Mozilla released their studies, and I’m seeing a growing number of posts on the Internet about cars and the privacy nightmare they entail. I remember how this issue wasn’t talked about earlier because “just buy an older car” was still prevalent. I’m so happy that people are taking notice. Thank you to this community and Mozilla for the work they are putting in!
How exactly do they collect info other than GPS?
How are people interacting with the “radio” that it’s given so much info?
Are new vehicles required to be connected to phone network to function?
What functionality is lost of not connected.
As a motorist who prefers to drive cheap cars that have a little tech as possible so that there is little to go wrong and what goes wrong I can fix myself I know nothing about the latest gen of cars
Cars are mandated to have a “SIM” (I don’t know how this is implemented, that’s a question for the engineers) inside that can be connected at all times. This was originally meant for faster accident response, and I’m assuming car companies have contracts with the Telecom companies (someone from the engineering/law teams help me here) to transmit data over their networks even when the user’s devices are not connected
Ever since Jeep released their current gen Cherokee and two hackers revealed that they could hack into the entirety of the car by just knowing the phone number of the car’s hotspot, I have avoided new cars like the plague
maybe I’m a little behind the times when it comes to cars, but shouldn’t it be relatively trivial on the community scale to create foss head unit OS’s? are there other components that phone home besides the head unit? most cars have replaceable head units anyway, right? I feel like I must be missing something here
I’m basically in the position that I’m driving a car from 1999, and when it finally dies, I’ll either be resigned to riding the bus or finding another aged used car without all this absolute bullshit in it.
Maybe it really is time for the Free Open Source Vehicle.
People are starting to comment on the topic and take notice? That is great to hear. It is not often that this happens when such a study is released. It might be that ordinary people who lack the knowledge on the subject may be able to comprehend the concerns regarding privacy in cars more readily than in other areas. Whatever the case is, I’m happy the discussion is finally happening.
Huge props to Mozilla on this one - their article is clear and thorough. A lot of the studies are very vague, limited in scope, or way too technical, which makes them hard to share and discuss broadly.
