> Important: Even after the modem is removed, if you connect your phone to the car via Bluetooth then the car will use your phone as an internet connection and send all the same telemetry data back to Toyota.
How is this the case? I thought bluetooth was just sharing my phone's audio. Why would it allow requests over the internet? Surely there's a way to tell the phone not to give its internet connection to any connected bluetooth device?
When reading the article I think he appears to be talking about car play/android auto connection not audio only connections. I think Bluetooth in AA and Carplay is used to configure a local network between the phone and the car to transmit the images to the cars screen. I would assume that that data capability can also be used for the car to communicate with the Internet.
It does produce a local Wi-Fi network but there's no evidence that it supports internet communication. That would be considered a hotspot, which not all carriers even support.
I've never understood how this can be limited in practice: surely as far as the carrier is concerned, all traffic from the mobile device is the same (unless there are identifiers on the traffic coming from hotspotted devices via the mobile device). Here in Australia we've never had any form of hotspot detection/segmentation - if you have a data plan, all data features work (across all carriers). I do recall lots of online chatter from the US though, especially years back when mobile data was more of a precious resource.
> surely as far as the carrier is concerned, all traffic from the mobile device is the same
Going on a bit of a tangent, but deep packet inspection can identify packets routed using NAT, so if the phone is operating as a typical hotspot it would be identifiable by your carrier. Carriers in the USA used to block / denylist / charge extra for tethering using this exact approach.
Mostly by looking at packets TTL. It gets decreased by 1 by the hotspot’s NAT so if the value is something like 63 or 127 (instead of 64 or 128 which are the defaults for most platforms) then it’s almost certain the packet originated from a device behind the phone and not from the phone itself.
Plus it seems unlikely that the telematics module is even really related to the display screen stuff, let alone being configured to use alternate network connections to transmit data.
I think there are details being left out. But several people in the comments indicate that there is a Toyota app that provides various features. I bet the app implements some proprietary bluetooth service that the head unit connects to and feeds information through. Or maybe they give the head unit a straight pipe to the internet via that service.
That very much could be the case, in which case deleting the (now useless, because your car is not connected) app would resolve that - no bluetooth restriction needed.
Neither CarPlay nor regular Bluetooth connections allow this. It’s not a thing.
(There is the ability to set up a Bluetooth hotspot on a phone and allow Internet sharing over Bluetooth, but that’s a different thing entirely and you have to explicitly set it up and use it. It’s also slow compared to a modern WiFi hotspot).
> Even after the modem is removed, if you connect your phone to the car via Bluetooth then the car will use your phone as an internet connection and send all the same telemetry data back to Toyota. However, if you use a wired USB connection then it does not do that (see the discussion here and elsewhere), so I exclusively use CarPlay via USB.
The problem with this is that both carplay and android auto capture their own vehicle telemetry. So even though the car is not able to use your phone as a general data pipe, Google and Apple still get access to this data when you're connected.
They are both very cagey with how they talk about this (or don't).
And once you've gotten rid of Google and Apple, your telecom company tracks you, your CC payments help track you and even cameras in public do.
It's hard to not want to throw your hands in the air screaming "whatever" when almost everything you use in public is somehow used to track you either as you move around, or in the future.
This is one of those things that can't ever be solved with individual solutions but needs to be solved through legislation and standards, and ideally a fundamental right to privacy (and a fundamental redefinition of what privacy means when it comes to corporate surveillance of individuals).
I disagree. Government leaders will never give up their pipeline of knowing everything about everyone.
The real solution is technology, and popularization of something similar to Freenet, and hardware with an OS that is powerful enough for most people use their phones today, and as easy to use as Android or iOS.
Cell providers will still track and permanently store and sell your location information, and any conversation over SMS or non-E2E platforms will also still permanently stored, but at minimum you can have private conversations when you really want and your online activity (outside of banking etc) can be private.
Things will both get harder and easier with AI. Harder because soon the government will have AI track every single person on the planet, and an LLM will be reading every text, email, and online post you make to make sure you're not a threat to national security or some excuse around CSAM (which I'm not advocating for, obv). On the flipside, as we move away from things like browsers, and can have local LLM models do most of our web browsing for us and present it however we want (free of ads, tracking, annoying styling, cookie banners), it will be easier to not have friction for changing browsers and operating systems etc to protect your privacy.
If you have noticed, every independent candidate almost never gets elected. Vast majority of those who say they will "change the country to the better" either never get elected or are ousted early on.
And those who stay change their tune.
I fear that only blackmail-able people with the potential to win elections, get the support, so that they are beholden to someone who ultimately gives them the job (e.g. funding their campaign) and has to return the favor x10 when elected, so promises go out the window and new reality sets in.
Someone tried to create an entirely new country with minimal governance by dumping sand on a submerged reef until it became an island[]. Even then it was quickly co-opted by the nearing statist powers (Tonga) with the blessing of western powers.
So it's not just that the primary process will crush anyone who will seriously roll back government powers. They won't even let anyone peacefully create an entirely new fucking island to try and get away from the tyrants and do it while leaving everyone else alone and not messing with the powers that be.
Isn't that the libertarian paradox in a nutshell, the entire reason why "government" exists? Because in reality, the alternative is "might makes right" and a larger, stronger group will band together and steamroll the smaller and uncoordinated individuals?
Government is might makes right, just with a nice name slapped on it. Minerva was minarchist, not anarchist, but for whatever reason they chose not to defend their country by force. Somaliland and the remains of Rojava come to mind for ~minarchist governments that defended their territory by force and ~succeeded. The point being is these kind of changes won't be allowed by election or peacefully. The primaries stop the election process and the militaries stop the peaceful separation process.
America did have a period of relatively small government intervention at the beginning, but that took a war with Britain. It also had some periods of it during the pre-founding (some of 1600s Pennsylvania and Rhode Island while Britain was occupied elsewhere). Pennsylvania (before it was a state) in particular was basically straight up anarchist for I want to say, about 20 years.
Not only that. Them and the point-of-sale vendors (aptly shortened PoS), sell that data. They tend to attempt to do this anonymized. How successful they are in anonymizing that is very much so up for debate.
The websites (and even their retail locations) you buy from send your purchase data to meta and other advertisers directly via APIs so they can better track their marketing conversion rates. You can browse their APIs [1][2] to see what kind of data they like to get, but it tends to be every piece of identification they have on you. Rewards programs make this a much richer data set. You don't need to be a user of Google/Meta for them to build a marketing profile based on this. Google links your physical conversion from ads based on your maps data. Facebook does the same if you give them your location data. Many retailers attempt to use the bluetooth/wifi signals from your phone to track the same data even if you pay in cash [3].
There's no legal framework preventing this outside of the EU and California.
> And once you've gotten rid of Google and Apple, your telecom company tracks you, your CC payments help track you and even cameras in public do.
Maybe, but what happens without the mod described is that Google and Apple track you in addition to the telecom company. That, of course, assumes that you carry a cell phone tied to your identity. Some people refuse to carry cell phones altogether because of the privacy implications, or use them mostly in airplane mode with an anonymous SIM for backup.
If your margins are so razor thin that the cost of handling cash is significant, you need to raise your prices. Cash is legal tender -- not accepting it for in-person transactions is really shitty (maybe shouldn't be allowed?)
I think there should be a "digital equivalency act" or something to hamper full digital capture, but my feelings aside, there's a few powers that dislike cash:
Free people like cash, but businesses with low-skill/low-trust workers dislike cash because despite the CC fees, there is less theft, less overhead with cash reconciliation, cameras to watch cash with, less safes to manage, less cash pickup services.
The IRS hates it because there is a cash industry (as there should be, imo, but I'm injecting too much opinion already) that doesn't report earnings. I personally know barbers, housecleaners, handymen that admit to reporting no or few earnings, and synthesize a living off cash and benefits. If you stop paying taxes, this actually works pretty well compared to a low-end tax-paying job. My housecleaner takes overseas vacations (like, thrifty ones in hostels) 2-3 times a year this way.
Banks (arguably the IRS again, deputizing them with KYC) squint at you when you deposit or withdraw significant cash - ask any weed industry participants. Untrackable currency is a natural catch-all for people they don't want to bank with, so it's just friction and headache naturally.
You can't even get coins counted for free at retail banks anymore. Cash handling is too expensive even for the place that ostensibly provides cash handling services to the general public.
If there was a posted notice that no cash is accepted it's unlikely you'll get a criminal charge, but you can get civilly sued. Most places will just accept the cash then put up a picture saying "If this asshole shows up again, trespass him"
It's not about "just raise prices", it's about some industries (e.g. upstart restaurants) that already have massive failure rates and have hyper competition. Even airlines don't make money on flights, and instead only on selling credits cards or other perks.
If your operating costs are some percentage higher for accepting cash versus the coffee shop across the street that doesn't, you're more likely to fail.
If everyone has to accept cash, then everyone has the same costs and the point is moot. At any rate, courts are required to accept legal tender, and I think that requirement ought to extend to businesses as well.
> At any rate, courts are required to accept legal tender
Assuming you’re talking about the US here: there is no such requirement, at least not at the federal level. Individual states may have their own laws, but see for example this notice [0] from a Texas federal court that they will no longer accept cash as of May 21, 2021.
