I have a few year old Volkswagen. I'm security conscious and made sure to disable all the data collection I could find in the companion app, turn off remote access services, dig through the infotainment to turn off what I could, etc.
Last year I requested a Carfax on it, and one of the fields in the request was current mileage. I entered an estimate like 75000 miles. On form submission, that field failed validation with the red subtext along the lines of 'this is less than the last reported mileage of 75345, reported <5 or so days prior>'. Checking my odometer and looking at my past few days' trips, that was indeed accurate.
The car hadn't been to a shop or out of my possession in weeks, so I can only assume the telemetry was still dialing home and selling to third parties despite my best efforts to disable it.
Anecdotal and not unexpected in the grand scheme, but it still surprised me.
> 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).
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.
True, but we must not let the perfect be the enemy of the good. I don't own a smartphone, so neither google nor apple track anything about me that way. I leave my dumbphone at home when I'm out and about, so it basically works like a traditional landline phone, again, no data there (except for phone calls and textmessages of course).
My car is old, so no gps/trackers there, but this is troubling of course. I think that if/when I buy a new one, it has to be either some vintage car, or I have to find a workshop who can rip out all the tracking.
CC payments can be mitigated by paying cash, when available. But yes, CC and bank are a concern and so is CCTV.
A friend used to work in ad tech years ago. The telecoms sell real time location data to digital billboard companies which are targeted at whoever is nearby. It's basically minority report. I can definitely imagine they're now using visual processing and face recognition on the billboards.
> 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.
It’s still worth minimising how many companies get your data, and minimising the data itself. I’m not sure what data Apple and Google get specifically out of their car thingies, but it’s very easy to avoid using their car thingie.
I use a googleless flip phone and just don't do anything important on it, and leave it behind often. We didn't always carry tracking devices with us, you can choose not to.
You can also buy an older car that doesn't come with a SIM card installed.
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.
> They are both very cagey with how they talk about this (or don't).
No, not really - at least not apple. They are very clear on what CarPlay’s privacy stance is, and they’ve got privacy white papers on pretty much everything:
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.
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.
>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.
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)
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.
> 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?
Yeah, but at least for now they don’t have the power to remotely disable my car or jack up my insurance prices and I trust Apple 1000% more than any of the other random car companies do not sell my data.
> 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).
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. 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. I wish I had a way to completely disable the car’s Bluetooth functionality, but it’s deeply integrated into the head unit.
How can data via Bluetooth be routed to an active internet connection? I assume this would only work if you have the manufacturer's car application installed on your phone.
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.
This sounds like pure speculation, and I would love to hear if there is any information that can substantiate what they are claiming.
Bluetooth tethering is a thing, actually predates wifi tethering. Though it's not enabled unless you enable Personal Hotspot in your phone settings (and Android requires it to be enabled separately).
CarPlay complicates things, as it only uses bluetooth to pair, then it switches to using a wifi network (as bluetooth doesn't have anywhere near enough bandwidth). Maybe Apple automatically shares internet over that carplay connection?
I have no doubt that the car will use the internet connection if one is exposed, I just doubt it will be exposed automatically.
My iPhone automatically shares the internet without enabling hotspot with my Toyota via Bluetooth. It happens automatically. I just start the car, and it happens. And CarPlay is not involved, since there is no such thing in my car.
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 had the same problem with my Skoda, but it was fixed under warranty, albeit it took 7 months for them to do it, although they've acknowledged it from day one.
I use Apple CarPlay and one thing that consistently worked was starting the navigation on the phone before it connected to the car.
Otherwise, the fix is relatively simple and cheap: the ECU has to be replaced, it doesn't cost too much, but it's pretty labour intensive.
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.
I had an M3LR during 2021/22 as a company car and during that time they “refreshed” the UI completely which made it objectively worse as a means of interacting with your car (i.e. more taps/levels/menus to get the same simple things done).
Aside from that, it was always pretty solid and IMO better than the typical legacy manufacturer offering.
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.
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.
> 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.
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?
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.
> 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?
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 would presume that other manufacturers might have this as well.
On newer vdubs there’s both a “location services” and a “offline mode” toggle in the infotainment, though this only turns the infotainment SIM off. Obviously this also disables remotely controlling the car using the app.
And the secondary eCall SIM cannot be disabled - not without triggering a fault code and a tell-tale. Since eCall is considered a safety-critical system it has self-monitoring and must work for the vehicle to pass inspection. It even has its own separate power supply. This is true for any vehicle (type) newer than ~2018 in the EU. This probably makes tracking the rough location of any eCall-equipped vehicle quite easy, if you have signaling-level access to the cell network – exactly like in all those SS7 exploits.
edit: turns out they thought about that and eCall modules aren’t supposed to constantly stay connected to a cellular network (dormant mode). Instead they only log onto the cellular network when needed. Difficult to verify as a consumer though.
