I think car privacy isn’t talked about amongst any privacy enthusiasts online ever, and it apparently is one of the biggest data collectors out there. For someone like me who values electric cars for there affordability and environmental reasons, but still want physical car buttons and control over my data, how would I go about this?
Consumer reports recently added a privacy rating to their car ratings. I glanced at it a little last year. I think it rated if you could opt out and the reach of the sharing.
I do have to say that I’m generally disappointed with the discussion on this topic every tine it comes up. The majority of responses go contrast to the question. “Don’t buy a car” or “fix up a junker” are generally not helpful if you’ve already decided that your top priority is to have a newer car. Another thread actually recommended to move to another country where you could walk everywhere. Seriously.
Most often a car purchase is a complex decision making process where you need to weigh multiple, often conflicting priorities where privacy is only one aspect. I get the impression that if people followed the advice of the majority of these comments, they’d be living in a tent off grid, hunting for food to stay alive, but living their privacy dream.
I don’t think you have to “fix up a junker.” You can find older vehicles that are modern enough to incorporate OBD2 (which helps troubleshooting and maintaining) but modern enough not to be connected to surveillance programs; late 90s into early 2000s maybe even 2010s. You can find them that have been basically maintained.
You’ll sacrifice things like warranties and included maintenance plans, but you’ll be hard pressed to find a mechanic that won’t work on it, parts will be plentiful and cheaper because I feel like lots of things were less bespoke to each manufacturer around that time frame. Plus they didn’t have a computer connected to every little thing. And theres junkyards for big parts.If you have your own tools (or a friend with them) there will be a cheap shop manual you can get (like Haynes) and/or a plethora of youtube videos on how to fix and maintain it.
The price of ownership might be higher but the cost of entry will be significantly less. Not that everyone can or is willing to do the above but there is a middle ground that doesn’t involve junkers.
Electric cars are not that great for the environment if you look into it deeply. Purchasing an old car and having things rebuilt like the engine are much more sustainable. You could also swap the engine out for an electric motor.
The largest block to having modern private cars is that laws require cars to have driver monitoring systems and kill switches installed. Cars also have microphones in them for hands free calling, emergency calls, and active noise cancellation.
Connecting your phone to your car is also a huge privacy invasion as now your phone that knows everything about you is tied to an invasive vehicle that takes you everywhere. A data aggregators wet dream.
You would need to remove the sim card at the minimum but it’s impossible to know ahead of time if that will detrimentally affect it’s functions and throw codes.
I have read about work being done on Linux operating systems for cars that I assume would be more open to modification but I don’t think we can expect anything reasonably private anytime soon from that.
Just because your phone is connected to your car. Doesn’t mean the car gets all the info. Apple and Google made the integration.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eIryvRwxp9A&t=670
Timestamp 11min10sec
You can purchase used electric cars too.
Battery degradation and telemetry/surveillance will still be large issues if you do that.
Just for Leafs and some of the short range compliance cars like Golfs that don’t have active thermal management of the battery. The old SparkEV batteries are following the expected curve mostly: about 10% loss in the 8yr warranty period, followed by relative plateau of slow degradation mitigated somewhat by its overprovisioning. Hyundai and Kia etc. batteries should be fine, for example.
Telemetry is just as much a problem though.
10% over 8yrs to me is a huge loss. Think of a 2004 vehicle. That doesn’t seem too old and certainly lots of those vehicles have modern expected amenities. It would have lost 25% of it’s fuel tank size today if it had a battery instead. Diesel hybrids would be a great solution for outstanding fuel economy that would last for many, many, many years
No no, after initial degradation, the battery health levels off and stays around 90% for a long while, generally.
My ICE vehicles are maintained but don’t have the new car fuel efficiency either. I wouldn’t be surprised to find they have lost 15% since they are pretty old.
Recent research shows that batteries are likely to outlast the body of most EVs, if the battery is not abused.
Also, people overestimate the typical daily range used with the primary or secondary vehicles, but even short range EVs cover the average daily drive for most.
There are no electric cars that don’t track you except for the really old NiMH Rangers and Rav4s and whatnot that they leased to fleets in California back in the day. Even the very first mass-market Nissan Leaf had unacceptable telemetry from day 1.
Nissan Leaf had unacceptable telemetry
My 2015 Leaf asks me every month on the car screen whether I want to opt in or out. I believe the old-timers on mynissanleaf.com, who say that when you tell it to opt out, it does. Sure, it would be better if it only asked once.
I also removed the SIM card.