The real problem for those businesses is way upstream of payment processing costs, namely in the cost of business loans, the general poverty of the American consumer, and (for brick-and-mortars) zoning. The latter is a matter of getting municipalities to relax restrictions put in place mid-century literally to support segregation, and the former two are a matter of forcing the wealthy to eat the costs of their poor decisions from the last few decades, rather than continuing to allow them to socialize related losses through avenues like scandalously low labor pay vis a vis productivity and various investment/asset market scams (which, through housing and passive retirement investment, they've roped in Boomers and older Gen-Xers).
If you wish to make an apple pie shop from scratch, you must first invent an economy that isn't hamstrung by legacy obligations from ventures that people who are long-dead somehow were allowed to finance with your paycheck. (Somewhere, a middle-aged nepo-baby is clutching her pearls at the thought, and I just think we should cherish, rather than shy from, the opportunity to throw her and her siblings under the bus.)
Is there any information about precisely what vehicle telemetry they capture and retain?
I know the laws are far from perfect, but isn't there some legislation compelling them to disclose what they collect?
What specifically would be the most relevant law/regulation? (If it varies by geography, pick any major market, eg. California, that is big enough to impact their engineering design and the content of published material). You mentioned they're cagey, and my aim is to examine if there's a gap between what they're supposed to disclose and what they do, which could be rectified by litigation. Eg. If they just say "vehicle telemetry" that doesn't tell you much, and I'd happily contribute to an EFF effort to get them to elaborate.
Alternatively someone who works close to this code could provide some examples of what a "typical" smartphone OS platform collects these days.
GDPR should work to get a copy of the data, also it would only be allowed to be collected with explicit permission -- I'm assuming that data about your car is PII about you.
Generally speaking the author seems to wave a bunch of conspiracies around without the evidence to support it, or frankly, much technical knowledge.
The author seems unaware that in iOS you can uncheck nearly every single location usage the OS and Apple Apps themselves collect.
On iOS not only can you shut off things like traffic reporting while using Maps and cellular/WiFI/Bluetooth data collection...unlike Google, Apple will let you use those services without requiring you contribute to them.
>if you connect your phone to the car via Bluetooth then the car will use your phone as an internet connection and send all the same telemetry data back to Toyota
Source? Can bluetooth devices do that without the user's knowledge?
I assume that the original article statement is referring to connecting to CarPlay/Android Auto wirelessly, not simply connecting via Bluetooth for a speaker-type setup. But I do not know that this is the case. Certainly, I would assume all privacy bets are off if you connect CarPlay/Android Auto in any manner.
Is android auto still available with Graphene? AA is genuinely one of the few life-changing features introduced in the last decade that I'd prefer not to go without.
Yep and works flawlessly via USB for me. That was a deal breaker for me for the longest time too.
Allowing it to connect over Bluetooth requires granting AA plenty of additional permissions which I didn't want to do (but hey, on GOS at least you can muzzle that thing).
Unfortunately that's not quite true, since the "app screen" on the media display during Android Auto use has an additional "Toyota" icon that AFAIK isn't coming from my phone.
What's more concerning is that it's entirely unclear exactly what information is shared over the Android Auto link, in my case, over Bluetooth.
There's a protobuf-based API for two-way communication between the Android Auto app and the head unit [0]. It depends on what the headunit supports, but this includes data such as GPS location, steering wheel button activation, accelerometer data, parking brake activation, gear selection, touch screen input, dimmer switch position, odometer, and much more.
A lot of this has obvious use within the AA interface; for example, the parking brake position is used to prevent scrolling too far through lists, and the car's GPS is usually much more accurate than the phone's and better on the phone battery.
One of the things I notice CarPlay has access to is the fan speed. In one of my vehicles, when I say “hey siri” it turns the HVAC fan down so it can hear me better. I’ve always wondered if the interface is the phone telling the car “hey make things quieter” or if it’s explicitly turning the fan down. It’s also interesting that this only happens in one of my cars. I assume it’s because the other car is a higher end vehicle and has a quieter fan.
In GM cars (as observed in my last few), the logic is in the head unit: "mic on -> hvac lower", while "hotword detect" uses a different "mic on" method that does not
EDIT, previously "does not" above said "doe snot", which explains the reply below
I never learned to properly touch type, i have my own method, somehow, which uses two fingers of the left hand and three of the right. Spacebar being pressed too soon or too late is, sadly, common :(
On Android there is an option called "Bluetooth tethering - Share phone's internet connection via Bluetooth" . If it is On and you are connected to the car's bluetooth it will have internet access via your phone.
I'm suspicious that the car's system can do this. I don't think we should be assuming your car can tether internet through bluetooth until we see someone snoop Toyota-bound traffic being routed through their phone.
Can you clarify? Does it feed it bullshit data? Because android auto expects car telemetry data which it streams to Google's servers. Which is a big no-no for me for obvious reasons.
It doesn't stop Android Auto from doing whatever with the car data, but it's sandboxed to have no more default privileges than a regular app, so it can be denied access to your phone's data by default (apps, contacts, etc.). Wireless AA will only work if you grant it extra privileges; wired AA does not need them.
You can also "firewall" AA via something like TrackerControl, this would let you block connections to eg. Google Analytics servers without denying network access altogether (which would likely cause AA to stop working). I've only used AA with short-term rentals so I didn't spend too much time exploring these options.
In a perfect world they wouldn't collect it either, but I'd rather Apple have it than the car manufacturer (or rather, only Apple vs both Apple and the car manufacturer)
Sure -- I'm not asking a general question, but thinking about my wife's phone, which is paired as an audio device. It sounds like we're probably in good shape.
AFAIK, every single one of those "built-in navigation/maps" either require the car itself is internet connected (with its own modem), or that you every year get a SD card with map updates to stick into the car.
I guess it's fine in an emergency, but I wouldn't want to use it day-by-day, the live traffic/road closure information in my case ends up saving us tons of time over the year.
My 2019 Subaru legacy supports auto and does not have built in navigation. The aftermarket dashboard display in my 2011 Ford ranger also supports android auto but has no built in GPS.
Yes. I can't remember which cars (some base-model Hyundais I think) but I know I've rented a few that did have Android Auto but did not have any navigation included.
> The problem with this is that both carplay and android auto capture their own vehicle telemetry. So even though the car is not able to use your phone as a general data pipe, Google and Apple still get access to this data when you're connected.
Do you have evidence or a citation for this? Or is it just the sort of statement that’s made in the pretty certain expectation of upvotes on HN?
> then the car will use your phone as an internet connection and send all the same telemetry data back to Toyota [...] so I exclusively use CarPlay via USB.
I would be concerned that a passenger connecting their phone to it while I was driving.
In other cars I've been successful picking up the relevant modules for peanuts from surplus/scrap then just desoldering the RF-active components (like bt radios, etc) and swapping them in. YMMV but if it doesn't work you're just out the cost of a junk part.
Even if some radio feature is benign its existence means that its hard to be confident that there isn't some other telemetry feature you missed. With no connectivity at all you don't need to worry that you missed something because you can monitor the car with a spectrum analyzer and observe its never transmitting.
Unfortunately in some newer cars you can't swap any modules without a dealer tool to pair the module to the car, presumably in a bid to prevent third parties from fixing the car (presumably preventing people from lobotomizing their surveillance isn't on their radar yet).
$100k is in Canadian dollars? I just added almost every accessory/package and option to the the 2026 GR Sport Plug-in Hybrid RAV4, and it came out to $55,821. If there were options that were nearly identical, I only added the most expensive one. So I only added one hammock ($340) and one of the Pelican Dayventure Backpack Cooler ($301). This includes the dog first-aid kit, and the human first-aid kit. Maybe all the options will come through this link:
No, they meant inflated. Cars are quite expensive right now, and dealers are notorious for raking in cash through financing. If they were subsidized, prices would be lower to increase user base, as in the aforementioned dynamic present in the current smart TV market.
I think the inital point was that car manufacturers/dealers are double dipping through initial cost/interest AND data harvesting.
Both an high end tv or a car are expensive items where the manufacturer shouldn’t be making additional income on your personal data.
A free 55 inch tv supported by ads would be subsidized. A big ticket item price likely does not change even if it intrudes on your privacy and the manufacturer makes additional income on your data. In that sense it’s not subsidized it’s just greedy business practices.
I haven't had any insight into the industry lately, but did work for a company in that space several years ago.
Most (all?) ordinary TVs, plus things like Roku streaming devices, are sold essentially at-cost. The profit comes from ads and information-brokering stuff. This makes it basically impossible to break into the market without doing the same thing.
The 2024 Ford Maverick has a single fuse for the telematics unit that you can remove without throwing a code or an error. No idea if this remained true after the 2025-2026 refresh, but worth knowing.
Kias have a “Massachusetts mode” flag hidden behind a service menu (that needs a dealer code) that disables telematics at the owner’s request. However, the service menu pin also has timeout protection that will inject a waiting period between retries so there is no guessing.
I don’t think there’s convincing my dealer to get into the service menu and disabling it.
I would presume that other manufacturers might have this as well.
Give one of the mechanics $500 and I bet they’ll accidentally drop the password on the floor of the car as they get out after moving it inside to change the oil.