> 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.
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.
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
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?
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.
> 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.
> 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 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.
There is a bluetooth protocol for cars to piggyback on your phone's internet connection. There was an article about it here a couple of years ago but I've forgotten the name of the protocol, and trying to search for it turns up a lot of irrelevance.
The fix for this is a phone that doesn't implement that protocol, i.e. not Android or iOS.
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).
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
If you are considering purchasing a Kia, insist on getting a loaner or a 24 hour test drive.
The active driver assistance features are criminally dangerous.
Sadly, the current administration is more interested in illegally locking Kia’s engineers in cages than actually enforcing consumer protection or safety regulations.
Anyway, avoid them and Hyundai. If you don’t believe me, drive in rush hour for 30 minutes and frequently change lanes. Be sure to be on the road at dusk and dawn to get the full experience, where glare confuses the onboard cameras, so regen braking flaps on and off, and it repeatedly overrides steering and sets of spurious cabin alarms.
I’d suggest parking a few times at a costco during peak hours, but I don’t want to get anyone killed.
I hired a peugeot something (MPV) to drive in the french alps and it was insanely dangerous.
Driving mountainous switchbacks with very tight corners it was so strict about not wanting to cross the central line that it frequently tried to dump me into either the mountain or over the cliff.
Similarly on straight 2 lane roads where only really the centre was clear of snow and ice it was adamant that I should be driving with 2 wheels in deep snow instead of daring to drive in the middle.
Be careful messing with your (modern) car like this. It may work at first glance. In some time in the future you may not be able to unlock your car.
As mentioned in the article as part of the introduction, there were problems with those car regarding security. Especially with the Rav4 where a colleague, Ken Tindell, showed a very serious flaw: https://kentindell.github.io/2023/04/03/can-injection/
Because of this OEMs build in more and more security, like SecOC with Autosar and other similar things. More and more of those security feature depend certificates in the devices that have an expiration time. Those certificates needs to be rotated regularly. If the rotation does not happen, because of missing communication with the mothership, then the security will fail, which finally will lock you out of your car.
That will be true for all the coming luxury car models.
IRC, Tesla has something like this for years in their cars. They can be offline for a certain period of time. But when this runs out, you will be out of luck.
> 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.
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.
I tried looking into this too but couldn't get further than some reddit bickering and a handful of forum posts. Not a Tesla owner myself but might want to be if the privacy issues can be fixed.
Ideally I'd like to keep my cake and eat it: keep navigation (preferably offline), spotify, etc. working but disable the telemetry, remote control, etc. From what I could gather, Teslas can use Wifi (your phone's hotspot) as a backup uplink. So depending on how they've implemented the cloud features, after disconnecting the antennae, you might be able to set up a tiny router and whitelist certain DNS queries, HTTPs connections, etc. But it might also be that they just use a big ol' VPN tunnel to the mothership and pipe all the cloud features through it.
Slightly less ambitious: does the navigation in Teslas work offline? Offline maps and route calculation have been around since the 00's in standalone GPS navigators, so it's not impossible.
Everything has cameras these days. On my street almost every house has a cloud connected camera. Every major road has cameras, every store and business. Now I’m not suggesting we give up the fight for privacy but avoiding gas stations does nothing
Difference is most of those things you mention overwrite their data in a few days or weeks. Even doorbell cameras, no one's stuff is being stored indefinitely.
> the car will not be bricked if you cut the antenna wires
They can't brick cars with bad antennas. They have to allow for cars that drive into tunnels or that are used in areas with no cell service.
They could choose to throw up increasingly annoying messages if the car hasn't phoned home for some time. Tesla does this if you haven't updated your software in a while but the screens are pretty easy to close and ignore.
With no antennas, can a Tesla transmit anything at all?
BTW I don’t own a Tesla. My car is like yours, a pre-2010 gas minivan with zero tracking.
Our phones and roadside Flock cameras still rat out both kinds of vehicles. I suspect soon cameras in other cars will also be reporting our whereabouts.
Absolute privacy is almost impossible on public roads.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
I've rented an Audi in Germany. On autobahns with 140 km/h speed limits there are lots of signs that limit speed to some low values like 50 km/h, but only under some conditions like snow, darkness, workday morning etc. Of course the car had no idea about those, started beeping for no reason and once even decided to do an emergency brake.
> They beep when you go above the speed limit, and only for a couple seconds.
No. They beep when they think I go above the speed limit.
Technically it is wrong 100% of time because the car underreports the speed. But even if we agree to ignore that fact, it is still wrong constantly because the car doesn't have nearly enough sensors and compute power to actually figure out what's the limit at the moment.
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)
A completely empty straight country road with just a cyclist ahead of me. I pull out to pass the cyclist with plenty of room, and the lane assist tries to swerve me into the poor bugger. Very alarming considering I had no idea the car had such a "safety" feature.
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.