Who would though? The marketing idea pushed to the public is that no oil changes means they need no maintenance. They are mechanical devices not magical devices. They require maintenance to stay in good working order like anything. Suspension, brakes (although less often with regeneration systems), tires, wipers, air filters, coolant, batteries 12v not just the rechargeable, transmission fluid (gear box oil on Teslas iirc), etc. This no maintenance myth has turned them into throw away disposable e waste. Not to mention the lack of service for repairing the batteries and computers in the USA leading to insurance totaling the vehicles and them ending up rebuilt in Ukraine.
My biggest worry with used EV is the batteries. Me living in a tropical country that can reach 40°C that has to take a big toll on battery health.
The other thing stopping me buying a new car is my old car still works fine and I don’t want to be in debt again for a car.
Ah, yes, here come the “just use your old car because EVs are worse for the environment than the Exxon Valdez or something” posts
That is a myth thoroughly debunked by just a little bit of research and data collection into the making and driving of EVs, as that assumption ran off an old study that used guesstimated worst-case scenario numbers and don’t really reflect what the actual numbers are.
If you want to avoid being tracked, you will have to disconnect the data modem somehow - it is part of your radio antenna. If it gets no power, it gets no connection. Either disconnect from the telematics unit, or at the antenna. Also, you can disconnect your telematics unit itself - the “black box” that lives under the dash and records your driving. Some aftermarket makers have “dummy plug” connectors which will trick the car into thinking it is connected. These are often used with aftermarket head units.
Beware that some cars are tracked by your financial lender, and they don’t like it when this happens. Some other cars actually have to be cloud connected once in a while or they stop working - which is the worst thing modern cars can do.
I as a person wouldn’t even blame myself for buying an ICE car because I blame corporations for global warming etc. But I just want an EV because it’s cheaper to run, is more environmentally friendly, I can plug in to a wall socket at home, charge with solar panels etc.
OP didn’t ask about EVs, they asked about modern cars.
Well, actually… Read the post again ;)
Cars are the problem. I am agnostic to whether the car is powered by steam, diesel, gasoline, or electricity. Tail-pipe emissions are a very small part of the overall pollution from a car.
Prove it’s a myth. I find it really hard to believe me going and purchasing a new car is better then using an already existing car. Manufacturing has a big cost for cars.
Just to point out that you made the initial argument and commented a view without evidence. Now you ask someone who disagrees to give evidence?
Rough math involved: production of a new EV results in between 8-15 tonnes of CO2 emissions, depending on the size of the batteries and vehicle trim.
But let’s aim for somewhere in the middle and take ~12 tonnes as a yardstick.
~12 tonnes of CO2 emissions equates to roughly 1,350 gallons of fuel.
Depending of fuel efficiency, this would equate to between 20k~45k miles.
Feel free to double-check my math in case I did anything wrong, but it does validate that most of these „facts” around EVs are likely FUD spread by fossil fuel aligned sources.
ETA: initially forgot to include CO2 emissions from electricity generation - but this varies wildly based on source (nuclear, hydro & renewables at 0 etc.)
Please use metric for anything scientific
I find this a bit misleasing, especially when (in the uk) electricity is only ~50% renewables apparently.
https://www.zemo.org.uk/assets/workingdocuments/MC-P-11-15a Lifecycle emissions report.pdf
For example, a typical medium sized family car will create around 24 tonnes of CO2 during its life cycle, while an electric vehicle (EV) will produce around 18 tonnes over its life. For a battery EV, 46% of its total carbon footprint is generated at the factory.
So EVs are a small improvement. Since I enjoy older cars and my privacy a lot more, I’m gonna keep enjoying them and not let manafacturers ram EVs down my throat, especially when a lot of them are hideous SUVs.
Not intentionally being misleading, as I do have a footnote calling out not including carbon emissions from electricity generation as they vary so wildly based on the energy source.
But unlike ICE cars, EV emissions from energy sources are improving over time as nations build more and more renewable energy sources. Your linked report is correct, but potentially out of date already - the UK for instance was already at 58% in 2024, with a goal of full of 95%+ by the end of this decade.
Here in Australia, our uptake of residential solar has been so high that our energy providers are offering free electricity during peak daylight hours to all customers to help use up all of that excess production. It’s quite feasible for a significant portion of us here to be able to not only recharge an EV for free, but with next-to-no CO2 emissions.
Additionally, we now have a big Government subsidy in place to install batteries in our homes as well: ~£4,000 for a ~30kWh system, fully installed!
I share your love for older cars, but with a toddler and another one planned - we need to have a modern, safe car for peace of mind. But believe me, I will be ensuring that I disable as much telemetry as possible due to privacy concerns.
But for a secondary/weekend car - there is always the option of electrifying an older car, allowing for the best of both worlds - in a sense!