I'm more afraid of the likelihood of someone smashing the window on a modern Kia thinking they can start it up with an iPhone lightning cable (just look up "Kia Boys" if you're confused by any of this) and drive off with it, when in fact, they cannot anymore. Unfortunately, until people stop breaking into Kias I'll avoid the brand in perpetuity.
> Kias have a “Massachusetts mode” flag hidden behind a service menu (that needs a dealer code) that disables telematics at the owner’s request.
I would be very concerned that the flag just continues to submit your data but with a "telematics disabled" bit set on it. This is absolutely how location privacy is implemented in some devices. Moreover, even if it is effective it could be remotely reset including accidentally as part of an update.
Older Toyotas also had a DCM fuse, and this was the easiest way to get rid of telemetry. I am not sure if partially disassembling the dash and physically removing the DCM is now necessary.
There's still a fuse for the DCM even in this car but:
- It has an internal battery and will keep running for quite a while after pulling the fuse. This is a safety feature in case you get in a crash that disconnects the 12V battery
- It will break your in-car microphone as discussed. Repairing that requires opening up the dash
- That won't do anything for disconnecting the GPS antenna
That also means it isn't passed to your phone via android auto / carplay. Phone GPS is much worse than car GPS for road navigation. It's basically unusable.
Good point, but in practice I think the only way onboard data could be exfiltrated is by a dealer while the car is being serviced. If you DIY or hire an independent mechanic, this seems unlikely.
I have the same car and want to do this, but not for the reasons the author noted but because the GPS unit in the car is broken when paired with Carplay and has the wrong compass heading causing navigation to be completely useless.
I have reported this to Toyota multiple times with videos detailing the problem and they have denied the problem and ultimately when faced with the evidence simply refused to fix it.
I've been a big fan of Toyota's Production System and their management culture, but this experience has really diminished the brand for me. I realize these problems exist with all cars today. The pattern seems to be to foist low-quality hardware and software on their customers and take no responsibility for the results. Software bugs aren't what they consider a "typical car problem" so they simply don't fix them.
I have exactly the same problem in my (latest-model) Honda Civic / Android Auto! I thought I was going crazy, I'm glad to hear someone else has the same problem.
The only fix I've found is to disconnect the phone and use its map standalone, just sending audio over Bluetooth. Maybe it's possible to get Android Auto or Carplay to reject GPS data from the car? I don't know...
> I have reported this to Toyota multiple times with videos detailing the problem and they have denied the problem and ultimately when faced with the evidence simply refused to fix it.
I don't work for Toyota, but I do wonder, who exactly within Toyota have you contacted? Maybe you're reaching people who have no idea how to reach out to a real engineer within Toyota?
I don't know about internet, but it actually works the other way for GPS; Carplay/Android Auto relay the car's GPS data to your phone, because that is usually more accurate and it means your phone doesn't have to burn battery constantly polling its own GPS.
Some brands take software very seriously. This isn't an "entire industry" problem.
My experience is pretty small; I've owned the same Tesla Model 3 LR for the last 6.5 years, and the software has been pretty much solid the entire time. There was briefly a problem with echos when I called land lines using the bluetooth and my iPhone, but that problem eventually went away - not clear if it was because the iPhone changed, the software was updated, or perhaps the particular landline I was calling got an upgraded CO, but for a car that's a pretty good track record. There were some sensor glitches but they got fixed.
I've test driven other cars. Lucid Air - tons of weird glitches. Rivian - almost as good as the Tesla, but laggy UI on a brand new car. My Tesla is almost seven years old and still smooth as the day it was new! How do they do it?
Compass heading specifically does seem to be unusually challenging. Does anyone else recall the bizarre "Google Maps on iPhone is 90 deg off" problem? Totally strange.
> Some brands take software very seriously. This isn't an "entire industry" problem.
This does not change the fact that Tesla is shamelessly spying on you. In fact, Tesla takes the software so seriously that it can probably fully remotely control your car. This is not something that I would want, and, if I were to be gifted a Tesla, the first thing that I would do is unplugging the cellular modem. If the car becomes unusable because of this, I would get rid of it.
As a fellow Tesla Model 3 LR owner, I can confirm that this has been my experience as well. I bought mine in 2008. So nearly 8 years old and still going strong.
It's really hard to take this claim seriously about a car company that programs its self-driving system to disengage if it detects what it thinks is a likely crash, so said company can then tell investigators, regulators, juries, and the public that "the car wasn't in self-driving mode when it crashed." "I'm not touching her, Mom. THE STICK is touching her!"
...and touts itself as having the most advanced driver assistance and self-driving capabilities, yet has the highest crash rate of any brand? Beating out Mustang and Imprezza WRX STi owners is truly an accomplishment, though.
...and (still?) hasn't fixed its issues with "phantom braking" that have caused multi-car pileups
...and has self-driving software documented as being so bad it will randomly swerve at cyclists, steer at light poles while turning, and swerve at crowds of pedestrians on a street corner waiting for the light? Which after years of refinement drives about as well as a highly distracted teenager who just got their learner's permit?
Yeah, this is similar to what I hear about Tesla's everywhere. While some members of the company leadership can be polarizing, the product itself seems very solid. Have been saving up for my first "good" car since starting my end-career job, really want to get a Tesla, but wish there was a hybrid option due to charger anxiety. Otherwise, would get one already.
Thanks - Seeing how easy this was, encouraged me to do the same for my Subaru. The info and parts were easy enough to find.
Interestingly, Subaru itself used to make a DCM bypass kit for its cars. When AT&T shut down its 3G network, Subaru was stuck replacing all the DCMs, because they would search and search forever for a connection to a network that no longer existed, and slowly drain the battery. But there initially wasn't enough inventory to replace them all, so they offered these bypass kits if you weren't an active Starlink (cloud svcs) subscriber.
Just a note about Toyota specifically - There are many blog posts and articles out there alleging that Toyota shares your data with insurance companies.
As I own two Toyota's I have read through these carefully and consistently the theme is that the owner was opted into this program without knowing it (likely by the sales person clicking through setup steps to enable every feature). If you are not opted in, I have seen no evidence they share driving data.
When I set up my Toyotas, the app clearly walks through the programs they have and you must click either "yes/opt in" or "no/opt out" for each program. It is not opted in by default.
I've bought multiple Toyotas from the same dealer, and each time the sales person has been overly aggressive about setting up the app and connecting to the car. The first time I let them do it to a point as I had not seen what it did, but had to prevent them from syncing contacts. After that, I had to be very stern about not needing help to set up an app I was never going to use. I don't know if they are used to neophytes being unable to handle this and think they are doing a service or if it's a push to get people to connect/sync as much as possible.
> I don't know if they are used to neophytes being unable to handle this and think they are doing a service or if it's a push to get people to connect/sync as much as possible.
Likely doing it to remove any frustrations from the brand new buyer being unable to figure out how to set it all up. The last thing you need is someone changing their mind about the car they just bought, because well if setting up the app is a PITA, what else is terrible about the car?
The main problem I had with it is the fact it requires an app in the first place. Once they have an app on your phone, they have access to so much data. The app by nature of the functions it performs will need GPS, Bluetooth, and Contacts at a minimum. Once they have that access, there's nothing stopping them from using it for whatever they want. That's just absolutely not something I'm willing to give a car app. Do we really think their map/routing app will be better than something else I could use instead? I don't even like using map apps because of their power to snoop and report.
I assume any dealer who's comfortable signing a contract (terms of service) on your behalf is comfortable with you signing a contract on their behalf. Time to write yourself a new car.
Before 2018-2019, the opt-in process for data sharing was hidden on a website somewhere. Around that time, the form became part of the vehicle purchasing process.
I would like everyone to know that if you have a brand new Kia, the process is even easier. I spent $20 on the Kia service manual access (didn't even know that was a thing until I read OP's post) it finally figured it out.
Modern Kias with the CCNC cockpit have a data connectivity unit that exclusively handles cellular. If you can get this unit unplugged, which only requires two Phillips head screws to remove, your set. It took me nearly 2 years to figure this out. Thanks OP
> Unfortunately I think it’s only a matter of time before the modem and GPS become more deeply integrated into the car (making this blog post infeasible), or cars have more drastic failure modes when the modem/GPS is removed, or anti-right-to-repair laws get passed to further clamp down on this behavior.
> Strong Federal privacy laws would make posts like this unnecessary, that’s the world I’d rather live in.
yes. there ought to be a right to reasonable expectation of behavioral privacy where if it's not obvious and intrinsic to function that behavior is being recorded then it must be consented with functional opt-out.
gps tracking to the manufacturer of a car seems egregious. i wonder if it runs afoul of anti-stalking laws.
The author probably means CarPlay and Android Auto. In wireless mode they share the phone's internet connection. The adapter linked in the article is a CarPlay adapter, not plain BT.
Seems like this way of using CarPlay isn’t documented. Bluetooth is used for discovery and WiFi/USB for CarPlay communication but not for providing car and internet access. Using users’ phone data without notice could be noticeable by users as well…
It would also require that my phone not show my car using the hotspot, when it does show my laptop, and also for my cellphone plan to not show that usage (I have limited hotspot data), which is theoretically possible, but now we're talking three companies having to collude in a totally undetectable fashion, which seems a little far fetched.