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.
There's also OPVS, which supposedly can be self-hosted (I don't know how good their product is; I'm content with 3G-only 2012 Leaf being permanently offline).
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.
Not sure what you mean, maybe it depends on region. I am in EU and have Type 2 and CHAdeMO connectors. I only charge at home and travel to go to work and back, so barely ever use CHAdeMO. I agree, though, that I don't and wouldn't travel long distances with this car.
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.
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)!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It’s pretty unhelpful to list off other ways one’s privacy could be compromised in response to efforts like this. Privacy isn’t all all or nothing binary choice. Taking measures to improve privacy are worthwhile, even if you don’t continue the journey to absolute anonymity.
Exactly! I feel like a lot of people in these comments are saying privacy isn't achieved by doing this, and then move the goalposts to apple / google tracking you. I would love if we could just keep this about the scope of the car, and to that end I am so thankful of OP because after reading his article I was able to disable my car telemetry in 20 minutes. I've been wanting to do this for years but had no idea where to look. Spent hours on Google and couldn't get anywhere.
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?
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.
It's one thing for something to be mandatory original equipment, it's another for them to be necessary for passing an inspection (MOT / roadworthiness certificates). It's not mandatory in many countries, AFAIK.
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.
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.
losing SOS/cloud features is real cost, but so is having an always-on telemetry device in a thing you own. this should be a software setting and a clear privacy contract
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!
As much as I should really care about this, I have to say... I don't. I should, but I don't.
To me it's a little bit like, "I love these new cellphones but I'm keeping it in airplane mode all the time because I don't want it online"
I mean what's the point of buying a new car if you're going to cripple features that are so much better because it's connected? Sure, use CarPlay or such, but to say forever end things like over the air software updates? Anything to prevent Kia from theoretically detecting sexual activity I suppose [1].
Just buy an old car. Or convert a classic into an EV [2].
There are A LOT of things in our lives that can be completely torn apart if one wants to. Glass is a vastly inferior window covering. Do you know how easy it breaks, and people can just look into it.
1
If you ask me, there's a whole whitepaper to be written about how to detect sexual activity in a Kia.
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.)
> 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.
They can deny any claim for any reason, the onus gets flipped on you because if you want to fight back, you have to take a multi-billion dollar company to court .
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.
I honestly can't either. A lot of people drive around with navigation set on their phones which also track every movement and knows your exact location and travel speed, might even know how aggressive you drive based on accelerometer data and all that info can be uploaded from navigation app like Waze which is very popular
Get a determined ex-partner who knows a lot about you and wants to harm you or kidnap your children. For most people this represents the greatest immediate risk with this kind of data.
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.
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.
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.
Yeah this would be different. Also let me tell you my approach so I disconnected my car's data connectivity unit and all that does is forward the signal from the cell antennas down to the main head unit. So by disconnecting it my car doesn't actually know that it cell service has been turned off it literally just thinks there is no signal right now.
Cars are now using eSIMs. Cutting an antenna wire only limits the effectiveness of the communication. You can wirelessly send and receive data with a solder terminal on a board if you're dedicated enough.
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.
There is no way that is true, basic cars have always existed, like Dacia with bare minimum features to pass all requirements and they are far from being popular. The fact of the matter is, is that people just like fancy things and cars especially
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.
A screen for the back-up camera is federally required for new cars in the US, afaik. But using the screen for additional purposes is still optional... for now...
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.
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.
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
I have a few year old Volkswagen. I'm security conscious and made sure to disable all the data collection I could find in the companion app, turn off remote access services, dig through the infotainment to turn off what I could, etc.
Last year I requested a Carfax on it, and one of the fields in the request was current mileage. I entered an estimate like 75000 miles. On form submission, that field failed validation with the red subtext along the lines of 'this is less than the last reported mileage of 75345, reported <5 or so days prior>'. Checking my odometer and looking at my past few days' trips, that was indeed accurate.
The car hadn't been to a shop or out of my possession in weeks, so I can only assume the telemetry was still dialing home and selling to third parties despite my best efforts to disable it.
Anecdotal and not unexpected in the grand scheme, but it still surprised me.
> 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).
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> your CC payments help track
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...
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True, but we must not let the perfect be the enemy of the good. I don't own a smartphone, so neither google nor apple track anything about me that way. I leave my dumbphone at home when I'm out and about, so it basically works like a traditional landline phone, again, no data there (except for phone calls and textmessages of course).
My car is old, so no gps/trackers there, but this is troubling of course. I think that if/when I buy a new one, it has to be either some vintage car, or I have to find a workshop who can rip out all the tracking.
CC payments can be mitigated by paying cash, when available. But yes, CC and bank are a concern and so is CCTV.
A friend used to work in ad tech years ago. The telecoms sell real time location data to digital billboard companies which are targeted at whoever is nearby. It's basically minority report. I can definitely imagine they're now using visual processing and face recognition on the billboards.