By “tonnes”, do you mean 2,000lb or 1,000kg? In an engineering context, “ton” is the former and “tonne” is the latter.
“Tonne” is also synonymous with “long ton” (dur to converting to 2204.6lb), as well as “metric ton”.
Gladly, it will be years before I can afford a car that doesn’t respect my privacy.
Good starting point would be looking up forum or blog posts from people who have disconnected the modem/TCU on a particular EV model. No self-interested auto manufacturer (all of them) would intentionally provide an option in the user interface to take the telemetry system offline. Take note of any side-effects they report, if it needs to be reconnected for inspections, and if there’s any gotchas between software and hardware revisions.
I’m actually prototyping some designs for making open source vehicles/transportation. The only way this stops is more people advocating for more privacy laws, & for more open source transportation/vehicles becoming a thing worldwide
Just like it is for laptops/phones and Social Media via Linux, FOSS, & Open Source
Volkswagen (VW) had a massive scandal that showed how dangerous this is. By leaking driving behaviour, VW leaked hidden military bases, politicians likely visiting prostitutes and more. Lucky for them ethical hackers (CCC) found that and did not use the data.
Lucky for them ethical hackers (CCC) found that and did not use the data.
In other words “ethical hackers” wasted a great opportunity to give shithead politicians a taste of their own venom. Very frustrating.
Yea, CCC actually has a huge problem by being too ethical. Apparently they had cases were the data protection authority did not force companies to disclose the leak because access by CCC does not constitute access by a malicious third party; absolutely bonkers. Just because the malicious party didn’t open their mouth doesn’t mean they haven’t accessed the data, you pigeon.
Lucky for them ethical hackers (CCC) found that and did not use the data.
I think the most effective way to ensure privacy is to find data mined on anti-privacy politicians and release all of it to the public.
I wish I knew how.
You’re fucked. Best you can do is ride a bike when possible, and keep driving old cars from the mid-2000s or earlier when necessary.
Well, my mom’s 2014 golf mk7 doesn’t have telematics. Just look at the specs and buy a car based on it.
Lotta early 2010s models are also telemetry free but have newer safety systems and probably less miles on them.
I don’t really care about car privacy myself.
Where I drive to isn’t really a secret, social events are organized on Discord. And if driving recklessly raises my insurance premiums then that’s deserved. I wouldn’t risk something as expensive as a car with privacy hacks.
Then you’re lacking in imagination.
Similar data have outed people’s pregnancies, relationships and locations, which has been used to let people be stalked and even murdered.
Car data can be sold and amalgamated to create a very precise profile of you, available to be purchased by anyone. Anyone with about $100 can purchase access to your daily/weekly schedule, including physical locations, and can easily steal your identity, if not rob or murder you.
Also, foreign propaganda can similarly profile you and hyper target influence campaigns.
To complement the above reply, although you paid a lot for the car, you’re paying even more daily, giving many away to very nasty companies that will turn your investment against you to increase their profit. Your data will be sold and you’re donating money to billionaires.
Is that what you want? Are you happy to have ads on a windows install you already paid, for example?
Because that’s what you’re doing. If you got a massive discount on account of the daily extra profit you’ll give them I would understand. But if not, why be so charitable to people who don’t deserve it?
You should, privacy is a human right which is being stripped away from us.
You’re basically saying I don’t really care about my human rights.
Without privacy, you’re one step closer to an authoritan regime, where mass surveillance helps prevent an uprising of the people against it.
E.g. Russia, where you “accidentally slit your throat while shaving” when you go against Putin.
“I’ve got nothing to hide”
how can I improve my privacy when buying a modern car?
Buy a train ticket with cash? Not guaranteed to be fully “private” in the cyberpunk shithole we live in but presumably more private than a car.
On that note, fuck every transit agency (including TransLink in Vancouver) who make it more expensive to buy tickets with cash compared to a transit card. And especially fuck you if your transit card system is a P3 with the data handled by a private company (again, including TransLink). You’re probably paying the money they thought they could have made selling your commute data to advertisers.
Bonus non privacy related rant: TransLink, the Earth and our decedents also say fuck you for using plastic RFID cards even for single journey tickets that will get promptly thrown in the trash when they expire in 90 minutes instead of a simple piece of paper that can biodegrade. They even wrap the plastic in paper to give the illusion of the ticket being made of paper when it absolutely is not. Yeah make single use microcomputers and antennas why don’t you? Can’t have transit being too eco friendly after all. They’re not futuristic, future generations will curse us for being so barbarically wasteful of precious resources while digging those RFID tickets out of landfills to extract silicon and metal from. Just print QR codes on normal paper tickets for god sake since the RFID cards probably only store a single unique ID that needs to be looked up against a database anyway, or better yet, just have coin slots on the fare gates and skip giving you a ticket altogether. Oh wait, but then they wouldn’t able to know which station you get off at and refuse to let you out until you’ve paid the upcharge for having the audacity to ride a fully automated train system even one station outside your home city.
