These articles are useless because where is the search bar that lets me plug in my make/model and look at the specific results like cool research guys thanks for burying the lede in 3000k words
They only looked at the domains the car talks to over wifi, not to the content. For a Tesla Model 3 they also looked at the mobile traffic, because it was easy doable.
They played around with the infotainment of the car for 30 minutes, when it has for example a YouTube app, they opened it. When the car talked to YouTube over Wifi they counted it as one ATA (Advertising, Tracking, and Analytics).
When you have less apps in the car, or all data is tunneled trough the car manufacturer it results in less ATA and therefore a better score.
The paper says this:
> 2. Stationary Active: The vehicle was parked and powered on for 30 minutes while we interacted with as many sensors and features as possible. This included opening and closing doors and the trunk, pressing dashboard and seat controls, activating stalks (lights, wipers), and exploring all infotainment menus and apps.
https://automatictransmission.khoury.northeastern.edu/paper....
It would be nice to have know which domains were accessed by which car. Even better would be to know which action in the car correlated with which connection.
Pro-surveillance people were not born one fine day. They were conditioned for a decade making them believe sharing everything about their life is normal.
Spot on. I've continued to be astonished at how publicly many people choose to live, especially considering all the inevitable negative results which have been well documented for decades and continue to increase.
According to some, every generation is insistent to learn the negative results for themselves, which can be counted on to advance the erosion of privacy.
Despite this I do have hope for the current gen who seems more aware.
Some are conditioned, but I think there will always be a subset of people that just feel like they are the “right people” that everyone else should emulate. The system feels like it’s there to protect them, strong authority makes them feel safe, and they have a strong instinct to conform.
They’ve never been on the wrong end of a political witch hunt, colonized, or felt like they were being attacked for wrongthink, so they don’t understand why everyone else can’t just be “good, law-abiding citizens” like them. Seems utterly alien to me, but I’ve known more than a few.
I've never met anyone who's 'pro surveillance'. I've met ad tech executives and Googlers, though. Have you spoken to them about the world that's been built?
I've met "pro surveillance" people before. There's a surprising number of "normies" in favour of it.
I remember being shocked, about 10 years ago, when I mentioned social network spying and my sister in law remarked she thought there should be more of it to keep people inline.
I've also met people who think all internet access should be through government sanctioned id and monitoring, which I also find shocking.
I haven't been able to pin this down to a single political view point, these people come from across the spectrum.
In the political alignment chart, authoritarianism falls on y axis, whereas left/right is x axis. This explains why you find people from both sides supporting it. They're essentially the same side as far as this topic is concerned.
In my experience, the pro surveillance people are many times just rural folk that are extremely right wing. They think that these technologies will narrowly be applied to whatever minority they dislike while having a huge blind spot about how this will directly apply to themselves as well over a longer time span. That exact scenario is how it also plays out currently with social welfare where they will demonize minorities that use social welfare while sucking on the teat of the government for everything from their farms to their healthcare.
I'm not a big fan of the "silence is violence" view. Are we really going to blame looming surveillance dystopia on people who are working 60 hour weeks to heal the sick, address world hunger, or care for young children because they didn't become privacy activists?
Every time I mention working on privacy laws like GDPR on USA level I get heavily downvoted and attacked - so not only you've met people who are "pro surveillance", a lot of HNers that say otherwise will aggressively fight against legal frameworks that punish engineers and business leads that collect unnecessary data.
As soon as you'll put out a concrete proposal, you'll get massacred for being "anti business".
> One thing i don’t understand is how pro-surveillance advocates don’t understand that the moment they are not behind the terminal, they are the target.
I think it's three things; (a) They're just being paid not to care, (b) short-termism, and (c) are naively hoping they get to stay in the club on the other end of the surveillance. Hard to convince nearly anyone to give up short term profit for long term societal benefits.
Cynically I worry we are seeing the decline of democracy and our new overlords are seeing that too (many accelerating it). Surveillance is necessary for control. The AI, mass surveillance, and drone combination is getting pretty scary TBH.
I can’t even imagine the dystopia of the future where you are always on camera and due to LLMs you are constantly being monitored- your actions, your purchases, your social relationships, and you are graded as such constantly. We have the technology for this now, so if someone wanted, they could implement the above dystopia today.
It would be like creating an always present omnipotent God.
uniformed services and some kinds of professionals already have agreed to terms on conduct and records. The people who agree to that say "of course" when it comes time to subscribe Everyone Else to the same constraints. That is my own thinking, it might cover some proportion of the cases there...
The unfortunate reality is we can expect more and more of our goods to spy on us over time, as there are both political and economic motivations to track and collect as much data as possible on everyone.