Nonetheless I'll still try to maintain what privacy I can.
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> 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.
It’s still worth minimising how many companies get your data, and minimising the data itself. I’m not sure what data Apple and Google get specifically out of their car thingies, but it’s very easy to avoid using their car thingie.
I use a googleless flip phone and just don't do anything important on it, and leave it behind often. We didn't always carry tracking devices with us, you can choose not to.
You can also buy an older car that doesn't come with a SIM card installed.
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At least you can shut your cellphone off and pay in cash.
RE .... company tracks you ..... [ somewhat off topis ]
Did you know ... in many countries government tracks car number plates and the data is stored for many years.
Exactly, and more and more places are removing cash as a payment option :(
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1987 4runner, no phone, use cash.
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Perhaps it's time to give up some convenience for old ways, eh?
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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.
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> They are both very cagey with how they talk about this (or don't).
No, not really - at least not apple. They are very clear on what CarPlay’s privacy stance is, and they’ve got privacy white papers on pretty much everything:
Eg. https://www.apple.com/privacy/docs/Location_Services_White_P...
Again, at least on the apple front this comes off as a ton of “stated without evidence “
What does a user see when enabling CarPlay on their iPhone, and not browsing apple.com for random .pdfs?
You need GrapheneOS to sever the link to Google. You can also deny specify apps and services Internet access.
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.
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I like the idea of graphene, but I worry my banking / brokerage apps wouldn't work anymore and that'd be a deal breaker
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Standard Carplay is essentially an additional screen for your phone - your existiing privacy settings carry across. What's your concern?
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.
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>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.
> then the car will use your phone as an internet connection and send all the same telemetry data back to Toyota
How?
They are probably confusing google auto with bluetooth.
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A 12v bluetooth to FM transmitter can at least give you tunes and a speaker phone feature.
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)
I use android auto through grapheneos thankfully! this is crazy!
this sounds like donning a TNT vest to diffuse a bomb
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.
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What about if it's just paired as an audio device rather than through an app?
Don't get CarPlay/Android Auto that way though, so no navigation/maps for example.
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I trust Apple more than I trust Toyota.
You shouldn’t. Apple preserves backdoors in iCloud encryption to enable warrantless government surveillance. They have no other option.
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> 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?
I would have liked to have seen this citation too instead of seeing you get downvoted.
Yeah, but at least for now they don’t have the power to remotely disable my car or jack up my insurance prices and I trust Apple 1000% more than any of the other random car companies do not sell my data.
> 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).
They are cagey because they get nearly $100k upfront with crazy interest rates, and then they make a ton of money through their spyware.
Honest question: what do you mean?
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Does anyone have any details on this claim?
How can data via Bluetooth be routed to an active internet connection? I assume this would only work if you have the manufacturer's car application installed on your phone.
Following the thread linked to, the only thing I can find is very unsubstantiated; https://www.rav4world.com/threads/2019-rav4-dcm-deactivate-p... :
This sounds like pure speculation, and I would love to hear if there is any information that can substantiate what they are claiming.
Yeah, I'm a little suspicious about that claim.
Bluetooth tethering is a thing, actually predates wifi tethering. Though it's not enabled unless you enable Personal Hotspot in your phone settings (and Android requires it to be enabled separately).
CarPlay complicates things, as it only uses bluetooth to pair, then it switches to using a wifi network (as bluetooth doesn't have anywhere near enough bandwidth). Maybe Apple automatically shares internet over that carplay connection?
I have no doubt that the car will use the internet connection if one is exposed, I just doubt it will be exposed automatically.
My iPhone automatically shares the internet without enabling hotspot with my Toyota via Bluetooth. It happens automatically. I just start the car, and it happens. And CarPlay is not involved, since there is no such thing in my car.
One thing I notice is that it doesn't appear to upload contacts from your phone in usb mode. I haven't confirmed this.
Bluetooth tethering is a thing, and I believe is enabled by default on Android, maybe it's using that?
For me on Android 16, the setting is in Network & internet > Hotspot & tethering > Bluetooth tethering
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 had the same problem with my Skoda, but it was fixed under warranty, albeit it took 7 months for them to do it, although they've acknowledged it from day one.
I use Apple CarPlay and one thing that consistently worked was starting the navigation on the phone before it connected to the car.
Otherwise, the fix is relatively simple and cheap: the ECU has to be replaced, it doesn't cost too much, but it's pretty labour intensive.
Stop "reporting this to them multiple times" and sue them.
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.
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.
I had an M3LR during 2021/22 as a company car and during that time they “refreshed” the UI completely which made it objectively worse as a means of interacting with your car (i.e. more taps/levels/menus to get the same simple things done).
Aside from that, it was always pretty solid and IMO better than the typical legacy manufacturer offering.
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.
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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.
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> 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.
