You can disassemble the interior a bit (usually not too difficult) and disconnect the antenna from the comms module. Depending on the structure of the wiring harness your car uses, it may not be possible to easily do that without also removing GPS/radio functionality. Some models are now integrating WiFi/Bluetooth into the same system.

Alternatively, depending on which manufacturer your car is from, you can "acquire" the manufacturer diagnostic/service software and disable the cellular connection.

I will give a shoutout to Honda for being pretty good about this. The Civic didn't have a cellular connection at least as of the 10th gen (up to 2021). Not sure if the new '22 Civic does. Also, their infotainment systems run Android and you can root/jailbreak it - on the Civic, Accord, HR-V, and others. Again, this may change in current model years so double check before you buy. And (excepting a few years around 2016-2018) Honda also still has physical buttons/knobs for all the important controls, instead of putting everything into a touchscreen like 90% of companies do these days.

BMW has had a cellular connection in their cars for many years, but you can disable the SIM card by programming the TCB through ISTA, even on the current G chassis cars. Not sure if that completely disables Tx. Also not sure how their just released iDrive 8 system handles it though.

Alternatively you could unplug the TCB on the BMWs. That requires dropping the headliner on recent ones (annoying but not hard), and on the really recent ones I don't think you can unplug cellular only (you'll also lose GPS & some other things, potentially including WiFi/BT/NFC, I'm not sure). And it'll show a warning on the dash all the time if you unplug it.

The discourse 5-10 years ago was that this was the price you pay for free (as in beer) consumer services. In reality, no such principles exist, and everything is instead a numbers game. Do enough people complain? Does it factor into their purchase decisions?

Unfortunately, average people seem to not value their attention, even as everyone else is fighting tooth and nail for a share of it.

I hate this coming Orwellian future.

That said, they do need to be monitored at all time; abusing that location data for different usage is only one piece of legislation away. Which is why it's probably best to not gather this information in the first place.

To invoke Godwin's Law, iirc you are no longer required to fill in your religion anywhere, because the nazi's used records like that to track down Jewish people and others they were after.

This is why these privacy laws are so important, and why the right to be forgotten should be sacred; you should be able to disappear if the governments turn against you.

The right to be forgotten is the wrong place to push for privacy, it should be the "right to never be known".

As to the "EU directives are all above board and documented" you know what they say about the road to hell, and good intentions right?

Oh, you mean you want to be able to have your devices send requests to other people's devices and have them respond, but at the same time, you want there to be no record that your device ever did this? Good luck with that.

An GDPR relevancy outside the EU is just a paper promise.

https://ec.europa.eu/justice/article-29/documentation/opinio...

https://www.phoronix.com/forums/forum/phoronix/general-discu...

It is mandatory to have it installed for new cars, but it looks like it can be disabled if the owner prefers to be left alone while dying, instead of calling an ambulance :D

Nobody prefers to die. It's the part where it's capable of being active all the time that's worrying.

You also can't control the mandatory microphone. How long until someone abuses that (if it hasn't happened already)?

Abuses can always happen, and we should put reasonable checks in place to avoid them. Is the current regulation good enough to minimize the risk of having them? I hope so.

Via IMEI tracking the cell providers have your location data, willingly or not. If you want to travel anonymously you'd better have an oldtimer. I know of lawyers who only visit clients with an old car.

Devices that allow tracking when no accident occurred, violate the current regulation. This is stressed multiple times. "not connected to the mobile phone networks until a serious accident happens" -- https://ec.europa.eu/newsroom/dae/redirection/document/5963

"it is not permanently connected to mobile networks" -- https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/fr/MEMO_1...

"not connected to the mobile phone networks until a serious accident happens" -- https://ec.europa.eu/newsroom/dae/redirection/document/5963

There is even a technical test to check if the device is compliant with the privacy regulations: "Procedure for verifying the lack of traceability of an eCall in-vehicle system", where the "Failure to establish the connection can be attributed to the 112-based eCall in-vehicle system not being registered on the network" -- https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=celex:32...

Registering the SIM on the network before an accident occurred could be considered a violation indeed.

My previous car sometimes came up with a warning that eCall currently is not available. I'd attribute that to bad reception which means that connection at least has been tried.

Your previous car could have had a non-compliant implementation, but it could be that the system run a passive network scanning from time to time, without trying any connection, just because it would be way faster to connect to a network and send a message if there is an up-to-date list of the compatible available operators. Having a better understanding about the specifics of the various implementation would be interesting. The devil is in the details :)

Note that the linked document applies only to eCall In Vehicle System. Nothing prevent manufacturer to install a second system, using the same or separate modem, and track user's location and actions continuously. If the law requires you to install a GPS receiver and a modem, it would be uncapitalistic not to try to gain some profits from the data.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

The main things to do are (1) edit out swipes (e.g. "might be hard to understand for $group"), and (2) add enough information to make for a substantive comment.

https://www.google.com/search?channel=fs&client=ubuntu&q=npr...

