So you use GrapheneOS with Organic Maps or whatever other FOSS navigation app, have a Mint eSim that you registered under an alias and pay with a privacy.com card or a gift card, turn on airplane mode before going home - or worse, you bought a Faraday bag in order to store it before going home -, then have all data brokers know your home address and second by second location because Toyota just sold you out to them. It feels like the privacy community is asleep at the wheel (pun unavoidable).
It would be great to have a vehicle section on the site, saying what car manufacturers/models to avoid, what to ask at the dealership, after-purchase guides, etc.
But honestly, do we even have that information today?
Motorcycles - IDK from personal experience, but I assume many new motorcycles are still not “smart” and don’t feature any connectivity whatsoever.
e-bikes - these are much slower, often topping out around 30 MPH, but AFAICT few bother with connectivity, I guess because they’re so cheap.
public transit - only practical in some cities. Pay with cash and cycle transit passes often.
If it’s safe to travel by bike in your area and you truly feel that you need to carry more stuff than a regular bike can hold, also consider a cargo bike/bakfiets:
this is something that came up for me as i was confronted with possibly having to buy a vehicle. i feel like the only possibility i know of for newer cars is disconnecting the antennae they use to communicate, but that seems both difficult and very out of scope for the site.
I’ve been delaying for a while now, too, but will have to face the need to face the need to buy a new car sooner or later.
Yes, getting rid of the car’s SIM should definitely help, but non-connected cars can also record all your data and send it home to the mother ship when you stop it in the shop to get it servicer and;
That’s why we need resources. Only site I could find was https://privacy4cars.com, but that’s only for US & Canada, and I’m not sure what exactly it has.
Massive organizations are monitoring your online activities. Privacy Guides is your central privacy and security resource to protect yourself online.
If this out of scope for this site their self definition should change to “your central privacy and security resource to protect yourself online, except from your car”.
Off course this is an issue, I have also thought about it. But you (we) really need to focus on our REAL threat model…
I have bought a very cheap phone, I believe 70 or 100€, a burn SIM, and I use that with a specific google account and OSM and done… or the built in Toyota maps… and I use that phone only for that, it remains into de vehicle…
Inspired by Cars | Privacy & Security Guide | Mozilla Foundation it seems that all modern cars invade our privacy. This may be a longer-term research project, but it would be interesting to know which cars are the most recommended from a privacy perspective and in what ways we can improve our privacy. Hopefully, there’s a better way than sticking to 90s cars (which are already banned in some cities e.g. London).
Personally, I would prefer a less “car-centric” section - maybe something like “transportation” - both because not everyone owns/wants to own a car, and because it seems pretty much impossible to get ahold of a new privacy respecting car. So the best long term solution for privacy, if the infrastructure around you allows for it, is probably to go car-free.
A bicycle would be private, but public transport not really. In many cities you can only pay by card (Visa/Mastercard) or with a separate transportation card that you may be able to top up with cash but that will still track where you got on or off. There’s few cities where you can still do everything with cash and paper tickets (Berlin is perhaps one of them?). But even then, CCTV is everywhere. Nevertheless it would be interesting to see privacy tips for transportation in general, not just for cars.
For car I guess you could have tips like:
dont use the app
dont create an account
opt out of everything
It seems that modern cars have SIM cards talking home so I wonder if these can be disabled? Or if there’s “safe” makes that don’t have those SIM cards? (On another note, maybe I’m wrong, and the SIM card does not send anything unless you subscribe to a service such as map/traffic updates. After all, that 4G/5G data would cost the car manufacturer a lot of money, especially when the car is used abroad i.e. roaming, and also considering that some people might use a car for 20-30 years.)
Yes, I would add that many areas also have cameras that read license plates to detect speeding or use of toll roads. Not sure there’s much one could do about that, though.
Also paid street parking and parking garages often will not accept cash and/or collect license plate numbers.
Dealerships typically require a lot of personal information from you at the time of sale, and often keep a copy of your driver’s license. Plus you have to have the car registered and, at least in the US, you have to have it insured, which means handing personal info over to a private insurance company.
My understanding was that most cities in North America still allow paying for public transit with cash, but I could be wrong.
I guess concealing your movements has become almost impossible. Even if you drive an old car from the last century which hasn’t got any computer in it.
As long as that’s not your threat model and you just don’t want your car to send unnecessary data about you to the manufacturer to be used for advertising etc, there’s still merit to a privacy guide for cars.
Removing the SIM card is also probably not enough to prevent location tracking, as it may still connect to cell towers just like cellphones do. The modem needs to be removed.
Anyone knows of a website that has guides on how to do this for different vehicles?
Also, how old would one have to go to be safe when buying an used car, in terms of preventing location tracking?
Probably not out of scope for this discussion forum.
I suspect that disconnecting the antenna or replacing it with a dummy load is the most straight forward way to deal with this. How to do that will vary for every brand and model of car.
Some vehicles have all of this communications equipment behind a single fuse which can be removed. It is definitely a YMMV situation depending on make and model.
Very much depends on the vehicle. Some luxury vehicles even had this functionality before 2010. OnStar was formed in 1996 after all.
Since @OldGuy said it is not out of scope you are both saying the same thing.