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Tesla takes software very seriously, but for their goals not yours.
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> Some brands take software very seriously.
> 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."
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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.
> 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?
Resolving basic usability issues shouldn't require infiltrating the company.
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.
https://www.mavericktruckclub.com/forum/threads/telematics-f...
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.
I was able to enter dealer mode on my 2023 Kia using this tutorial. https://youtu.be/Q2AEhGYnOaA
It let me disable telematics, and Kia support confirmed that my car was flagged as a "Massachusetts variant" even though it wasn't purchased in MA.
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.
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> I don't think there's convincing my dealer...
How far do you live from Massachusetts, and how do your feel about driving vacations?
> I would presume that other manufacturers might have this as well.
On newer vdubs there’s both a “location services” and a “offline mode” toggle in the infotainment, though this only turns the infotainment SIM off. Obviously this also disables remotely controlling the car using the app.
And the secondary eCall SIM cannot be disabled - not without triggering a fault code and a tell-tale. Since eCall is considered a safety-critical system it has self-monitoring and must work for the vehicle to pass inspection. It even has its own separate power supply. This is true for any vehicle (type) newer than ~2018 in the EU. This probably makes tracking the rough location of any eCall-equipped vehicle quite easy, if you have signaling-level access to the cell network – exactly like in all those SS7 exploits.
edit: turns out they thought about that and eCall modules aren’t supposed to constantly stay connected to a cellular network (dormant mode). Instead they only log onto the cellular network when needed. Difficult to verify as a consumer though.
> 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.
Better than not setting it, I suppose! :)
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.
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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
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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?
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according to some guys on r/askcarsales the manufacturers have required KPIs for onboarding app users so they just have to do it.
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.
This aligns with my understanding.
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.
There was a recent class action suit against GM for this.
> 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.
Guaranteed
It's for the safety of the children.
> 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.
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Does anyone have a flow log or pcap or something from the phone showing this tho?
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.
There is a bluetooth protocol for cars to piggyback on your phone's internet connection. There was an article about it here a couple of years ago but I've forgotten the name of the protocol, and trying to search for it turns up a lot of irrelevance.
The fix for this is a phone that doesn't implement that protocol, i.e. not Android or iOS.
Is this specific to carplay, or can other bluetooth devices also silently and nefariously hijack your cellular data connection?
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).
The bluetooth protocol includes the ability to network, and share connections like a mobile/personal hotspot.
Older versions of bluetooth may have other networking capabilities.
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
If you are considering purchasing a Kia, insist on getting a loaner or a 24 hour test drive.
The active driver assistance features are criminally dangerous.
Sadly, the current administration is more interested in illegally locking Kia’s engineers in cages than actually enforcing consumer protection or safety regulations.
Anyway, avoid them and Hyundai. If you don’t believe me, drive in rush hour for 30 minutes and frequently change lanes. Be sure to be on the road at dusk and dawn to get the full experience, where glare confuses the onboard cameras, so regen braking flaps on and off, and it repeatedly overrides steering and sets of spurious cabin alarms.
I’d suggest parking a few times at a costco during peak hours, but I don’t want to get anyone killed.
I hired a peugeot something (MPV) to drive in the french alps and it was insanely dangerous.
Driving mountainous switchbacks with very tight corners it was so strict about not wanting to cross the central line that it frequently tried to dump me into either the mountain or over the cliff.
Similarly on straight 2 lane roads where only really the centre was clear of snow and ice it was adamant that I should be driving with 2 wheels in deep snow instead of daring to drive in the middle.
Any clues on how to disable any telemetry on a Kia Stinger?
Yes!! I still have access to all their service manuals for the next 48 hours.
What's your year model and engine? I'll look it up.
Be careful messing with your (modern) car like this. It may work at first glance. In some time in the future you may not be able to unlock your car.
As mentioned in the article as part of the introduction, there were problems with those car regarding security. Especially with the Rav4 where a colleague, Ken Tindell, showed a very serious flaw: https://kentindell.github.io/2023/04/03/can-injection/
Because of this OEMs build in more and more security, like SecOC with Autosar and other similar things. More and more of those security feature depend certificates in the devices that have an expiration time. Those certificates needs to be rotated regularly. If the rotation does not happen, because of missing communication with the mothership, then the security will fail, which finally will lock you out of your car.
That will be true for all the coming luxury car models.
IRC, Tesla has something like this for years in their cars. They can be offline for a certain period of time. But when this runs out, you will be out of luck.
It's a Toyota - you already can't unlock it in heavy rain.
Does changing the date fix it?
> 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.
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.
I tried looking into this too but couldn't get further than some reddit bickering and a handful of forum posts. Not a Tesla owner myself but might want to be if the privacy issues can be fixed.