Bluetooth PAN seems to work pretty seamlessly once you've paired your phone and set it up. It's possible some kind of "seamless hotspot" functionality is remotely activating PAN on a paired device.
> Even after the modem is removed, if you connect your phone to the car via Bluetooth then the car will use your phone as an internet connection and send all the same telemetry data back to Toyota
What is the basis for this claim? I've never heard of this capability.
> One caveat, if you use bluetooth to connect your phone to the car DCM will use your phone to connect to the mother ship and presumably send your data. I only use my iPhone cable to connect to the car which does not have this effect.
A random post on a forum is not evidence that Toyota has found a magic way to exfiltrate data over a bluetooth connection without turning on hotspot/etc.
RNDIS was a mechanism for tethering over USB, and you could certainly pair "Bluetooth Network Adapters" for years and there's a profile for it. So there's at least precedent for it. That makes it pretty plausible to me.
It's not evidence against it either. Presumably CarPlay and Android Auto could implement a network interface through the application layer, or even activate Bluetooth tethering at the system level as they are privileged apps.
But they could also do this over USB, so something doesn't add up.
I was looking into this with Teslas. Apparently the car will not be bricked if you cut the antenna wires. They are in the side mirrors (both sides) and the wires are exposed when you pull the interior door panels.
If you then charge only at home you’re even more private than gas cars, which must stop at gas stations with cameras.
But both types of vehicles are easily spotted with Flock cameras. And if you keep your phone on that tracks you, too.
I’m not that paranoid so I won’t do it, I just wanted to know.
Modern cars are horrible. I recently discovered that all new cars sold in the EU constantly beep at you for supposedly speeding, even though the system doesn’t work well, and it has to be turned off every time you start the car.
They beep when you go above the speed limit, and only for a couple seconds. If they do that 'constantly' the problem is in the driver's seat...
It takes two seconds to turn off in my car (though by law it has to reset on every drive), but I never bother. In situations where it's "ok" to drive a little over the limit, it's a small price to pay and a gentle reminder.
It’s horrible since it gets the speed wrong 25% of the time and 25% of the time it beeps because you are doing 33 in a 30kmh zone because you are just going along with traffic.
When you get in a car, you have to spend 20 seconds disabling all those systems. Lane keep assist is downright dangerous as it keeps you in your lane if you do an emergency avoidance manoeuvre.
I don’t hate safety system like emergency brake assist or ABS but I don’t need a nanny keeping me in my lane. I also don’t need a coffee symbol for taking a break.
My Honda Civic gets the speed wrong almost 100% of the time in Slovenia where intersections automatically cancel out non-zoned speed limit signs (so no crossed out signs that the car could read). Luckily it doesn’t beep or nag about it.
(Which makes me wonder, is there a flag set to make it not beep on cars sold here? Cuz otherwise people would be returning them en masse)
Isn't eye tracking required there too now? If you look away, or even not in the direction the car expects, for more than a couple of seconds >> more beeps.
I was debating replacing the head unit in my old VW, but I actually like that it has a six-disc CD changer, SD card slot (32GB max, with support for MP3, WAV, etc.), 40-pin iPod connection, and regular AUX in. I use my phone with a USB-C DAC and have never felt like I needed anything else. With AUX I can plug in my Walkmans as well (both cassette and MiniDisc)!
This is really cool. One of my favorite parts of the internet is getting to see these kinds of projects by people who aren't afraid to tear into stuff and take it apart and put it back together.
But you do all that for privacy... and then you use CarPlay?
Buy Nissan instead, they will do that for you free of charge. I own 2021 Nissan Leaf and Nissan sent me an email early this year telling that the communication infrastructure costs too much for them and they are taking it down.
Jokes aside, I am seriously pissed at Nissan because it was one of reasons I bought it in the first place: to pre-heat or pre-cool the car remotely before going to work, while it is still plugged to the wall charger. And they just decided to take it down. Funny thing, they even mentioned in the email that "not to worry, I can still use my AC when I am in the car". Wow.
Sorry, rant. Anyway, my point being - buy Nissan Leaf, no connectivity guaranteed by the manufacturer, LOL.
> to pre-heat or pre-cool the car remotely before going to work, while it is still plugged to the wall charger
Modern aftermarket remote start systems work with both ICE and EVs alike. Take a look at Compustar. You can remote start your Leaf with a key fob from 1/2 mile away, no telemetry, connectivity, or silly app needed.
That is crazy.
5 years and they are already shutting down the servers?
They should be forced to open up the API when they shut it down.
Running a replica yourself should be pretty doable.
We need more posts like this. I'd love a follow-up where instead of removing it injects fake data to the system. I am tired of passively being digitally assaulted. If they are going to do this to me without my knowing consent I want to fight back.
Yeah, like AdNauseam. We're way too polite when it comes to these exploitative corporations. Start poisoning their data sets. Start costing them as much money as humanly possible. Drive their returns on investments as close to zero as possible, ideally well into the negatives.
Just be aware, this is something that will be noticed. I've been building analytics systems for a while now and have had people do this. Usually it gets picked up by the anomaly detection system or as an alert in the ETL pipeline when we try to transform it.
Personally, I just plop it into a "dead letter office" table, then verify it's not malicious. But it's possible other companies would handle this differently.
I'm always surprised there aren't more projects that just pump random data back into all of these system. I think awhile back there was a plugin that would click on every advertisement it saw over and over, but got shutdown for some reason. But how hard is it to just have everyone inject nonstop data to all of these tracking systems? if nothing else a drive somewhere is going to eventually fill up.
Hmmm... This isn't evil enough. This could actually work. This data is valuable which means there are entities that will pay to bias it. If you want a business to look more traveled, create fake driving tracks to it. If you want insurance to give you an amazing deal, build a system to slow your driving to look perfect. Random is likely easy to detect but why not get paid to forward fake data that someone else wants to inject! They will spend real time figuring out how to make it look real and get value out of it which will -really- destroy the dataset.
There have been plenty of projects that do send junk data to these endpoints. The problem is the junk data gets users noticed because some manager looking at dashboards gets an alert about some supersonic Corolla driving down the Pacific. And they go yell at the team responsible.
As a result, analytics endpoints generally have some authentication and verification built into them. Obviously, with enough time it's possible to reverse engineer these components. But that's a lot of time and effort vs just blocking the request.
CAN is a protocol, but the messages on the bus are implementation specific. Yes, you can use it on any CAN bus, but there's no guarantee that you will be able to decode the traffic. Some modern CAN networks are encrypted, too, because it's trivial to view the traffic. https://kentindell.github.io/2021/01/02/can2-wireshark/ has a great guide on decoding traffic with sigrok.
From what I understand the CAN traffic on my vehicle is encrypted. Clearly this does not apply to all of the traffic, as I can fetch some OBD2 data with a generic dongle.
The data on the OBD2 port is legally mandated, so can't be encrypted. But besides encryption CAN buses in a car are also separated, the bus on the OBD2 plug often can't even talk to the most interesting components.
The reason I think this is a bad idea is that it lulls you into a false sense of security. The article makes recommendations that seem thorough and sensible - keyword "seem" - but, as mentioned elsewhere here, there are other potential hidden sources of telemetry (in CarPlay and Android Auto), and who knows what else.
For this kind of thing to succeed as a general lifestyle, you would need to invest an enormous amount of time making potentially irreversible modifications to all kinds of electronic equipment - only to be virtually guaranteed to miss something.
Do this kind of thing if you want, but don't be fooled into thinking you're actually solving the problem for real.
I think you can substantially reduce the information collected about you, without an enormous amount of time. Security - and any solution - isn't about perfection; it's about improving the situation and making attacks more expensive.
Every HN thread is accompanied by comments saying it's all hopeless.
Can't do that in Fr*nce and likely other European countries, all vehicles must have eCall and your vechicle might not pass the mandatory routine check you need to do once in a while to be allowed on the road. Hope you like biking a lot.
Apps like Spotify in my Volvo are convinced I am in New Jersey while I'm on the opposite coast. On one hand I like that inaccurate data is being peddled to advertisers but at the same time I would actually prefer regionally relevant ads if I have to listen to them anyway.
My daily is a 1997 Range Rover. You want to update the computer? Sure, you need to remove the desktop PC-sized box of 68HC11-family chips from under the driver's seat and desolder the two big 144-pin ones.
When I was a younger man, audio visual forums used to have an unfortunately sexist, but fairly good conceptual measure they called “wife acceptance factor”. It should really just be partner acceptance factor. Regardless of whom you are with, I hope they would physically intervene before letting you do this. What is the point? All of these posts feel like they miss the forest for the trees. Don’t like This Modern World? Fair enough, start by leaving your phone at home. Pay cash. And so forth. The author’s problems would be better solved by taking the bus. If you’re going to get into messing with cars, the wiring harness is not the place to start. Every trip to the dealer or any other mechanic is going to be painful right up until you finally give up and try to private sale the vehicle. At some point in that process, after you have dropped the price by over half the Kelley Blue Book value (or whatever Palantir shit replaces that) you may actually hear yourself explaining to the pleasantly smiling with a certain look in their eye non buyer about how you had to do this.
I will admit my bias. Fair play to the author for putting this all together but it reads like a very intricate aluminum foil hat.
1) My auto insurance is already too expensive. I have zero interest in "oh yeah we had to add to your driver factor because telematics says you exceeded the speed limit 11 times last year :^)". Less tracking is just a bonus.
