Friendly reminder: Mozilla studied 25 car brands and NONE of them passed the privacy test. Mozilla even said that cars are “privacy nightmares”.
I mean this is gotta be on the newest Internet connected cars right? Cause like aint no way my 2017 ford focus has that many “privacy issues” it doesn’t even have android auto lol.
Has what’s called a Telematics Control Unit. And that thing phones home. It’s basically a wifi modem.
No it does not. Some models may. But mine does not. Also, as far as I understand you would have to have like a cellular connection or something for your car to phone home anywhere? And not only is that not a service offered on my car? . It would also mean someone has to maintain that device and ensure it’s communicating basically 24/7 . I mean who’s paying for the cell service. Is it running on 3G which is defunct now? If I even had one How can it phone home? I don’t understand.
Yes. A lot of cars and car manufacturers include a Telematics Control Unit (a Cellular wifi modem) in their vehicles.
If people really cared about privacy and their cars and were serious about solving it, disabling the telematics control unit or the cellular modem would resolve this issue pretty quickly. None of the cars on the road today need internet connectivity to function.
However, if they have built-in Google maps or navigation system, well that’s always going to be a privacy issue right? This is no different than having GPS and maps on your phone.
Judging by the lack of tik Tok videos on how to disable your car’s cell modem, I’m guessing this isn’t that big of an issue for people.
Disabling it often bricks the car because it’s tied into an ECU or network that requires it. Even if it doesn’t and you could say go and unplug it or a fuse for it, the one in the focus (according to Google) is behind the dash and would probably require you to remove the dash to access it. You could unplug an antenna or something but then other features like radio or GPS might not work. If your car has integrated GPS do not be surprised if it’s the same antenna.
Disabling 4G breaks your car?
So how am I able to drive a Tesla across Northern Canada where there is no cell phone service or internet whatsoever?
Here’s a better explanation than I can ever give on the privacy aspect of this and the data car manufacturers are collecting.
As these cards age out, the cellular standard that they support will be eventually dropped and then they won’t work. Just like owning an old cell phone.
This has happened with 3G networked and older vehicles (OnStar has been a thing since the 90’s). People tried to unplug the OnStar hardware but they ran it through a CAN bus and it would disable the car (to prevent thieves from circumventing it).
Nope, still a privacy nightmare
Go ahead and explain. Cuz there’s nothing internet connected on my car.
My parent’s Hyundai had no customer-facing internet-related features on the car. Still had a cellular radio for telematics. A potential tell is an SOS button. (That’s a non-issue since it’s 3G now and that went bye-bye but 4G is going to be around a while)
But my similar age to your Focus, newer than the Sonata, Sorento had nothing that I could find. So it’s possible.
Ford started shipping all of their cars with one in 2015. I linked an article showing that somewhere up there. I’ll edit to post it here too.
Except I don’t have sync connect. I have an old sync which as far as I can tell has no telemetry and is completely defunct considering it doesn’t work with anything anymore.
You have sync 2. Because that is the standard sync system on your vehicle. It became standard on all Ford models in 2015, 2-ish years before your car was manufactured. Believe whatever you like, but please read the article.
I could waste my time explaining or you could Google it. Long story short is that there are many ways to send information that don’t involve the internet at all, and you’d have to get a mid 90s car if you didn’t want any data sent at all. They got worse in around 2012 when more protocols were added as well
I could waste my time explaining or you could Google it.
Sounds to me like you’re talking out your ass. Otherwise you could just explain it instead of telling me to google it. You did after all “waste your time” by even responding.
Notable was (I believe) Nissan, who included a clause about tracking your sexual activity.
Car companies really seem to be going all-in on technofeudalism. It’s definitely not the industry I would have expected.
Here’s the reason: it’s not the industry that’s the problem. It’s the system surrounding the industry.
“you will own nothing”
Collective ownership of communism gonna start looking a lot less scary to everyone when they own nothing anyway.
Communism would be nice economic model to try, but i wonder if its possible to setup in such a way it wont become mockery of itself like how russians did it. At least if hypothetically there was some kind of revolution after people get enough of current exploitation, most likely horrible people would worm into positions of power using the chaos and it would turn out like soviet union eventually. Peaceful and well though plan would be more resilient to corruption, but in current world even serious talk of such things gets shot down immediately.
people would worm into positions of power
Literally the reason models like that will never work. They don’t account for human nature. Humans love finding ways to put themselves ahead of others. You put a system in place to make people “even” – we’ll find a way to be more ‘even’ than Frank. That guys not nearly as ‘even’ as me. At the end of the day we are apes with hierarchical social structures. Any economic or political model that has a snowballs chance of succeeding needs to account for that.
Your reply got me thinking about some variants of market socialism I read about in undergrad, the names of which I can’t recall.
Generally speaking, artificial scarcity in its myriad variations would be abolished in sectors of the economy that are directly tied to housing, food, non-cosmetic medicine, and other categories directly tied to the UN declaration of human rights.
Said abolishments, legislative, executive, and judicial purview of the sectors in question would be decided by direct referendum votes of the citizenry, instead of representative vote. Representative legislature would be voted in a ranked-choice format instead of “winner-takes-all” balloting.
I think the first thing has to be making the government more representative. Congress should be something like 10,000 people based on the original ratio. We don’t have to go that far but a country of 325 million people needs a very large people’s house. Then we need to make it to where people vote, not land. Get rid of districts, first past the post, and the Senate.
Without those changes anything we do is doomed to just be another way to make rich people richer.
It’s really refreshing to see someone else point out the issue of how the small size of the House results in shitty representation. I have never seen anyone else bring this up before, thank you!