Ideally I'd like to keep my cake and eat it: keep navigation (preferably offline), spotify, etc. working but disable the telemetry, remote control, etc. From what I could gather, Teslas can use Wifi (your phone's hotspot) as a backup uplink. So depending on how they've implemented the cloud features, after disconnecting the antennae, you might be able to set up a tiny router and whitelist certain DNS queries, HTTPs connections, etc. But it might also be that they just use a big ol' VPN tunnel to the mothership and pipe all the cloud features through it.
Slightly less ambitious: does the navigation in Teslas work offline? Offline maps and route calculation have been around since the 00's in standalone GPS navigators, so it's not impossible.
>Gas stations with cameras.
Everything has cameras these days. On my street almost every house has a cloud connected camera. Every major road has cameras, every store and business. Now I’m not suggesting we give up the fight for privacy but avoiding gas stations does nothing
That’s specifically why I said ”Flock cameras”. Also mentioned our phones, they also report our location.
I suspect soon cameras in other cars will also be reporting our whereabouts.
Absolute privacy is almost impossible on public roads.
Difference is most of those things you mention overwrite their data in a few days or weeks. Even doorbell cameras, no one's stuff is being stored indefinitely.
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> the car will not be bricked if you cut the antenna wires
They can't brick cars with bad antennas. They have to allow for cars that drive into tunnels or that are used in areas with no cell service.
They could choose to throw up increasingly annoying messages if the car hasn't phoned home for some time. Tesla does this if you haven't updated your software in a while but the screens are pretty easy to close and ignore.
If you think your Tesla is somehow more "private" then my pre-2010's ICE car with no tracking electronics, then you are delusional.
With no antennas, can a Tesla transmit anything at all?
BTW I don’t own a Tesla. My car is like yours, a pre-2010 gas minivan with zero tracking.
Our phones and roadside Flock cameras still rat out both kinds of vehicles. I suspect soon cameras in other cars will also be reporting our whereabouts.
Absolute privacy is almost impossible on public roads.
What is the suspected method of Bluetooth communication?
Afaik phones do not share their internet blindly to Bluetooth devices.
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.
Also thought about it. It’s possible, but requires enabling hotspot on the phone. Without it, it will not share internet via BT.
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.
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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.
> 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.
It's from the linked rav4world post
> 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.
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There's no basis mentioned there either. It's just stated as a matter of fact without explanation.
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.
I've rented an Audi in Germany. On autobahns with 140 km/h speed limits there are lots of signs that limit speed to some low values like 50 km/h, but only under some conditions like snow, darkness, workday morning etc. Of course the car had no idea about those, started beeping for no reason and once even decided to do an emergency brake.
> They beep when you go above the speed limit, and only for a couple seconds.
No. They beep when they think I go above the speed limit.
Technically it is wrong 100% of time because the car underreports the speed. But even if we agree to ignore that fact, it is still wrong constantly because the car doesn't have nearly enough sensors and compute power to actually figure out what's the limit at the moment.
Thus this feature is as useful as cookie banners.
The car probably doesn't have perfect knowledge of speed limits across Europe.
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Lick the boot more.
If you can't drive into a tree at 200mph and kill yourself in a car, then I do not what it.
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)
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Lane assistance on hire cars piss me off. If I need to swerve I shouldn't need to be pulling against the wheel -.-
I'll raise you that.....
A completely empty straight country road with just a cyclist ahead of me. I pull out to pass the cyclist with plenty of room, and the lane assist tries to swerve me into the poor bugger. Very alarming considering I had no idea the car had such a "safety" feature.
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.
The car I drove from 2025 didn't have it.
Related: Can I disable all data collection from my vehicle? (rivian.com) 760 points 14 days ago 361 comments
(https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47967786)
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.
There's also OPVS, which supposedly can be self-hosted (I don't know how good their product is; I'm content with 3G-only 2012 Leaf being permanently offline).
https://www.openvehicles.com
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.
How are you dealing with the chademo only charger thing?
Not sure what you mean, maybe it depends on region. I am in EU and have Type 2 and CHAdeMO connectors. I only charge at home and travel to go to work and back, so barely ever use CHAdeMO. I agree, though, that I don't and wouldn't travel long distances with this car.
If you buy a ChaDeMo Leaf you do so knowing that it will likely never go more than a hundred miles from home.
There's going to be a lot of this going on in the future. RabbitLabs CAN Commander go BRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR.
I though this was just a crazy commenter, but here:
https://rabbit-labs.com/product/cancommander/
Crazy commenter, tell us a little about this. Can I use it on any Can bus?
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.
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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)!
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
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.
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.
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 wait when L4 and L5 vehicles become mainstream. Tinkering with the car will be illegal. Because of our safety and the scare of bad actors.
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.
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.
Feed it the current location of the ISS and see what happens to your insurance rates.
this is great idea! Hackers of Hacker News let's have more projects to overwhelm bad actors with bad data. Perhaps using OSS LLMs for that.