The best thing you can do is avoid products with trackers while they haven't taken over their entire market, learn to disable GPS, wireless, and cellular antennae once they do, and pray manufacturers take a while to insert dead-man switches as well.
Wouldn't disabling antennae on your car void the insurance? I would have assumed that was a basic thing insurance policies would have stipulated already over a decade ago.
for tesla insurance, yes. You have to agree for your driving to be monitored to use their insurance. They monitor and grade you based on a number of driving behaviors, then set your premium based on your score. You score determines the next month's premium. Note that the time you drive using tesla full-self-driving enabled, your score is 100% (even with the sometimes scary 12.x version)
You must agree to monitoring, otherwise they won't give you insurance.
> we can expect more and more of our goods to spy on us
strong disagree, this is complicit and defeatist nonsense given +100 years of active and successful consumer rights protection in lawful markets in the West.
Unfortunately it appears that the consumer protection advocates and more importantly the legislators and regulators are already decades behind the curve on these kinds of privacy intrusions and the other risks associated with incorporating more and more tech in everyday devices. I don't know how much of this is because of ignorance, how much is lack of resources, and how much is willing complicity or good old corruption, but the end result for the users of these devices is the same in each case.
This is part of the reason why I don't want a new car: I don't want to be involved in this directly. A guy from work got a brand new Hyundai(I think), and the first thing that popped on the navigation was "Create an account with Hyundai now". Nah. Nah. Forget it. I have 3 issues:
1. I should not have to authenticate or have connectivity to a manufacturer unless I want to once I've paid for a physical good(cars being physical goods).
2. I don't want my personal data to be sold off to anyone - I've been in the tech industry for long enough to know that "I don't want my data to be shared with third parties" is worth as much as the power used to light up the pixels on the screen.
3. I don't trust anyone to have done everything carefully and by the books to prevent any potential leaks.
I drive a 13+ year old car with retro-fitted android navigation from a now bankrupt Chinese manufacturer so no updates in the last 4 years at least. I have really gone to great lengths to leave the bare minimum (given that I self-host everything except for maps). It easily took a day of fiddling about with the navigation and OpenWRT alone and I don't know anyone else that has gone as far as I have. In fact, just about everyone I know doesn't care. If I had to guess, I'd say the answer is a firm "no".
Probably not large enough to pay for all the engineering needed to pull it off. Some of us would be interested, but it's no longer easy. There are too many useful things from connectivity too. My car for example shows me the current speed limit on all roads and when the speed limits change it gets updated because it has connectivity. That is a useful feature but it comes with all kinds of other things I don't want and so just stripping out is a complex work of stripping out just the parts I don't want while keeping the good.
If you'd asked in 2010, well yeah, just pull the fuse for the modem and done. since all it does is a little bit of connectivity and there's nothing else useful from the, from that, I wouldn't care. But now connectivity has useful parts, that I don't want to lose.
If this tech was being used for traffic enforcement then I'm all for it. Unfortunately it seems like people will still be able to browse their phone behind the wheel and run over kids on bikes despite the surveillance
It would be shocking if it weren't possible. Being a car does not confer any sort of magical protection against hacking because "it's just a car" or something.
My car still uses 3G, so not much listening to it anymore.. although oddly enough, when I drive into the dealership, they automatically download vehicle statuses.
I was pleased to that you can use the navigation with a data collection opt-out.
I was less pleased to see that they sneaked a "safety and maintenance" clause into the terms. The information they gather for that gets shared with insurance companies, social networks and data brokers.
There's no hiding in modern car it seems. I was hoping for better from a French company operating under GDPR but no.
You can't win, with all the car companies pulling this crap it's like fighting a surveillance cartel.
The only thing to do is keep my old car for as long as possible.
I don't think it's legal in EU. ePD essentially forbids reading information from the terminal equipment (like car) unless it's "strictly necessary in order for the provider of an information society service explicitly requested by the subscriber or user to provide the service". Even "safety and maintenance" would be hard to classify as strictly necessary for navigation.
Of course to enforce it you would need to complain to regulator in your country who then likely just tells them to stop it and that decision becomes effective years later after appeals. Many countries don't even fines for ePD violations.
Why rely on your car's built-in software for navigation? Smartphone navigation is going to be a lot better (in my experience) and Google, Apple privacy terms are greatly superior.
Huh? My 2019 vehicles have GPS that works completely without data uplink. Trouble is map updates (distributed on SD cards) are being discontinued in favor of cellular subscription services that don’t work in the desert.