One of several reasons I really want to do an electric conversion of an old car rather than buying a new electric car.
Renault Twingo, the original one with the eyes
Would sell like hot cakes in Paris
I’m not sure how feasible that is. Batteries are heavy, and take up space, and there’s only so much room under the hood for battery modules. If you cram it to the max, can the frame take that load all the time? It might work for a short-ranged car - maybe 100km range, to avoid going much heavier than the normal curb-weight.
You’re not wrong about those things being issues, but also people do electric conversions all the time, there are shops that specialize in it and premade kits you can buy for it. Low range is certainly a very common outcome, but I don’t have big range requirements for most of my driving. Plus, I love taking on projects that are way over my had and muddling through them somehow. It’s how I learn best.
This is actually a not uncommon swap and some companies have even started selling kits to do it on certain vehicles.
I have my shopping list together to convert an old Kia Rio to electric for 100 km range, it’s about 400lbs of lifepo batteries and a 200lb motor. So slightly more than the cratered ICE motor I’d be taking out.
But yah, if you want to drive across the country, convert an SUV or light pickup for the room to keep the batteries, and remove everything weight wise that you can to compensate.
I’ve thought about this also but that’s insanely expensive and older cars are very unsafe by comparison.
I no longer have a family and don’t prioritize personal safety, but there are a lot of cars that aren’t too old which are still quite safe and lack all the connectivity crap.
I’m pretty happy with my 2007 pickup truck. Not sure I’d be interested in a new one even if I could afford it. I consider even the automatic windshield wipers to be too fancy for my taste and would rather have the traditional ones. Connecting my car to the internet is out of the question.
I’ll die before I give up my automatic wipers! Thankfully my 2004 and 2013 VWs have it and don’t lock me out of features like new cars.
I’ll just stick with my 94.
I’m a modern man, I have a 98. Well, and a 77, though carburetors are black magic still.
I’ve said the same about carbs, all I see is screws and black magic.
carburetors are fine if you’re not a pussy
I’ve found a witch, may we burn her?
This seems more about repair notifications target than the repairs themselves. Personally, so long as the technicians in the shop aren’t locked out by proprietary controls from diagnostics on-site, I couldn’t give a damn if the dealership is getting the wireless “notifications” or not.
My dealership tells us about lots of things we “need done”. I take the vehicle to a trusted mechanic who either does the work or tells me when they’re full of shit
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Nathan White, CitySide’s general manager, said his staff warns car shoppers that features like those requiring wireless transmission don’t work on new Subaru models sold in the state.
Subaru crippled its technology over a state law intended to let people share their car’s wireless repair information with any service shop — not only the authorized dealer.
The Massachusetts law, and a similar one that Maine voters approved in a landslide this week, show our desire to influence what happens to the reams of data our cars collect.
The Massachusetts and Maine laws could let a car owner send an in-dash warning about worn brake pads to a service shop of her choice to schedule repairs.
Joshua Siegel, a Michigan State University engineering professor, said this isn’t a simple task and that car manufacturers are doing a reasonable job in trying to comply with the spirit of a first-of-its-kind law in Massachusetts.
At CitySide Subaru, White hopes that automakers find a way to let car owners provide remote vehicle maintenance data to any service shop.
The original article contains 907 words, the summary contains 174 words. Saved 81%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
Isn’t mercedes doing subscription heated seats etc?
That was BMW who tried it
https://www.businessinsider.com/bmw-scrap-heated-seats-subscription-service-car-2023-9?op=1
And they gave up on it, at least for now, because not unexpectedly it was a terrible fucking idea
I’m sure they knew it was a terrible idea. They just boiled the frog too quickly. They’ll try it again in 5 years.
That was BMW. Mercedes was even worse: they locked full acceleration behind a subscription
BMW already dropped it, it was that popular.
whatttttt
No
in the future there is only one company and it is not possible to own anything
AmaMetAppleSoftGle™
Unpopular opinion.
I’d like to have the choice not to “own” these kinds of things. I’ve felt this since I was young and I heard about the 3rd version of the iPhone. If these things get upgraded and get better every year and I’m “supposed to” upgrade every single time then it makes sense to just lease these things.
And now with electric cars being basically on the same upgrade schedule but half the speed, why would I own an electric car for 8 years when next year the new electric cars save like 10x more for me. It wouldn’t make sense.
Phones get an upgrade every year, and in 3 years your phone might become ‘invalid’ and you have to upgrade. So just borrow the phone from the maker and get an upgrade easier.
Unless you actually want to own your things, go for it! It’s a free market and you should be able to buy your phone in its entirety just like you could buy a car 10 years ago in its entirety. This choice should be easier is all I’m saying.
You’re not “supposed to” upgrade every year, that’s the point. You should be able to use a 5 year old phone if you want to.
We already have a strong lease market in many places and that works great for many people. The issue for me is not the availability of leasing, but the asssumption that my purchase of a vehicle nonetheless entitles the manufacturer to collect massive amounts of data on my in-car habits without my knowledge, which they can then provide to anyone they damn well please.
Even leasing, I doubt anyone expects to have thier call logs and texts stored for law enforcement’s later use, bug there was a story recently suggesting that some of them are actually doing that.
A car lease is an option. Always has been
I agree a rental/service economy is good for some things. I think the main complaint here is the way companies manipulate these products for their benefit not for the customer, and often in underhand ways (hence all the privacy issues). That happens with ‘owned’ products too, but the owner has more control to make of it what they want.
EV cars sold today aren’t that much better than 4 years ago. In fact, electric cars are basically a car. Surprising I know. But they are on the same 7-year model lifespan as any other car model.