It’s pretty unhelpful to list off other ways one’s privacy could be compromised in response to efforts like this. Privacy isn’t all all or nothing binary choice. Taking measures to improve privacy are worthwhile, even if you don’t continue the journey to absolute anonymity.
Exactly! I feel like a lot of people in these comments are saying privacy isn't achieved by doing this, and then move the goalposts to apple / google tracking you. I would love if we could just keep this about the scope of the car, and to that end I am so thankful of OP because after reading his article I was able to disable my car telemetry in 20 minutes. I've been wanting to do this for years but had no idea where to look. Spent hours on Google and couldn't get anywhere.
I dread the day I will have to start doing this when the 2015 vehicle I have finally goes
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?
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.
TIL:
> 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
It's one thing for something to be mandatory original equipment, it's another for them to be necessary for passing an inspection (MOT / roadworthiness certificates). It's not mandatory in many countries, AFAIK.
There's going to be a lot of value in keeping cars from 5-10+ years ago around indefinitely.
Until they're outlawed for the poor because "they pollute way too much"
> Fr*nce
What's this?
France.
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Just use public transit.. oh, wait, (https://reclaimthenet.org/the-eurail-breach-and-the-digital-...)
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.
If you disconnect the modem, the car can't share any information by itself. In my opinion, that is a huge win.
There is no way to know for sure that this data is not collected somewhere inside the car and then uploaded at dealer's.
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.
Modern cars are like Smart TVs.
Soon: ads on your HUD while you wait in traffic.
This has already happened: https://www.motorbiscuit.com/jeep-dodge-owners-mad-infotainm...
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.
So yeah, its already happening.
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losing SOS/cloud features is real cost, but so is having an always-on telemetry device in a thing you own. this should be a software setting and a clear privacy contract
About removing the modem. ....
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.]
[meta] this response was clearly not from an LLM. i wonder what sorts of distinctive styles could be telltales going forward.
We need a Framework laptop equivalent for cars.
I've been saying this for years! I agree.
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!
You buy a $40k car and it's still monetizing you. The hardware is just the entry fee. The real product is everything you do inside it.
As much as I should really care about this, I have to say... I don't. I should, but I don't.
To me it's a little bit like, "I love these new cellphones but I'm keeping it in airplane mode all the time because I don't want it online"
I mean what's the point of buying a new car if you're going to cripple features that are so much better because it's connected? Sure, use CarPlay or such, but to say forever end things like over the air software updates? Anything to prevent Kia from theoretically detecting sexual activity I suppose [1].
Just buy an old car. Or convert a classic into an EV [2].
There are A LOT of things in our lives that can be completely torn apart if one wants to. Glass is a vastly inferior window covering. Do you know how easy it breaks, and people can just look into it.
1 If you ask me, there's a whole whitepaper to be written about how to detect sexual activity in a Kia.
2 https://www.bugeyeguys.com/category/electric-bugeye/
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...
What type of fucking "safety" update could be performed?
If the car has a recall or safety issue with the suspension part failing prematurely, what possibly could some software nonsense do?
Tesla https://www.tesla.com/support/vehicle-firmware-prevent-autos...
Ford https://www.caranddriver.com/news/a70513450/ford-4-million-v...
GM https://www.themanual.com/auto/gm-brake-fluid-warning-recall...
I think Chrysler does it too, but I only find mention of the time they bricked a bunch of Wranglers with a bad OTA update.
Broadly I don't think it's hard to imagine a software update being safety critical if the software is used in a safety critical system.
Its probably an antipattern on a car to need an OTA "safety" update in the first place.
The safety update is physically removing the modem IMO. Can't be wirelessly broken into if you aren't on the network to begin with.
I bet in a couple of years you'll have to go straight to the dealership to fix your car, because it won't start.
On the other hand, as mentioned by others: Why bother if you use CarPlay?
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.
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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.
>That requires a cell connection.
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.)
> 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.
Another method is to disconnect the antenna and add a resistor so it acts as a dummy load. Here is an example with a Tacoma: https://www.tacomaworld.com/threads/simpler-solution-for-dis...
This is what I thought about doing instead. Removing the whole module seems overkill. Removing the signal should be enough to disable it.
> Strong Federal privacy laws would make posts like this unnecessary, that’s the world I’d rather live in.
Amen.
Writes long article about the concerns of software phoning home
Peppers article with Amazon affiliate links
Perfect summation of 2026
I wonder if insurance would refuse to pay out in the event of an accident due to this modification?
They would have to prove the modification caused the accident.
No they don't.
They can deny any claim for any reason, the onus gets flipped on you because if you want to fight back, you have to take a multi-billion dollar company to court .
I'm still just refusing to buy this garbage in the first place.
All these car manufacturers pushing this horrorshow deserve to go under. Tbh it looks like most will soon....
All the Chinese car manufactures are doing the same, they aren't likely to go under soon.