2) He made no irreversible changes to the vehicle. Just keep the part and plug it back in when you need it for service/inspection or whatever.
3) "Telematics disabled" probably adds to the resale value of the car.
What are you talking about? People sell used cars with broken stuff all the time. You don't have to tell the buyer that you intentionally broke that feature. The mechanics that I use would all consider this modification entirely reasonable and not say anything about it after you explained yourself.
Also my spouse is just as paranoid as this guy is and when I told her what new vehicles collect she was happy she had an older model car. So this is not really a thing.
Has anyone experienced a case where they needed an over-the-air safety update/recall performed, but weren't able to because they removed the cellular modem?
I'd like to think failure to apply an OTA safety update would trigger a mail-out notification requesting you bring the vehicle into the dealer. But that's probably optimistic...
How good a position can you get from GPS today in receive only mode?
You can download and store Open Street Map for individual states. Map data doesn't have to come in over the air. That's not the problem. It's enhancing GPS with cell phone tower data that's the problem. That requires a cell connection.
Resolution of less than 1 meter is normal with a decent view of the sky and a lack of interference. GPS itself is always receive-only on our end as consumers.
What problem are we trying to solve here? At this point in time, guided navigation with completely offline maps and GPS has already been a no-brainer off-the-shelf thing for decades.
> GPS itself is always receive-only on our end as consumers.
AFAIK it's almost always enhanced by things cell tower data, wifi network data, and external data sources (besides the satellites). Look up GPS/GNSS enhancement and augmentation for the latter.
I don't think cell tower connection will give you any more precision, GNSS fix will be much more accurate. (within few meters)
You could get more accurate fix with RTK data, but I'm not sure if that's actually widely used. And in any case that doesn't require active communications either, you could get correction data from satellite broadcasts too.
Technically it only requires an antenna that can listen on the LTE band (or even GSM). Trilaterating based on cell towers with a hackRF or other SDR is a fun exercise.
GPS is exceedingly accurate compared to cellular signals on it's own. What it isn't is fast. So the "enhanced GPS" is mostly just proving satellite ephemerides so your GPS device can lock onto the overhead satellites faster.
If your device has zero GPS signal then you can get ~100m accuracy from the cellular signals alone. If your device doesn't have "enhanced GPS" then you can get ~1m accuracy from the GPS signals alone.
I think towers were historically already much more accurate than 100m in urban areas.
Note that this changed with 5G beamforming. The new towers have a much better idea of where you are. (My understanding (thanks to other HN commenters) is that technically it's possible to do beamforming without deriving precise 3D coordinates but that this isn't how it's done in practice.)
Excellent practical guide and pictures, if OP is around on this thread: well done! Your future self is going to appreciative too when this needs repeating at some point!
Also worth noting that as recently as 2024, the S and SV models for Nissan did not have telematics whatsoever. This may still be true for the 2025 / 2026 models, I just haven't checked.
> Everything that relies on a data connection will no longer work. This includes things like over-the-air updates as well as Toyota cloud-based services and SOS functionality
I hate how this is a trade off. It’s totally possible for cars to broadcast their location only if the SOS is pressed or the crash sensor is triggered, but it feels like there’s no way to have that without also having everything else.
Last year we got a rental car when we were in Florida. When we first left the airport, we were using the navigation app that was in the car. First red light? Navigation app suddenly goes black and a commercial starts playing. My wife and I both look at each other like, "WTF is going on?!?" Light turns green commercial clips out and the navigation app starts working again. We waited to see if it happened at the next light. Sure enough, the last commercial finished and another started as the light turned green.
Tuned it off and used our phones from there to the hotel. That was the last time we used a rental cars navigation.
This would be the last time I used that rental car company. If they wanted to make more money from you, they should have just raised the price. That is disgusting.
New Zealand had a service called YourDrive[1] that was pitched exactly as "AirBnB for cars"[2]. I used it a couple of times and it was great, super affordable. Unfortunately they didn't survive the Covid crunch.
Thanks for the link. I once again find myself in that exceedingly strange zone where satire and reality become undifferentiable and I begin questioning my understanding of the world.
Why is a self-driving car so important to you? Is it really worth giving up your privacy, and advocating that others should give up theirs, just for some shortcoming in your own capabilities?
Why should a self driving car need a network connection? It's an absurd false dichotomy. Certainly that's what will be produced if the manufacturers are allowed to get away with it but that's not a technical problem it's a social and legal one.
There's a fortune to be made for whomever produces a car that has minimal features, and and electric-drivetrain with onboard gasoline generator. No screens, knobs and buttons, no assists. Extra fortune if you can licence designs and revive some of the old-and-loved classics with new safety features.
> electric-drivetrain with onboard gasoline generator
Generally speaking, it's more efficient to power a car using a series-parallel hybrid system than an electric drivetrain with generator (series hybrid) while not really being any more complicated.
In a series hybrid (electric with generator), you're losing energy converting the rotational energy into electric energy. It's better to use the engine's output to power the wheels while it's in an efficient range. It's why Toyota's series-parallel hybrid design offered better mileage than vehicles that (primarily or fully) operated as series hybrids like the Chevy Volt.
> No screens
You can't really sell a car without a screen due to government regulations which require backup cameras (since 2018 in North America, since 2022 in the EU and Japan).
> no assists
Automatic Emergency Braking is going to be required in the US in 2029 (detecting frontal crashes about to happen and automatically braking, including pedestrian detection).
The EU requires even more including blind spot detection and lane-keeping assist.
I certainly agree that cars need knobs and buttons for controls like AC/heat, music, etc. However, it'd be hard to make a car where you aren't putting in a screen and assistive technology. I think a better argument would be to make a car where the screen was simply Apple CarPlay/Android Auto and a backup camera - rather than shoving a lot of garbage UX into it.
> Automatic Emergency Braking is going to be required in the US in 2029 (detecting frontal crashes about to happen and automatically braking, including pedestrian detection).
I'm never going to want to drive a car that has that.
I guess you know your cutoff date, then. My own perspective differs.
A couple of years ago, I was involved in a stupid car crash that probably would have been prevented by this kind of system. Everyone was pretty much OK (yay), but both vehicles were ruined. And for me, at least, it was a complete and utter pain in the ass to find something else to drive that fit my intended use.
It is probably like with smart TV's where the value of the telemetry data ends up subsidizing a significant fraction of the hardware. Car manufacturers seem to be doing a lot of experiments with what they can charge for in terms of ongoing subscriptions. I am sure if they could show ads without it being considered distracting they would.
I think the problem is there isn't a fortune there. It would be a successful endeavor, but not something to rake in huge piles of cash. The kinds of leaders and investors who could pull off what you're describing are instead working where they can make multi-millions rather that multi-hundreds of thousands.
You would be surprised how leaky RF can be and how hard to completely suppress. There is a reason things like anechoic chambers and test labs are very expensive.
Leaky - possibly, but we are dealing with the real world where you have plenty of background noise. The cell tower will likely fail to receive the signal.
It doesn't take much of a leak. Radiation likes to radiate.
I used to keep my work phone in a Faraday bag sometimes. (I had my reasons[1]). It usually worked. Occasionally, it didn't work and the phone would demonstrate this by doing phone-stuff like ringing even while it was snug inside of that conductive bag.
So sometimes, the radiation was radiating well-enough despite my efforts.
Not so long ago, I was chatting with someone here on HN about blocking RF at GHz frequencies using aluminum foil. I was sure that it would be trivial, and they were sure that it would be difficult. So I tested that.
I started pinging my phone on its LAN IP, and wrapped it in foil. I found that I could increase latency some and also institute some packet loss.
But I couldn't stop it altogether -- not with a sheet of aluminum foil, anyway. No matter how carefully I made the creases, pings simply kept happening. (Having satisfactorily demonstrated to myself that were right and that it would be difficult, I stopped testing at that point.)
---
So here in reality, suppose the [car's] cellular connection finds that it has a connection occasionally. What's to stop it from buffering data and sending it in batches during times when it works? A few dozen lines of code that's geared to that purpose, perhaps? Or maybe a few hundred lines, instead?
Not that the difficulty matters much; the software is all closed up and inscrutable.
If the value of batching data to deal with intermittent connections is greater than the cost of producing the code to do this, then it can be assumed that such code has been or will be written.
---
[1]: An abusive manager I had liked to turn on the tracking system that the phone had. I didn't mind being tracked while I was on the clock, but I placed a higher value on my privacy than on her ability to be a snoopy bitch when I was not on the clock. My Faraday bag solution was adequate for that phone, at that time, with that particular tracking system, and for my particular desires, and I had access to the system with which to validate the adequacy of this success, but it was by no means perfect.
That's just it - move in just the right spot where reflections combine in the right way, and it might be enough to get a ping. So the tracking would still be there just less reliable, with an unknown level of degradation. In the end you still wouldn't have any guarantees.
In case of Subaru turning off 2G made their modems keep trying to reconnect 24/7 draining and killing battery. Subaru refused replacing batteries killed by defective car.
Unfortunately for many modern cars that may make it run less efficiently and clean and have a rough start every time you do it for 30 minutes or more because many sensors are trained on-the-fly from a running vehicle and then the correct calibrator sensor values are then stored in volatile memory which is lost upon power loss.