Seriously as a European I do not know enough about HD+ radio but DAB radio can transmit pictures which until now is mostly used to transfer album covers.

In due time we will see this abused to hammer ads down our throats.

When the service was first implemented, that was a possibility. Now, the most we're likely to take advantage of it is to show you a display ad that matches with the current "over the air" ad that you're hearing. Advertisers aren't interested in selling on top of someone else's advertising, and programming doesn't want their displays messed with outside of commercial breaks.

Plus.. it's a pretty low value service and honestly not worth selling. Advertisers all want demographic driven sales now, so those channels aren't all that useful to us.

RadioDNS opens the door somewhat to this, because it can direct your radio to start a stream instead of listening "over the air." However, there, we're happy to be able to replace the over the air ads with programmatic digital ads and that sales channel really doesn't care about "additional display opportunities" either.

Be happy that radio is slow to implement standards, and usually too far behind the punch to get the expected return out of them. So.. just album art for the foreseeable future.

Maybe people want internet connected TVs to attach to streaming services, but I doubt anyone really wants what we are calling "Smart" TVs

At a minimum.

WTF. Is this a thing? How?

Some cars show nearby points of interest as a feature; this isn't that.

Yes. I have a ~5yro Ford Fiesta with navigation built in and I massively prefer it to using a phone app.

Its standalone (mapping is on an sd card) so I know it will still work if I'm in a remote area with poor network coverage. It also has physical, tactile buttons (no touchscreen) that my muscle memory can learn, and which don't suddenly reposition themselves at the whims of some app ux designer. It can automatically download traffic updates via bluetooth on my phone, but its otherwise "self hosted" on my car.

Basically, it just works the way I expect and doesn't try to distract me. Which is all that I need.

Example: Instead of "Turn left onto Broad Street", it will say, "Turn left after the Wendy's".

It's pretty subtle right now, but I have no doubts that it will get more nefarious in the future.

Good thing Apple Maps doesn’t subtly repeat biz names to me until I remember them. If this ever happens, I’ll move back to paper maps.

I don’t care if I have to pull over, it beats this mental manipulation and my mind being an advertisers plaything.

This sounds exactly like that.

These have improved somewhat

I don’t really need any of those with my phone in the car.

Can't find the reference but don't they use this for generating precise topological data?

That means it will fail the bi-annual mandatory check.

So you'll lose the other things if you put it in a Faraday cage.

A cage is a bad way to do it anyway. It's easier to disconnect the cable between the antenna & the telematics module (which has the SIM and control electronics in it). Or disconnect the power to the telematics module. Etc. Depending on the wiring harness style and design of the car's electronics, that may also let you disconnect just the cellular antenna while leaving the GPS/radio antennas connected.

In the future we might see those components getting integrated together... But you can always physically destroy/remove the antenna.

Unless the device itself becomes the antenna or is reacting passively as is the case in RFID.

If you have an automatic toll transponder (ez-pasz, etc.), those things are read very frequently even when you're not going through a toll meter. There's info on this online.

TPMS sensors also transmit a serial number. I wouldn't put it past the NSA to have sensors embedded in certain roads to track that.

And of course, dragnet automatic license plate scanning / tracking is already ubiquitous and there's really not anything you can do about it. Use a bicycle instead, I guess...

Even the coming road taxes are all about constant tracking. How far / which road did you drive? They'll demand the answer. And you put a faraday cage to stop this? Suspicious. The default assumption is going to be fraud. Criminal behavior.

All the EVs will soon enough have some variety of tracking sooner or later. So thats basically all new vehicles. The alternatives will also, whatever they are. Hydrogen?

Transport privacy is likely dead already.

> Summary

All new vehicles sold from May 2022 must be fitted with advanced safety features, including:

monitors that detect when a driver has become drowsy or distracted

emergency stop signal to help prevent rear-end collisions

rear-view camera or parking sensors

alcohol interlock system to prevent drunk driving.

These systems will help reduce serious accidents on Europe’s roads.

This initiative sets out the test procedures and technical requirements for approving vehicles fitted with advanced safety features.

[Source: https://ec.europa.eu/info/law/better-regulation/have-your-sa...]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Driver_drowsiness_detection

Cars used to be a safe space where one could get away from being monitored and listened to by other people. This is no longer the case.

I wonder why people accept it. Does it appeal to the narcissism, i.e., people like to be monitored at all times because it makes them feel important?

That said, the "drowsiness" cameras in particular seem problematic, while the rear-view cameras for reversing/parking seem not problematic[2].

[0] The 2022 numbers compared to 2021 saw quite an increase, in Germany at least[1], tho. I'd guess it might have a lot to do with people "going outside" again a lot more, including fewer people still being in full-time home office and thus needing to commute again.