Train stations have hella cameras
So do roads, and your metal cage literally has a code on a plaque tied directly to your government ID, with a retroreflective background and each character carefully engineered to be machine readable from any angle and lighting. Hell, a good number of the cars you pass have 360 degree camera arrays pointed directly in your windows, or if you spring for a higher end model with all the features, you get the privilege of a camera pointed straight at your face and at your passengers’ faces.
Also, you can cover your face on transit with something like a medical mask and sunglasses. If you try covering your license plate you’ll literally get arrested.
As scary & intrusive as all of that sounds, I’m still only worried they’ll spy me picking my nose while driving.
I mean, compared to what? Picking your nose on transit? The people sitting across from you is probably a bigger source of “spying” (and judgment) than the cameras in that case. IMO if you’re okay with being spied on in your car you really don’t have much more to worry about on a train or in a station.
I further submit that cars, being your personal space but still very much “in public,” give you much more of an illusion of privacy while in most cases being just as if not more invasive than transit.
Also, if we’re talking only the transit or road system and not the spying at your destination, driving gives much more precise location data than transit. They’ll know which exact house or building you pulled up to compared to which train station or bus stop you get off at. And if you do consider all surveillance, then they can figure out where you’re going even if you walk because there will be cameras at your destination.
On the technological side of things, you’re pretty much fucked no matter what. Virtually all car companies now have proprietary app integrations, partnerships with Google and Apple, and other anti-privacy features.
Some practical things you can do-
Opt out of as much data collection and sharing as you can. Read the manual and menu dive to disable optional features you don’t need.
If you finance or lease from the dealer, there are likely additional data disclosures and third party sharing that you can opt out of. Read all the paperwork when you sign your purchase or lease documents. In my case I had to literally fill out and mail something in (they don’t want it to be easy to opt-out because they make money from sharing the data with third parties).
With how expensive current cars are I don’t know how they manage to get away with this.
You can’t! Even if you don’t use the cell phone based connections the car still has its own systems to wirelessly transmit data out.
You could yank the fuses associated with the cellular antennas but they’re attached to other electrical systems you’d want like the radio in every case I’ve experienced.
Also the data will be locally cached and can be collected when serviced or cause strange failures when it fills up the cars storage space. If considerate, smart engineers designed the car, they’d have different actual systems for the ecu, mcu, tcu and what have you but I’ve encountered one electric where it’s all in one.
So that’s scary.
Don’t buy a car made before 2007 and don’t buy an electric unless you know exactly what you’re doing I guess.
Or treat driving like a surveilled activity you partake of in public.
Just don’t connect it to the internet. The radio and Bluetooth do not need an internet connection to work and you can use your phone for maps and music streaming.
In modern cars you’d need to actually rip the dashboard apart and cut the power to the built-in eSIM cellular antenna. Cars these days use cell towers to phone home, not just Wifi. And oftentimes, disconnecting that cellular connection will also disable major features of the car (like the radio and Bluetooth, which you claim will work just fine) because it’s all integrated on the same circuit board.
In some cases your car will even fucking throw error codes that will cause you to fail a state inspection. Meaning you’re forced to reconnect it before you can pass inspection and update your car registration. And nobody wants to take the time or effort to rip their dashboard apart every year for inspection. Auto manufacturers know this, and it’s exactly why they do it as a deterrent.
Pretty sure many of the cars sold now have a SIM card or something similar which the manufacturer pays for up front. I don’t think it takes much for them to ping periodically with the information they’d like to track and this ensures they get the data.
Still, don’t connect your car to the Internet, as that could give them way more data but I doubt that anyone alone will completely stop the tracking.
What does this have to do with the computer application software Firefox? Mozilla continues to loose the point of the company with this crap. Are they trying to hide the fact that shoved unneeded AI and yet more unwanted file support into the latest version?
the mozilla foundation is also a non-profit that studies how much privacy certain things have. I’m perfectly fine with this.
They only have money to do that because of their browser, yet they keep laying off people from their browser division.
Buy a bike 😅
Works, but it definitely is not a solution for everyone. There are people who live in areas where it is too far to ride on a bike (and slow) and using public transport takes 2-3 times longer than by car. Especially some areas near cities.
Move then buy a bike.
instructions unclear. moved to the suburbs and bought a rolling coal lifted truck