Which car manufacturers are not pushing this garbage?
I cannot imagine the paranoia that it would take for me to go through this process.
I cannot imagine the lack of concern about my privacy that it would take to make me daily-drive a car that hadn't been put through this process.
(I dread the day my 2007 Civic is no longer usable.)
Not to mention, people kept saying "Who cares, you're being silly" then multiple companies were caught selling into to insurance companies.
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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.
I honestly can't either. A lot of people drive around with navigation set on their phones which also track every movement and knows your exact location and travel speed, might even know how aggressive you drive based on accelerometer data and all that info can be uploaded from navigation app like Waze which is very popular
Get a determined ex-partner who knows a lot about you and wants to harm you or kidnap your children. For most people this represents the greatest immediate risk with this kind of data.
How will they get access to this data? Hax into Toyota to track this one specific Rav4?
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Step 1. Be very, very single
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.
Counterpoints:
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.
So the authors goal is to reduce his car's ability to transmit his data to Toyota.
His solution: disconnect the cell modem
Your solution: Be single, never drive a car ever, and leave your phone at home.
?????
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.
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.
Could one cover the antenna with strategic foil?
Removing seems hard/complicated but foil seems within most ppls reach.
I get this desire and commend the author, but I just want self driving cars and so I think we are just stuck with this.
That's a hell of a defeatist attitude, and exactly the result they are hoping for.
What's the advantage in having a self-driving car?
It drives itself.
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?
> just for some shortcoming in your own capabilities?
It's a shortcoming each of us will have, if we're so lucky as to live that long.
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.
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For some, driving is an absolute chore. A mind-numbingly boring task.
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If you get into enough trouble they'll get all your phone data and cell tower pings or your passenger's.
Be careful as there has been precedence of insurance companies using the fact cameras were removed/disabled to deny or reduce claims.
Yeah this would be different. Also let me tell you my approach so I disconnected my car's data connectivity unit and all that does is forward the signal from the cell antennas down to the main head unit. So by disconnecting it my car doesn't actually know that it cell service has been turned off it literally just thinks there is no signal right now.
Why not just remove the antenna or SIM card from the modem?
Cars are now using eSIMs. Cutting an antenna wire only limits the effectiveness of the communication. You can wirelessly send and receive data with a solder terminal on a board if you're dedicated enough.
I wonder if removing the antenna would possibly cause the modem to try to transmit at a higher power level, thus running the car's battery down.
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.
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There is no way that is true, basic cars have always existed, like Dacia with bare minimum features to pass all requirements and they are far from being popular. The fact of the matter is, is that people just like fancy things and cars especially
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.
Well, Bollinger Motors tried just that, but they couldn't make it fly.
However, you now have a chance to buy one of the rare prototypes!
https://finance.yahoo.com/sectors/technology/articles/bollin...
A screen for the back-up camera is federally required for new cars in the US, afaik. But using the screen for additional purposes is still optional... for now...
Who’s responsible for presenting the privacy policy to passengers of a car, anyway?
Couldn't you just ground or resistor out the car's cellular antenna so it can't transmit data?
There's a post earlier linking to someone doing that for a Tacoma
Live free or die
I love those type of posts. But there is probably gonna be an interesting discussion when he will get the car serviced at Toyota.
Maybe a simpler way is to to slap a Faraday cage on all antennas.
props for still using Skitch to annotate images in 2026
I did it for my 2025 4runner. https://6thgen4runner.com/threads/disable-telematics-with-au...
DCM Bypass kit. https://www.autoharnesshouse.com/store/AHH-DCM77
Maybe two metal pins through the GPS and the cellular antenna coaxial cables would do the trick?
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.
Just hold it wrong. That should do the trick.
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.
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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.
On my classic cars I fitted a battery quick disconnect in the boot. Might need to start doing that with modern cars too.
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You just need to cap the connectors with a terminator.
It might easier to find the cable than disassemble the car to get to the terminals.
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Any guesses at how large the addressable market is for a dumb car (or appliance)?
I would be the target customer, but I keep making convenience concessions and buying the nice car / appliance with smart stuff.
I appreciate this guide from a technical perspective, but despite a lot of the stated preferences, I’m not seeing a huge market for it.
Convenience is paramount.
This is why I want a Chinese car. At least they won't do anything with my data.
Open-source car, please.
https://rangerovers.pub/downloads/rave.zip
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?
cool, well done. Now we just need it for the other gazillion "smart-cars" out there
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If you live in the EU and bought the car there, the GDPR still applies, even if data is sent to Toyota in Japan.
You have the full right to view and ask for deletion.
You'd think people would be doing that already. Has anyone posted details?
Can you skirt the GDPR by making it hard to discover who you need to ask?
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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
My hilly 25 mile commute isn't really bicycle compatible, unfortunately
There are impressively capable ebikes these days. I wonder how long before tracking gets introduced to those ...