Comment by cbdevidal
17 hours ago
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.
How do you know?
Most of these are cloud connected, how do you know they aren't storing license plate information, or face data, or audio data for extended periods of time in the cloud?
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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.