I don't know if the above post had an edit, but it says "distributed on SD cards" now. My cheap ~5yo car is the same, I can only update the maps via USB. The navigation still works, but is a lot worse/more out of date than any smartphone app where I live. Although even google maps barely works around here.
Until last year I had a 2014 car that was like his. Not having map updates is fine. The tech companies have conditioned us to believe that if we don't have streaming maps with details updated every three minutes, we'll all get lost and die.
99.99999904% of roads don't change that much.
People used to navigate with decade-old paper maps stuffed in their glove boxes and nobody died because of it.
The few times when I found myself driving on I-11, which my car didn't know about, it was a novelty, not a crisis. I didn't drive off the road because the screen told me the road didn't exist. I used common sense and followed the signs.
I'd like to have a radio kill switch be required on all devices. The reason is that eventually, things that emit RF energy could be targeted by drones. That scares me.
I obtained my data via GDPR request from Audi. Despite having disabled telemetry and location services, remote access and so on on certain date, the car kept sending every destination address I wrote on the navigator to the motherbase. Other location tracking services did stop (i.e. no live positioning).
I'm still clarifying the purpose of this before making a complaint to the data authority.
It's funny you including your tracking token so Google can associate your with a graph of everyone who clicks on the link (?si=)
You really need to look up the car and a lot of people sell replacement harnesses to terminate the built-in modems with resistors.
Sometimes if you hit the sweet spot, the car has a built in modem but its on 3G or EDGE networks that have been dismantled. There are several Subaru's like this. They no longer can connect to a network or transmit data.
Personally, I'd like to see someone salvage one of these modems and try to reverse engineer it for free Internet. It will probably be low speed and they might be locked to certain hosts, but I bet you could find some way to tunnel traffic on them.
My 1999 was so rusted that I had to junk it. My 2024 is about the same yearly costs to have because nothing is worn out or rusted away. (EV is also a lot cheaper fuel)
I’ve been constantly telling everyone I know about this since the patriot act was signed and basically 100% of people don’t care in my experience
They just want to be able to connect their phone and have their music/video available and think that because they are “not doing anything wrong” they don’t “have anything to fear”
I’m glad this site exists so I can just send it to people directly
Well, just the fact that you don't pay for the monthly cellular subscription these cars use should tell you all you need to know about who's the product in this situation.
I recently sold my Lincoln Navigator and bought a used 2005 Honda Odyssey (single owner before me, 115K miles and well taken care of). Good luck trying to spy on me. It doesnt even have bluetooth let alone all the other smarttech crap. Good old CD player and Radio.
It was a tongue in cheek comment. No one can win the surveillance battle with today's tech. I have given up on that a while ago but I do try to protect whatever I can.
>No one can win the surveillance battle with today's tech.
It's remarkable to me how many brilliant people here refuse to acknowledge this, believing that a zillion hacks and work-arounds can keep them off the surveillance grid. That ship sailed a long, long time ago.
Cash is great for small purchases while out and about, and it feels good to not leave a digital purchase paper trail. Use cash before it gets outlawed!
They played around with the infotainment of the car for 30 minutes, when it has for example a YouTube app, they opened it. When the car talked to YouTube over Wifi they counted it as one ATA (Advertising, Tracking, and Analytics).
When you have less apps in the car, or all data is tunneled trough the car manufacturer it results in less ATA and therefore a better score.
The paper says this:
> 2. Stationary Active: The vehicle was parked and powered on for 30 minutes while we interacted with as many sensors and features as possible. This included opening and closing doors and the trunk, pressing dashboard and seat controls, activating stalks (lights, wipers), and exploring all infotainment menus and apps. https://automatictransmission.khoury.northeastern.edu/paper....
Their repository has the classification of vendors here: https://github.com/nicolegerzon813/Automatic-Transmission-An...
It would be nice to have know which domains were accessed by which car. Even better would be to know which action in the car correlated with which connection.
One thing i don’t understand is how pro-surveillance advocates don’t understand that the moment they are not behind the terminal, they are the target.
Pro-surveillance people were not born one fine day. They were conditioned for a decade making them believe sharing everything about their life is normal.
"What's on your mind?"
Except for those in power, of course.
Despite this I do have hope for the current gen who seems more aware.
https://www.nbcchicago.com/news/local/police-say-license-pla...
https://www.alxnow.com/2026/10/02/license-plate-reader-helpe...
https://www.bakersfield.com/news/bpd-credits-automated-licen...
https://www.kcrg.com/2026/09/17/how-license-plate-readers-he...
https://turnto10.com/news/local/license-plate-cameras-help-s...
https://www.krqe.com/news/albuquerque-metro/albuquerque-poli...