I use to disconnect batteries all the time when fixing vehicles, but the last decade ive been avoiding it unless I have to because of how poorly new cars run afterwards. And people get really angry when you fix something on their vehicle and then go to drive it later and it hard starts and feels and performs worse than ever. Telling them to "just drive for 30 minutes and then restart your car again and hopefully it goes away" doesn't make people happy or confident in your fix, nor does it make diagnosing issues after replacing a suspected faulty module or sensor easier when it sounds and performs like trash for a long while afterwards.
That's an incredibly impractical and expensive place to put it. Frankly, I don't believe you purely because it'd be $200 cheaper for the manufacturer to put the antennas in the shark fin on the roof with all the other antennas
Can't do the design bits, but there's full service manuals for any 1990s to early 2000s Landrover. Only NAS models, unfortunately, so for some things in UK/EU you need to interpolate a little.
Notice the complete absence of phone-home GSM modems or other tracking stuff?
Great guide! After getting to the end, I had no idea what AirPlay was so I looked it up... bro, all this effort to avoid telemetry and you are using an iPhone XD
If you are wary of all the smart features in your next car purchase, consider buying a bicycle. We do not have to entertain the creeping invasion of our privacy
How is this the case? I thought bluetooth was just sharing my phone's audio. Why would it allow requests over the internet? Surely there's a way to tell the phone not to give its internet connection to any connected bluetooth device?
Going on a bit of a tangent, but deep packet inspection can identify packets routed using NAT, so if the phone is operating as a typical hotspot it would be identifiable by your carrier. Carriers in the USA used to block / denylist / charge extra for tethering using this exact approach.
Does the phone add a proxy header? Can it be configured to not add the header?
Android and Linux use 64 by default - the block could be circumvented by setting the laptop to use 65 TTL.
(There is the ability to set up a Bluetooth hotspot on a phone and allow Internet sharing over Bluetooth, but that’s a different thing entirely and you have to explicitly set it up and use it. It’s also slow compared to a modern WiFi hotspot).
Older versions of bluetooth may have other networking capabilities.
The problem with this is that both carplay and android auto capture their own vehicle telemetry. So even though the car is not able to use your phone as a general data pipe, Google and Apple still get access to this data when you're connected.
They are both very cagey with how they talk about this (or don't).
It's hard to not want to throw your hands in the air screaming "whatever" when almost everything you use in public is somehow used to track you either as you move around, or in the future.
The real solution is technology, and popularization of something similar to Freenet, and hardware with an OS that is powerful enough for most people use their phones today, and as easy to use as Android or iOS.
Cell providers will still track and permanently store and sell your location information, and any conversation over SMS or non-E2E platforms will also still permanently stored, but at minimum you can have private conversations when you really want and your online activity (outside of banking etc) can be private.
Things will both get harder and easier with AI. Harder because soon the government will have AI track every single person on the planet, and an LLM will be reading every text, email, and online post you make to make sure you're not a threat to national security or some excuse around CSAM (which I'm not advocating for, obv). On the flipside, as we move away from things like browsers, and can have local LLM models do most of our web browsing for us and present it however we want (free of ads, tracking, annoying styling, cookie banners), it will be easier to not have friction for changing browsers and operating systems etc to protect your privacy.
Then let us hire different leaders into government. Public servants, not overlords.
I fear that only blackmail-able people with the potential to win elections, get the support, so that they are beholden to someone who ultimately gives them the job (e.g. funding their campaign) and has to return the favor x10 when elected, so promises go out the window and new reality sets in.
So it's not just that the primary process will crush anyone who will seriously roll back government powers. They won't even let anyone peacefully create an entirely new fucking island to try and get away from the tyrants and do it while leaving everyone else alone and not messing with the powers that be.
[] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Republic_of_Minerva
America did have a period of relatively small government intervention at the beginning, but that took a war with Britain. It also had some periods of it during the pre-founding (some of 1600s Pennsylvania and Rhode Island while Britain was occupied elsewhere). Pennsylvania (before it was a state) in particular was basically straight up anarchist for I want to say, about 20 years.
Not only that. Them and the point-of-sale vendors (aptly shortened PoS), sell that data. They tend to attempt to do this anonymized. How successful they are in anonymizing that is very much so up for debate.
The websites (and even their retail locations) you buy from send your purchase data to meta and other advertisers directly via APIs so they can better track their marketing conversion rates. You can browse their APIs [1][2] to see what kind of data they like to get, but it tends to be every piece of identification they have on you. Rewards programs make this a much richer data set. You don't need to be a user of Google/Meta for them to build a marketing profile based on this. Google links your physical conversion from ads based on your maps data. Facebook does the same if you give them your location data. Many retailers attempt to use the bluetooth/wifi signals from your phone to track the same data even if you pay in cash [3].
There's no legal framework preventing this outside of the EU and California.
1: https://developers.facebook.com/documentation/ads-commerce/c... 2: https://developers.google.com/google-ads/api/docs/conversion... 3: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/06/14/opinion/bluet...
Did you know ... in many countries government tracks car number plates and the data is stored for many years.
Maybe, but what happens without the mod described is that Google and Apple track you in addition to the telecom company. That, of course, assumes that you carry a cell phone tied to your identity. Some people refuse to carry cell phones altogether because of the privacy implications, or use them mostly in airplane mode with an anonymous SIM for backup.
And if the competitor doesn't? Ouch.
I think there should be a "digital equivalency act" or something to hamper full digital capture, but my feelings aside, there's a few powers that dislike cash:
Free people like cash, but businesses with low-skill/low-trust workers dislike cash because despite the CC fees, there is less theft, less overhead with cash reconciliation, cameras to watch cash with, less safes to manage, less cash pickup services.
The IRS hates it because there is a cash industry (as there should be, imo, but I'm injecting too much opinion already) that doesn't report earnings. I personally know barbers, housecleaners, handymen that admit to reporting no or few earnings, and synthesize a living off cash and benefits. If you stop paying taxes, this actually works pretty well compared to a low-end tax-paying job. My housecleaner takes overseas vacations (like, thrifty ones in hostels) 2-3 times a year this way.
Banks (arguably the IRS again, deputizing them with KYC) squint at you when you deposit or withdraw significant cash - ask any weed industry participants. Untrackable currency is a natural catch-all for people they don't want to bank with, so it's just friction and headache naturally.
If there was a posted notice that no cash is accepted it's unlikely you'll get a criminal charge, but you can get civilly sued. Most places will just accept the cash then put up a picture saying "If this asshole shows up again, trespass him"
I worked at the gym in college and we sold like one item a day and it was still a whole bunch of work and pain to keep up on the cash counts correct.
I definitely believe that all businesses should take cash as much as is reasonable, but logistically it is understandable why some choose not to
If your operating costs are some percentage higher for accepting cash versus the coffee shop across the street that doesn't, you're more likely to fail.
Assuming you’re talking about the US here: there is no such requirement, at least not at the federal level. Individual states may have their own laws, but see for example this notice [0] from a Texas federal court that they will no longer accept cash as of May 21, 2021.
[0] https://www.txnb.uscourts.gov/news/notice-court-will-no-long...
If you wish to make an apple pie shop from scratch, you must first invent an economy that isn't hamstrung by legacy obligations from ventures that people who are long-dead somehow were allowed to finance with your paycheck. (Somewhere, a middle-aged nepo-baby is clutching her pearls at the thought, and I just think we should cherish, rather than shy from, the opportunity to throw her and her siblings under the bus.)
I know the laws are far from perfect, but isn't there some legislation compelling them to disclose what they collect?
What specifically would be the most relevant law/regulation? (If it varies by geography, pick any major market, eg. California, that is big enough to impact their engineering design and the content of published material). You mentioned they're cagey, and my aim is to examine if there's a gap between what they're supposed to disclose and what they do, which could be rectified by litigation. Eg. If they just say "vehicle telemetry" that doesn't tell you much, and I'd happily contribute to an EFF effort to get them to elaborate.
Alternatively someone who works close to this code could provide some examples of what a "typical" smartphone OS platform collects these days.
The author seems unaware that in iOS you can uncheck nearly every single location usage the OS and Apple Apps themselves collect.
On iOS not only can you shut off things like traffic reporting while using Maps and cellular/WiFI/Bluetooth data collection...unlike Google, Apple will let you use those services without requiring you contribute to them.
The author provides links at the top to credible reporting on relatively well-known privacy concerns.
Source? Can bluetooth devices do that without the user's knowledge?
Allowing it to connect over Bluetooth requires granting AA plenty of additional permissions which I didn't want to do (but hey, on GOS at least you can muzzle that thing).
Another possibility is to keep an old/cheap, stock Android phone at home with WiFi only for apps like this.
What's more concerning is that it's entirely unclear exactly what information is shared over the Android Auto link, in my case, over Bluetooth.
A lot of this has obvious use within the AA interface; for example, the parking brake position is used to prevent scrolling too far through lists, and the car's GPS is usually much more accurate than the phone's and better on the phone battery.
0: https://github.com/f1xpl/aasdk/tree/development/aasdk_proto (pretty old reverse-engineering effort)
EDIT, previously "does not" above said "doe snot", which explains the reply below
How?