[1] https://www.destatis.de/EN/Themes/Society-Environment/Traffi...

[2] Anecdote: my mom recently narrowly avoided running into/running over a kid crawling on the street when she was reversing out of a parking spot, thanks to the rear-camera and sensors which immediately sounded alarms; she'd not have had a chance to see the kid in time without that according to her. While she was going very slow and chances are it wouldn't have been a life-threatening injury, it would have been some injury regardless with a lot more stress and trauma for everybody involved, the kid, her, the kid's parents.

We should certainly keep an eye on the features and have productive dialogue about it. But denying safety concerns seems to be a fairly egregious twisting of the facts.

dont be too hasty to jump from correlation to causation. the numbers were declining before politicians did anything about road safety.

I think we should push for full self driving asap though.

Taking the driver out of the equation means no longer stuffing cars wth systems intended to second-guess the driver and their abilities. No more need to check for mobile phone use because the occupants are free to do what they want. No more need for speed cameras or distance between cars. More efficiency due to people not constantly overtaking because they're in a hurry.

Right now it's becoming this insane situation where a driver is not trusted at all and second-guessed at every corner.

I don't own a car anymore and I hope I will never need one again. I don't want to drive like this, constantly being looked over my shoulder. It's not worth that hassle.

Well a self driving car will give you no control over where you are going at all, i am not sure thats better from the point of view of liberty.

Personally I hate driving so I'd be really happy if I could just read a book, surf the web or watch a movie while travelling. For me driving is pure wasted time.

I know some people actually enjoy driving :) But for me it feels this way.

Sounds like slavery with extra marketing.

I think you should specify "safe from digital tracking" because cars are everything but safe, they cause thousands of injuries and hundreds of deaths each year in my country for example. And I'm not even counting the deaths and sicknesses due to car pollution.

I profoundly dislike cars and hope for a future where car ownership will be a thing of the past and there will be only self driving cabs / buses / cargo bikes, hopefully all electric, ideally hydrogen powered.

I know, I know, I'm dreamin' =)

  I wonder why people accept it. Does it appeal to the narcissism, i.e., people like to be monitored at all times because it makes them feel important?

Now it's the complete opposite. You have way better privacy on an feet or a train.

Especially since those systems will need to be easy to update OTA. And even if there are no malicious OTA capabilities (though the EU has already shown interest in LEO being able to remotely disable a car a few years ago) , they are using pretty subjective measures that might affect your driving experience or render your car unusable after a single update. What if the drowsiness detection does not work well on your skin color or on your heartbeat, or on your eye shape?

I guess It's just a bit creepy to me that your own car can police you autonomously with little recourse.

Basically just a long phrasing to say they will do after finding a proper excuse like terrorism or sex trafficking

utterly deboonked

In any case, we already have existing tech that is serving as a technological deterrent for drunk driving. The legislation doesn't explicitly say so, but I am imagining an expansion of this program. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignition_interlock_device

all detractors will be branded as pedophiles, of course

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30975725

Right to Disconnect? I want my Right to Disconnect.

When these backhaul comms go in this hardware, that "purchase" doesn't convey ownership. I would describe it as a rental in ownership's clothing.

It's not about 'learn the new tech' - it's 'learn when the company decides you don't need a feature or just decides to no longer support it' and remotely disables

I'd be impressed. The firmware on my devices anyways seems to be the minimum they could get away with...

I know there is lots of middle ground between coreboot, what windows does, what an iPhone does, and what a Samsung fridge does but my point is that it's really hard to judge wether you're just becoming an old man talking about the kids these days.

If you can't understand why I'm poking fun at the Apple fan Bois, here's exactly why:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31558875

Want to bitch and moan about Samsung smart fridges? Start closer to home. With your wallet and your yearly phone contract.

Have you heard of Computrace? It comes pre-installed on the firmware of many popular brands of computers, and it does send data over WiFi or Ethernet.

One is learning new tech, the other is loosing your rights

s/learn/adapt

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/End-user_license_agreement#Enf...

When exactly did this smart device thing turn bad? Maybe it's been bad all along? I refused to use a smartphone until 2014 or so. My first Android got Cyanogen within about a month. When I shopped for my first Roomba (recently RIP), I specifically avoided the WiFi models.

Nowadays the "smart" devices are almost unavoidable, so on my LAN, each one gets its own set of firewall rules (usually to block them from the Internet completely). If it can't work that way - it gets returned. I've also set up a host-based blocklist for ads/trackers, for the entire LAN.

It should not be this hard to protect your privacy, but the current trend is to make this impossible even for the power users. Right to Disconnect should be a thing.

I imagine our leaders won't start thinking about this until we already have ubiquitous 5G / IoT .

