Comment by nozzlegear
1 year ago
> I wrote about this after my gag order expired.
Some time last year I wrote a comment here on HN about my Bolt EUV and OnStar. I can’t remember exactly what I wrote and don’t want to dig for it, but I said something like being happy with the vehicle and had disabled all of the OnStar features/tracking soon after I purchased it. Somebody replied that they were intimately familiar with the OnStar/GM project, having worked on it, and that it was still tracking me despite not being subscribed to any of their services and having turned off all the features in the car that I could. They couldn’t elaborate further, I assume because of an NDA or something. I bet dollars to donuts that this is what they were talking about now.
Edit: thanks to Stavros for finding the comment below. It looks like you were in fact the person I was talking to 11 months ago. Small world!
This is sorta unrelated, but in your previous comment you mentioned:
> least right now using CarPlay they aren’t getting all the data about which books or music I’m listening to.
CarPlay absolutely reports currently playing audio metadata back to the car. I've driven multiple cars that display the currently playing song, etc in the driving instruments cluster.
> currently playing audio metadata
Plain old Bluetooth has supported track/caller data for many years now (ex: AVRCP 1.3) so it should be no surprise that cars were made that read and display that information.
That said, if my car persisted that information I'd be rather suspicious.
P.S.: It's also not unknown to have a certain level of address-book contact sharing over BT, since people were making hands-free calls in their car long before CarPlay/Android-Auto came around.
Yeah, I noticed that at some point last year. This is my first vehicle with CarPlay, so I’m not sure how it works in other vehicles, but with mine the CarPlay interface completely replaces the infotainment display. The car will also show the current media in the cluster, but it’s a few clicks away and not what I had configured. I finally realized that the car was still able to see what I was listening to with CarPlay when I navigated back to the car’s default Home Screen while idling one day and saw the name of my book playing in the car’s native media app.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35391090
There it is, thank you! That’s exactly the conversation I was thinking of. And I see now that the person I was talking to was in fact the very person I replied to here in this thread.
You're welcome! For next time, searching for "nozzlegear onstar" only returned two comments, today's and this one from a year ago.
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I purchased a Bolt as well. Literally the day after I drove it off the lot, I found and modified the electrical connections to the Onstar antenna system, as I'm fairly handy with electronics and work on all my own cars. If you yank the fuse you'll also lose hands free bluetooth calling and some other features, so you have to use it.
Anyway, told this story to many people, and they looked at me like I'm a conspiracy nut. Well this will be the 1000'th conspiracy I worried about that turned out to be completely true, imagine that.
I own a Bolt (bought used) and have never activated OnStar, and I'm extremely unhappy to learn that it might be spying on me.
I did some reading when the NYT article came out, and found this, which explains how to install a terminator on the antenna to disable the cell connection: https://imgur.com/gallery/n00QKnH. If you go that route, it's probably prudent to make sure your car isn't connected to wifi, either. (Edit: looks like that guide came from here: https://www.reddit.com/r/BoltEV/comments/16h91a6/i_made_a_st...)
Apparently some Bolts newer than mine have a different fuse configuration that puts Bluetooth and OnStar on separate fuses: https://www.chevybolt.org/threads/remove-mobile-data-chip.33...
^ that Bolt forum thread also talks about some of the downsides of disabling the antenna (e.g. GPS won't work so your home/away charging settings don't work anymore).
Phone meta data is tracked. Car meta data is tracked. Supplement with credit card data, browsing history, the Rings in your neighborhood, etc., etc., etc.
Per, "Stand Out of Our Light", we don't stand a chance.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/jul/20/stand-out-of...
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=MaIO2UIvJ4g
Remember that 10 or 20 years ago, BEFORE phone, car and doorbell camera data was tracked, people were already saying "everything is tracked, we don't stand a chance", and this defeatist attitude has since contributed to allowing phone, car an doorbell camera data to be tracked as well.
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Guess we live in different worlds. Pretty much everyone around me, friend, family, coworker, or neighbor is fully aware and expecting any and all devices around them to be spying. Not all care or think it's nefarious though.
Welcome to customized pricing for everything, based on how much they think you value inconvenience vs spending money.
Dark patterns are the new frontier of corporate greed. Every business model now needs a “moat” (monopoly) to be considered fundable. The antitrust skirtings are built into the whitepaper these days, and having competition in your space is a bad smell. The invisible hand of the market and all that lol.
You should request your LexisNexis Risk consumer disclosure report.
Edit: please report back!
I just did! Very interested in seeing what’s in it.
Time to find the ATT SIM card and gut it from both of my vehicles.
Most cars have an integrated SIM. You can either pull the fuse, and lose a bunch of functionality, or if you're clever, throw an attenuator on the antenna rendering it useless but preserving the functionality of the rest of your car.
Do they not store it an just upload it once the car goes in for service? I have a 32 Gb mini SD card the size of a fingernail that was like $10, something like that would store a fuckload of hard braking events.
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Time to pop it in a data usage heavy device for free data.
The bbc or someone has had at least one article about a bird tracking device that operated via cellular and a sim that expected 5k or less data a month suddenly started charging gigs a month in their home continent just after the last natural looking flight of the bird ended, the ornithological society involved had a few shock bills.
From what I know, this wouldn't work. I worked for a telco and the way they explained it to me is that SIMs for these purposes are not the same as consumer SIMs. They end up on a different network using a different APN and they typically go straight to a VPN or other private network for their owner. And no, you can't reconfigure them to the consumer APN (I asked). (This was not in the US btw.)
Most SIMs for such purposes are sat directly on an L2TP connection or similar. They’re often not public internet.
As a consumer you can buy similar - I know my ISP (A&A) will sell you (quite reasonably) a sim that will drop straight onto an L2TP connection of your choosing.
Nope.. Machine to machine plans most likely