You can also "firewall" AA via something like TrackerControl, this would let you block connections to eg. Google Analytics servers without denying network access altogether (which would likely cause AA to stop working). I've only used AA with short-term rentals so I didn't spend too much time exploring these options.
I guess it's fine in an emergency, but I wouldn't want to use it day-by-day, the live traffic/road closure information in my case ends up saving us tons of time over the year.
So I bought an Android auto / Car play module that integrates with the car touch screen. Now I have up to date maps and navigation for ever. :)
https://support.apple.com/en-us/108756
Do you have evidence or a citation for this? Or is it just the sort of statement that’s made in the pretty certain expectation of upvotes on HN?
I would be concerned that a passenger connecting their phone to it while I was driving.
In other cars I've been successful picking up the relevant modules for peanuts from surplus/scrap then just desoldering the RF-active components (like bt radios, etc) and swapping them in. YMMV but if it doesn't work you're just out the cost of a junk part.
Even if some radio feature is benign its existence means that its hard to be confident that there isn't some other telemetry feature you missed. With no connectivity at all you don't need to worry that you missed something because you can monitor the car with a spectrum analyzer and observe its never transmitting.
Unfortunately in some newer cars you can't swap any modules without a dealer tool to pair the module to the car, presumably in a bid to prevent third parties from fixing the car (presumably preventing people from lobotomizing their surveillance isn't on their radar yet).
https://www.toyota.com/configurator/build/step/summary/year/...
...maybe there is a lot of dealer markup in your area?
I think the inital point was that car manufacturers/dealers are double dipping through initial cost/interest AND data harvesting.
A free 55 inch tv supported by ads would be subsidized. A big ticket item price likely does not change even if it intrudes on your privacy and the manufacturer makes additional income on your data. In that sense it’s not subsidized it’s just greedy business practices.
Most (all?) ordinary TVs, plus things like Roku streaming devices, are sold essentially at-cost. The profit comes from ads and information-brokering stuff. This makes it basically impossible to break into the market without doing the same thing.
https://www.mavericktruckclub.com/forum/threads/telematics-f...
I don’t think there’s convincing my dealer to get into the service menu and disabling it.
I would presume that other manufacturers might have this as well.
How far do you live from Massachusetts, and how do your feel about driving vacations?
I would be very concerned that the flag just continues to submit your data but with a "telematics disabled" bit set on it. This is absolutely how location privacy is implemented in some devices. Moreover, even if it is effective it could be remotely reset including accidentally as part of an update.
Better than not setting it, I suppose! :)
- It has an internal battery and will keep running for quite a while after pulling the fuse. This is a safety feature in case you get in a crash that disconnects the 12V battery
- It will break your in-car microphone as discussed. Repairing that requires opening up the dash
- That won't do anything for disconnecting the GPS antenna
I have reported this to Toyota multiple times with videos detailing the problem and they have denied the problem and ultimately when faced with the evidence simply refused to fix it.
I've been a big fan of Toyota's Production System and their management culture, but this experience has really diminished the brand for me. I realize these problems exist with all cars today. The pattern seems to be to foist low-quality hardware and software on their customers and take no responsibility for the results. Software bugs aren't what they consider a "typical car problem" so they simply don't fix them.
The only fix I've found is to disconnect the phone and use its map standalone, just sending audio over Bluetooth. Maybe it's possible to get Android Auto or Carplay to reject GPS data from the car? I don't know...
I don't work for Toyota, but I do wonder, who exactly within Toyota have you contacted? Maybe you're reaching people who have no idea how to reach out to a real engineer within Toyota?
This is exactly why the civil legal system exists.
I promise you a consumer rights attorney will be interested in going after Toyota if you have clear evidence of it.
Or you could take it to an independent mechanic. It's likely just a bad connection to the "sharkfin".
> I realize these problems exist with all cars today.
Nah. It really doesn't, not to the same degree. Consumer Reports has demonstrated this handily for many, many years.
My experience is pretty small; I've owned the same Tesla Model 3 LR for the last 6.5 years, and the software has been pretty much solid the entire time. There was briefly a problem with echos when I called land lines using the bluetooth and my iPhone, but that problem eventually went away - not clear if it was because the iPhone changed, the software was updated, or perhaps the particular landline I was calling got an upgraded CO, but for a car that's a pretty good track record. There were some sensor glitches but they got fixed.
I've test driven other cars. Lucid Air - tons of weird glitches. Rivian - almost as good as the Tesla, but laggy UI on a brand new car. My Tesla is almost seven years old and still smooth as the day it was new! How do they do it?
Compass heading specifically does seem to be unusually challenging. Does anyone else recall the bizarre "Google Maps on iPhone is 90 deg off" problem? Totally strange.
This does not change the fact that Tesla is shamelessly spying on you. In fact, Tesla takes the software so seriously that it can probably fully remotely control your car. This is not something that I would want, and, if I were to be gifted a Tesla, the first thing that I would do is unplugging the cellular modem. If the car becomes unusable because of this, I would get rid of it.
> Tesla
It's really hard to take this claim seriously about a car company that programs its self-driving system to disengage if it detects what it thinks is a likely crash, so said company can then tell investigators, regulators, juries, and the public that "the car wasn't in self-driving mode when it crashed." "I'm not touching her, Mom. THE STICK is touching her!"
...and touts itself as having the most advanced driver assistance and self-driving capabilities, yet has the highest crash rate of any brand? Beating out Mustang and Imprezza WRX STi owners is truly an accomplishment, though.
...and (still?) hasn't fixed its issues with "phantom braking" that have caused multi-car pileups
...and has self-driving software documented as being so bad it will randomly swerve at cyclists, steer at light poles while turning, and swerve at crowds of pedestrians on a street corner waiting for the light? Which after years of refinement drives about as well as a highly distracted teenager who just got their learner's permit?
Yeah, taking software "very seriously."
and amplified racially bigoted conspiracy theories
and likes eugenics
and runs companies which have set a record for the highest number of complaints about racial discrimination and bigotry in its workplaces
and bought an entire social media platform solely so he and people with his ideologies could spew bigotry without having their accounts deleted
and, uh, came from a very wealthy white family that lived in one of the most racially oppressive countries on the planet during his youth
Interestingly, Subaru itself used to make a DCM bypass kit for its cars. When AT&T shut down its 3G network, Subaru was stuck replacing all the DCMs, because they would search and search forever for a connection to a network that no longer existed, and slowly drain the battery. But there initially wasn't enough inventory to replace them all, so they offered these bypass kits if you weren't an active Starlink (cloud svcs) subscriber.
As I own two Toyota's I have read through these carefully and consistently the theme is that the owner was opted into this program without knowing it (likely by the sales person clicking through setup steps to enable every feature). If you are not opted in, I have seen no evidence they share driving data.
When I set up my Toyotas, the app clearly walks through the programs they have and you must click either "yes/opt in" or "no/opt out" for each program. It is not opted in by default.
Likely doing it to remove any frustrations from the brand new buyer being unable to figure out how to set it all up. The last thing you need is someone changing their mind about the car they just bought, because well if setting up the app is a PITA, what else is terrible about the car?
Before 2018-2019, the opt-in process for data sharing was hidden on a website somewhere. Around that time, the form became part of the vehicle purchasing process.
Modern Kias with the CCNC cockpit have a data connectivity unit that exclusively handles cellular. If you can get this unit unplugged, which only requires two Phillips head screws to remove, your set. It took me nearly 2 years to figure this out. Thanks OP
Guaranteed
I always though ...just need to remove the ... the antenna .. modem would always get no signal and transmissons would always fail....
Same for the GPS.
To verify- no other hiddwen transmitters could use some RF( Radio Frequency) analyzers
[RF analyzer (ie spectrum analyzer) is a tool for measuring the power, frequency, and signal strength of radio frequency signals.]
yes. there ought to be a right to reasonable expectation of behavioral privacy where if it's not obvious and intrinsic to function that behavior is being recorded then it must be consented with functional opt-out.
gps tracking to the manufacturer of a car seems egregious. i wonder if it runs afoul of anti-stalking laws.
Afaik phones do not share their internet blindly to Bluetooth devices.
What is the basis for this claim? I've never heard of this capability.
A random post on a forum is not evidence that Toyota has found a magic way to exfiltrate data over a bluetooth connection without turning on hotspot/etc.
But they could also do this over USB, so something doesn't add up.
If you then charge only at home you’re even more private than gas cars, which must stop at gas stations with cameras.
But both types of vehicles are easily spotted with Flock cameras. And if you keep your phone on that tracks you, too.
I’m not that paranoid so I won’t do it, I just wanted to know.
It takes two seconds to turn off in my car (though by law it has to reset on every drive), but I never bother. In situations where it's "ok" to drive a little over the limit, it's a small price to pay and a gentle reminder.
When you get in a car, you have to spend 20 seconds disabling all those systems. Lane keep assist is downright dangerous as it keeps you in your lane if you do an emergency avoidance manoeuvre.
I don’t hate safety system like emergency brake assist or ABS but I don’t need a nanny keeping me in my lane. I also don’t need a coffee symbol for taking a break.
(Which makes me wonder, is there a flag set to make it not beep on cars sold here? Cuz otherwise people would be returning them en masse)
(https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47967786)
Dangerous, but hilarious (Dubai raver has set up a 303 and 606 to make acid house while he drives): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mwYtjQk0QaU
But you do all that for privacy... and then you use CarPlay?