I almost would say there is a better chance of a law that says you can't disconnect.

Just wait until someone deliberately buys such a "smart" appliance, tears the SIM card out (or does some free-style rewiring of the PCB), and starts prodding around what they can reach on the other side. They might even be so kind as to take a look at the analytics/remote-control protocol, maybe pull some credentials out of the SoC and provide a free fuzz testing service to the manufacturer.

If the manufacturer can observe the device remotely, can control the device, can add or remove functionality, decide to stop selling you spare parts so you have to buy a new one, or brick it at any time - meanwhile you cant get the device to do what you want, or even to stop showing you ads?

You are not an owner, you are just sucker paying the bill. John deer agrees, in their submission to the court the argued that the farmer is not the owner of the tractor they bought.

This is worse than taxes, at least there you get a vote

It turns out I kinda have that already. My 1919 house has plastered walls, some of which have a wire mesh underlay. It blocks wifi signals between rooms beautifully.

On this particular topic, basic software Freedom would be sufficient. But apparently enough people don't even care to make purchasing decisions based on anti-features. Or at the minimum, say hiring a technician to fix your brand new fridge as described in OP.

So, as seems to be the trend, most people are effectively content letting technology take away their agency. A small number of us can swim in the stream of navigating it so we don't get ruled over by it, but once you're doing all that work just to tread water it becomes awfully tempting to use your understanding to subjugate others.

Happy to be proven wrong, wouldn't a Faraday Cage need to be tuned to absorb whatever wavelength you're aiming to block?

In the same way that you can see in to a microwave because the terahertz μm waves can pass through the holes but the microwave mm waves are blocked.

Until it won't be legal to impair Big Brother watching you.

No reading my cards without actually taking them out.

Lots of manufacturers probably do it, but I'll name and shame anyway... it's a ResMed AirSense 10.

There are a whole bunch of issues that can occur that a patient may not be aware of because they are asleep. Generally I wish we'd all use some kind of sleep monitoring system or at least we started routine screening for sleep disorders

The benefit of this is that I don't have to rely only on the therapist, I can also read the card myself with tools like OSCAR: https://www.sleepfiles.com/OSCAR/

I would really hate having one that reports via 4G to the therapist only.

3g definetly was bad for the, maybe lte is not scaling well enough for having each bulb in the house connected to the network without wifi ;D

Oh, I think it will be sooner than that, and beyond that, it won't even be your appliance. You'll be renting it for only $49.95/month, and for only $4.99/month more you can have the RecipePlus(tm) subscription and see what all your friends are cooking, comes with ExtraCare repair and monitoring service too! Even more discounts when you rent the entire kitchen appliance suite.

I wish the guy best luck with his unplug solution. I recently did something comparable and was first lucky to discover when unplugging antennas from the board the device seemingly went on unaffected just to find out that it behaved erratic: Input was terribly lagging up to the point of being unusable to interoperate with. Reluctantly and in defeat I had to re-attach the antenna. I doubt it was designed to behave like this on purpose, but the CPU being tripped for operating out of regular parameters.

However intentionally bricking the device when it can't phone home is a very likely future.

Of course, it's probably a bunch of effort (eg electrical compliance, RF compliance, etc).

Kind of thinking it might be suitable for crowd sourcing. :)

My expectation is the online tracking/advertising is about to hit an incredible hard legislative period. The change that is coming is big, and the fallout it going to seriously badly hit some business models and corporations.

However, you are completely right, they will try anything and everything to continue.

Judging by the new CSAM legislation being pushed by EU bureaucrats, your fridge won't report to its maker but to EU commission and maybe to your own government.

So a fridge with very limited embedded storage doesn't really match.

I can't seem to find the relevant part of GDPR that would even attempt to cover that - beyond any tracking data sent back to the manufacturer.

Say you are Samsung, you have a fridge with a camera on it that keeps track of what’s in the fridge “for the user”, so they can see inside their fridge even when not at home. Now add in some image recognition, automatically tracking exactly what’s in the fridge, how often it’s used, when it’s running low. Now you have some of the most valuable consumer data possible to sell to data brokers. That is defiantly covered by GDPR.

France doesn't even have WiFi in schools for this reason. Hard to imagine they would allow something like this in a vehicle.

Also, use of your home internet modem to transmit a ISP-only open wifi is also legal according to many EU laws.

I can't count how many times my friends and family said "I don't care" when I tried to educate them on how their devices or software spy on them.

People who really care about privacy enough not to buy stuff that spies on them are rare, and becoming rarer every year as more and more kids grow up in a world where being spied upon is normal.

Any ball park idea what this price might be? $10/year/device? Less?

Especially given the ridiculous price difference between a corporate and a common data plan.

That is the final barrier. Right now, they can't financially justify an always-on "hard" link.

And voiding the warranty for sure.