I remember being shocked, about 10 years ago, when I mentioned social network spying and my sister in law remarked she thought there should be more of it to keep people inline.
I've also met people who think all internet access should be through government sanctioned id and monitoring, which I also find shocking.
I haven't been able to pin this down to a single political view point, these people come from across the spectrum.
they may not be asking for it.. but once you make it a yes/no question and the public has to decide, they will support it blindly
As soon as you'll put out a concrete proposal, you'll get massacred for being "anti business".
I think it's three things; (a) They're just being paid not to care, (b) short-termism, and (c) are naively hoping they get to stay in the club on the other end of the surveillance. Hard to convince nearly anyone to give up short term profit for long term societal benefits.
Cynically I worry we are seeing the decline of democracy and our new overlords are seeing that too (many accelerating it). Surveillance is necessary for control. The AI, mass surveillance, and drone combination is getting pretty scary TBH.
It would be like creating an always present omnipotent God.
The best thing you can do is avoid products with trackers while they haven't taken over their entire market, learn to disable GPS, wireless, and cellular antennae once they do, and pray manufacturers take a while to insert dead-man switches as well.
You must agree to monitoring, otherwise they won't give you insurance.
strong disagree, this is complicit and defeatist nonsense given +100 years of active and successful consumer rights protection in lawful markets in the West.
1. I should not have to authenticate or have connectivity to a manufacturer unless I want to once I've paid for a physical good(cars being physical goods).
2. I don't want my personal data to be sold off to anyone - I've been in the tech industry for long enough to know that "I don't want my data to be shared with third parties" is worth as much as the power used to light up the pixels on the screen.
3. I don't trust anyone to have done everything carefully and by the books to prevent any potential leaks.
If you'd asked in 2010, well yeah, just pull the fuse for the modem and done. since all it does is a little bit of connectivity and there's nothing else useful from the, from that, I wouldn't care. But now connectivity has useful parts, that I don't want to lose.
Fast forward to today: getting access to the canbus (e.g. via headlights) allow you to steal the car: https://www.theregister.com/security/2023/04/06/how-thieves-...
Given the integration of these modules, is it that weird that you could send signals the other way?
https://youtu.be/DoP71LeQt3o?si=eSWRTaBYmzAOPWEz
Why would it be shocking?
It would be shocking if it weren't possible. Being a car does not confer any sort of magical protection against hacking because "it's just a car" or something.
I was pleased to that you can use the navigation with a data collection opt-out. I was less pleased to see that they sneaked a "safety and maintenance" clause into the terms. The information they gather for that gets shared with insurance companies, social networks and data brokers.
There's no hiding in modern car it seems. I was hoping for better from a French company operating under GDPR but no.
You can't win, with all the car companies pulling this crap it's like fighting a surveillance cartel.
The only thing to do is keep my old car for as long as possible.
Of course to enforce it you would need to complain to regulator in your country who then likely just tells them to stop it and that decision becomes effective years later after appeals. Many countries don't even fines for ePD violations.
I don't want a lit-up screen in the car.
Do you hear yourself?
99.99999904% of roads don't change that much.
People used to navigate with decade-old paper maps stuffed in their glove boxes and nobody died because of it.
The few times when I found myself driving on I-11, which my car didn't know about, it was a novelty, not a crisis. I didn't drive off the road because the screen told me the road didn't exist. I used common sense and followed the signs.
I'm still clarifying the purpose of this before making a complaint to the data authority.
>Cybersecurity experts hack and take remote control of SUV (2015)
https://youtu.be/DoP71LeQt3o?si=eSWRTaBYmzAOPWEz
You really need to look up the car and a lot of people sell replacement harnesses to terminate the built-in modems with resistors.
Sometimes if you hit the sweet spot, the car has a built in modem but its on 3G or EDGE networks that have been dismantled. There are several Subaru's like this. They no longer can connect to a network or transmit data.
Personally, I'd like to see someone salvage one of these modems and try to reverse engineer it for free Internet. It will probably be low speed and they might be locked to certain hosts, but I bet you could find some way to tunnel traffic on them.
They just want to be able to connect their phone and have their music/video available and think that because they are “not doing anything wrong” they don’t “have anything to fear”
I’m glad this site exists so I can just send it to people directly
Implying that payment will stop the tracking is a red herring.
Unless your Navigator doesn't have tires, they're still spying on you.
The only way to mitigate that is to not use credit cards in the same place you drive. Especially malls, strip malls, and drive-through restaurants.
It's remarkable to me how many brilliant people here refuse to acknowledge this, believing that a zillion hacks and work-arounds can keep them off the surveillance grid. That ship sailed a long, long time ago.