Jokes aside, I am seriously pissed at Nissan because it was one of reasons I bought it in the first place: to pre-heat or pre-cool the car remotely before going to work, while it is still plugged to the wall charger. And they just decided to take it down. Funny thing, they even mentioned in the email that "not to worry, I can still use my AC when I am in the car". Wow.
Sorry, rant. Anyway, my point being - buy Nissan Leaf, no connectivity guaranteed by the manufacturer, LOL.
Modern aftermarket remote start systems work with both ICE and EVs alike. Take a look at Compustar. You can remote start your Leaf with a key fob from 1/2 mile away, no telemetry, connectivity, or silly app needed.
Personally, I just plop it into a "dead letter office" table, then verify it's not malicious. But it's possible other companies would handle this differently.
As a result, analytics endpoints generally have some authentication and verification built into them. Obviously, with enough time it's possible to reverse engineer these components. But that's a lot of time and effort vs just blocking the request.
https://rabbit-labs.com/product/cancommander/
Crazy commenter, tell us a little about this. Can I use it on any Can bus?
For this kind of thing to succeed as a general lifestyle, you would need to invest an enormous amount of time making potentially irreversible modifications to all kinds of electronic equipment - only to be virtually guaranteed to miss something.
Do this kind of thing if you want, but don't be fooled into thinking you're actually solving the problem for real.
Every HN thread is accompanied by comments saying it's all hopeless.
> eCall was made mandatory in all new cars approved for manufacture within the European Union as of April 2018.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECall
What's this?
(I dread the day my 2007 Civic is no longer usable.)
When I was a younger man, audio visual forums used to have an unfortunately sexist, but fairly good conceptual measure they called “wife acceptance factor”. It should really just be partner acceptance factor. Regardless of whom you are with, I hope they would physically intervene before letting you do this. What is the point? All of these posts feel like they miss the forest for the trees. Don’t like This Modern World? Fair enough, start by leaving your phone at home. Pay cash. And so forth. The author’s problems would be better solved by taking the bus. If you’re going to get into messing with cars, the wiring harness is not the place to start. Every trip to the dealer or any other mechanic is going to be painful right up until you finally give up and try to private sale the vehicle. At some point in that process, after you have dropped the price by over half the Kelley Blue Book value (or whatever Palantir shit replaces that) you may actually hear yourself explaining to the pleasantly smiling with a certain look in their eye non buyer about how you had to do this.
I will admit my bias. Fair play to the author for putting this all together but it reads like a very intricate aluminum foil hat.
1) My auto insurance is already too expensive. I have zero interest in "oh yeah we had to add to your driver factor because telematics says you exceeded the speed limit 11 times last year :^)". Less tracking is just a bonus.
2) He made no irreversible changes to the vehicle. Just keep the part and plug it back in when you need it for service/inspection or whatever.
3) "Telematics disabled" probably adds to the resale value of the car.
Also my spouse is just as paranoid as this guy is and when I told her what new vehicles collect she was happy she had an older model car. So this is not really a thing.
I'd like to think failure to apply an OTA safety update would trigger a mail-out notification requesting you bring the vehicle into the dealer. But that's probably optimistic...
You can download and store Open Street Map for individual states. Map data doesn't have to come in over the air. That's not the problem. It's enhancing GPS with cell phone tower data that's the problem. That requires a cell connection.
What problem are we trying to solve here? At this point in time, guided navigation with completely offline maps and GPS has already been a no-brainer off-the-shelf thing for decades.
AFAIK it's almost always enhanced by things cell tower data, wifi network data, and external data sources (besides the satellites). Look up GPS/GNSS enhancement and augmentation for the latter.
You could get more accurate fix with RTK data, but I'm not sure if that's actually widely used. And in any case that doesn't require active communications either, you could get correction data from satellite broadcasts too.
Technically it only requires an antenna that can listen on the LTE band (or even GSM). Trilaterating based on cell towers with a hackRF or other SDR is a fun exercise.
If your device has zero GPS signal then you can get ~100m accuracy from the cellular signals alone. If your device doesn't have "enhanced GPS" then you can get ~1m accuracy from the GPS signals alone.
Note that this changed with 5G beamforming. The new towers have a much better idea of where you are. (My understanding (thanks to other HN commenters) is that technically it's possible to do beamforming without deriving precise 3D coordinates but that this isn't how it's done in practice.)
Maybe a simpler way is to to slap a Faraday cage on all antennas.
Amen.
Peppers article with Amazon affiliate links
Perfect summation of 2026
I hate how this is a trade off. It’s totally possible for cars to broadcast their location only if the SOS is pressed or the crash sensor is triggered, but it feels like there’s no way to have that without also having everything else.
Tuned it off and used our phones from there to the hotel. That was the last time we used a rental cars navigation.
So yeah, its already happening.
[1] https://www.drivencarguide.co.nz/news/new-zealand-startup-le...
[2] https://thespinoff.co.nz/partner/17-09-2017/the-airbnb-for-c...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turo_(company)
It's a shortcoming each of us will have, if we're so lucky as to live that long.
Generally speaking, it's more efficient to power a car using a series-parallel hybrid system than an electric drivetrain with generator (series hybrid) while not really being any more complicated.
In a series hybrid (electric with generator), you're losing energy converting the rotational energy into electric energy. It's better to use the engine's output to power the wheels while it's in an efficient range. It's why Toyota's series-parallel hybrid design offered better mileage than vehicles that (primarily or fully) operated as series hybrids like the Chevy Volt.
> No screens
You can't really sell a car without a screen due to government regulations which require backup cameras (since 2018 in North America, since 2022 in the EU and Japan).
> no assists
Automatic Emergency Braking is going to be required in the US in 2029 (detecting frontal crashes about to happen and automatically braking, including pedestrian detection).
The EU requires even more including blind spot detection and lane-keeping assist.
I certainly agree that cars need knobs and buttons for controls like AC/heat, music, etc. However, it'd be hard to make a car where you aren't putting in a screen and assistive technology. I think a better argument would be to make a car where the screen was simply Apple CarPlay/Android Auto and a backup camera - rather than shoving a lot of garbage UX into it.
I'm never going to want to drive a car that has that.
A couple of years ago, I was involved in a stupid car crash that probably would have been prevented by this kind of system. Everyone was pretty much OK (yay), but both vehicles were ruined. And for me, at least, it was a complete and utter pain in the ass to find something else to drive that fit my intended use.
0/10. Would rather be annoyed by false positives.
However, you now have a chance to buy one of the rare prototypes!
https://finance.yahoo.com/sectors/technology/articles/bollin...
DCM Bypass kit. https://www.autoharnesshouse.com/store/AHH-DCM77
I used to keep my work phone in a Faraday bag sometimes. (I had my reasons[1]). It usually worked. Occasionally, it didn't work and the phone would demonstrate this by doing phone-stuff like ringing even while it was snug inside of that conductive bag.
So sometimes, the radiation was radiating well-enough despite my efforts.
Not so long ago, I was chatting with someone here on HN about blocking RF at GHz frequencies using aluminum foil. I was sure that it would be trivial, and they were sure that it would be difficult. So I tested that.
I started pinging my phone on its LAN IP, and wrapped it in foil. I found that I could increase latency some and also institute some packet loss.
But I couldn't stop it altogether -- not with a sheet of aluminum foil, anyway. No matter how carefully I made the creases, pings simply kept happening. (Having satisfactorily demonstrated to myself that were right and that it would be difficult, I stopped testing at that point.)
---
So here in reality, suppose the [car's] cellular connection finds that it has a connection occasionally. What's to stop it from buffering data and sending it in batches during times when it works? A few dozen lines of code that's geared to that purpose, perhaps? Or maybe a few hundred lines, instead?
Not that the difficulty matters much; the software is all closed up and inscrutable.
If the value of batching data to deal with intermittent connections is greater than the cost of producing the code to do this, then it can be assumed that such code has been or will be written.
---
[1]: An abusive manager I had liked to turn on the tracking system that the phone had. I didn't mind being tracked while I was on the clock, but I placed a higher value on my privacy than on her ability to be a snoopy bitch when I was not on the clock. My Faraday bag solution was adequate for that phone, at that time, with that particular tracking system, and for my particular desires, and I had access to the system with which to validate the adequacy of this success, but it was by no means perfect.
I use to disconnect batteries all the time when fixing vehicles, but the last decade ive been avoiding it unless I have to because of how poorly new cars run afterwards. And people get really angry when you fix something on their vehicle and then go to drive it later and it hard starts and feels and performs worse than ever. Telling them to "just drive for 30 minutes and then restart your car again and hopefully it goes away" doesn't make people happy or confident in your fix, nor does it make diagnosing issues after replacing a suspected faulty module or sensor easier when it sounds and performs like trash for a long while afterwards.
Can't do the design bits, but there's full service manuals for any 1990s to early 2000s Landrover. Only NAS models, unfortunately, so for some things in UK/EU you need to interpolate a little.
Notice the complete absence of phone-home GSM modems or other tracking stuff?
You have the full right to view and ask for deletion.
Can you skirt the GDPR by making it hard to discover who you need to ask?