and harder to meet this requirement.
It also seems to conflict with `right-to-repair` laws if the capability is legally required.
It really isn't. FB Marketplace is literally awash in perfectly serviceable vehicles that don't and can't phone home. For the budget conscious among us it's also significantly cheaper to buy a "clapped out" used older car and refresh the drive train than buying new or late model.
Besides the irony of a privacy-conscious user using facebook to buy a car... those "perfectly-serviceable vehicles" are 1. no longer manufactured, and 2. will not last forever.
Unless a new age of unconnected cars becomes a reality in the near future, I don't see this being a long-term solution.
"will not last forever" doesn't comport with observed reality to date. There are literally model A's still on the road. Barring true oddities there doesn't appear to be a model of production vehicle that has gone extinct at any point in automotive history. Anyway, three of my cars are older than I am, and I am not a young man. Buying into their shit is optional.
>Much like owning a home without an HOA attached, it is becoming harder and harder to meet this requirement.
The near universal proliferation of owner's associations and management groups and whatnot for developments larger than ~1ac (the EPA threshold, some states/towns have lower) is something you can lay at the feet of the Clean Water Act and it's implementation and precedents over the following decades.
The exact area of the buildings, the driveways, the community park and gazebo, etc, etc, are necessary features of the site plan that makes the math that is required to meet stormwater/environmental requirements. And and some legal entity has to be responsible for that in perpetuity. Enter the HOA. This is also why HOAs often won't allow you to expand your driveway or add a non-permeable patio, it could (prob not, but still) ruin the environmental calculations they're responsible for enforcing as a condition.
I'm not nearly as familiar with car regulatory stuff but I would bet a lot of money that they're using OTA telematics to check some sort of compliance box...
I believe it was Strongtowns reporting a few months back that HOAs are generally being driven by developers, the only folks with (a) land to build in bulk; (b) capital, relationships, and experience to get fully through permitting in bulk; (c) building a substantial fraction of SFH.
Strongtowns is happy to follow the money and incentives on all sorts of other issues. Why do they just throw up their hands and say "it's the developers" on this issue?
Developers don't do anything that costs money, like set up an HOA, without a reason. The developers create the HOA because you need your >1ac residential development to pass stormwater permitting. While you theoretically could make each individual .25ac parcel you're putting a house on compliant it's infinitely cheaper to just ignore all that, grade everything toward the road, dig a ditch, send the contents of the ditch through your stormwater treatment features, build in a little margin to those items, show the permitting authority the numbers that prove it passes with flying colors and when some jerk says "but what if X Y Z changes" you point to the excess you built in and tell them to GFY.
Now, where it really gets evil is when you start really pinching pennies or where the rules change over the course of the process making your numbers not work. Say you've got a lot of grade, a lot of rainfall, a lot of stormwater you gotta "treat". Well, you start adding rules to the HOA. Require certain parts of the lots remains grass or planter or whatever. Disallow patios, but do allow wood decks because the municipality considers those pervious, etc, etc. Or maybe the results you've got are marginal but you throw the bureaucrats a bone by saying you'll disallow car-ports and sheds in the HOA rules to prevent people from adding impervious surface. Or maybe you're uphill of some wetlands but not close enough to be regulated by default you promise to disallow working on cars and require people pick up their pet waste and not use lawn fertilizer or some other laundry list of certain things in order to make the local town's wetlands people comfortable not raising objection and claiming jurisdiction.
And of course, however these rules and plans shake out, the HOA is responsible for implementation in perpetuity.
Not just storm water, but also things like maintenance of 'common areas', roads, and snow removal. Many small municipalities are budget strapped and don't want to be responsible for plowing/surfacing the new little 1/8 of a mile culdesac the developer created to build their 'neighborhood'.
In carving up the 5 acres the developer purchased, the 30 houses they squeezed in left some remainder that wasn't buildable or odd shaped, so this now becomes a lame 'park' or some other space that requires maintenance.
I read all my local municipal meeting minutes, and at least around here, permitting and ordinances control all the environmental/nuisance stuff, so I can't really explain why HOAs go beyond the collective expenses into the draconian rules.
There’s no reason that sort of compliance needs an HOA. Most places already have building codes enforced by mandatory government inspections for major renovations.
How do you think right-to-repair intersects with cars?
An obvious thing may be to say the software must be published or the spec released, but we've had computers in cars since the 80s. It seems like a tall task but people can and do reverse engineer entire ECU systems (See Trionic Tuning)
Another seemingly very obvious one - requiring manufacturers to publish specifications regarding ALL OBD interface options. Of course this immediately runs into trouble. Saab for example gated features of the security system to prevent key reprogramming, swapping of certain components without a dial out to the internet using specific saab software that runs on a laptop and interfaces.
> How do you think right-to-repair intersects with cars?
Strongly. You don't own the thing you purchased if you can't legally repair it or legally obtain the knowledge to repair it. At beat you're paying an overpriced lease and granting a liability waiver.
I tend to agree. In my mind, it would be pretty cost efficient to put a builtin- system diagnostic utility in all new vehicles that provide at least moderately good tooling for the ODB. T
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I want a car that doesn't collect the data, not one that gives a pinky promise not to sell still collected data.
When given the choice between privacy and convenience, the great majority of consumers choose convenience over and over again.
I'm not sure what the solution is, but it's not going to be market based if you look at any recent trends. Interest in privacy is unfortunately a niche concern outside of places like HN.
Anyone who has tried to market a privacy oriented product knows what I am talking about.
Is it that the friction to use privacy is too high and not that interest in privacy is actually a niche concern?
I imagine its friction and not indicative of interest itself.
Which brand? And what's to stop them from changing your opt in toggle on after an update as we've seen countless companies do time and time again?
Haven't they been caught snooping on customers before with their in car surveillance?
Which brand is that if you don't mind me asking?
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That’s a lot of words coming from a very angry place. Frankly I’m surprised and disappointed that this hasn’t been flagged yet.
Congrats you free speech absolutist! You got my comment flagged, but the good thing is everybody with above room temperature IQ can infer what a [flagged] comment probably said based on context :)
“Someone disagrees with what I’ve been told to believe, I want them censored!!!1!”
Just like musk, props on the consistency
Found the Musk Stan. It’s perfectly fine to be angry with a political trillionaire who did all of the aforementioned things. Keep being disappointed, that’s going to be your natural state when this dust settles.
don't forget that elon is personally responsible for the deaths of 14 million people, now ranked #4 just below hitler and above stalin
He has caused a non-zero number of deaths from entirely preventable diseases, I would rather not mention any numbers (nor do I claim real knowledge of them) before there is public accountability. Mentioning numbers tends to put the Elon Stans into a willfully ignorant state. It’s natural for them, as they have to pretend the Emperor’s garments are astonishing 24/7.
but you agree he's personally responsible for at least like a million though right?
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lol sure - provide their terms and maybe we can believe this trust me bro attitude