Comment by vikingerik
14 hours ago
All it would need is a wi-fi antenna internally, and then it could connect to an open wi-fi network anywhere. And it's going to be pretty much impossible to avoid ever driving your car within range of some open network.
It would have to find an open Wi-Fi network that isn't gated behind a captive portal, which is very rare. Rare enough that most telemetry would be too stale to be useful.
Cable ISPs such as Spectrum sell capacity on their customers routers for such situations, including ‘smart’ appliances.
Xfinity (Comcast) does the same, and the LG TV data leak demonstrated it joining these open “xfinitywifi” SSIDs to transmit telemetry home (edit: retracted, see below subthread).
You can see a map of these nodes with https://wigle.net/
2 replies →
> which is very rare.
This depends a lot on the region/country. IN the US, open WiFi is unusual but it's pretty common in parts of asia, for example.