Car is a smartphone on wheels. Here's who's listening

Re:Car is a smartphone on wheels. Here's who's listening by hecturchi on Sunday October 04, 2026 @12:32PM (#49955366)

I obtained my data via GDPR request from Audi. Despite having disabled telemetry and location services, remote access and so on on certain date, the car kept sending every destination address I wrote on the navigator to the motherbase. Other location tracking services did stop (i.e. no live positioning).

I'm still clarifying the purpose of this before making a complaint to the data authority.

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Re:Car is a smartphone on wheels. Here's who's listening by dmschulman on Sunday October 04, 2026 @01:11PM (#49955749)

It's another revenue stream for the car company. Data brokers love car telemetry and GPS data and the car companies know it. Both parties have struck up a rather cosy relationship: https://www.forbes.com/sites/adamtanner/2013/07/10/data-brok...

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Re:Car is a smartphone on wheels. Here's who's listening by kccqzy on Sunday October 04, 2026 @12:52PM (#49955575)

My car infotainment UI clarifies that it has offline routing and online traffic-aware routing. The latter sends destinations to the mothership.

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Re:Car is a smartphone on wheels. Here's who's listening by hecturchi on Sunday October 04, 2026 @03:29PM (#49957014)

Reasonable explanation. Why would they store them though once the traffic info is provided? I was hoping it has a "purpose", i.e. making the voice assistant more intelligent/helpful. But I need to ask about it.

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Re:Car is a smartphone on wheels. Here's who's listening by abcd_f on Sunday October 04, 2026 @01:52PM (#49956162)

Can you describe the process of the GDPR request?

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Re:Car is a smartphone on wheels. Here's who's listening by hecturchi on Sunday October 04, 2026 @03:24PM (#49956977)

You write to the email address in the privacy policy and ask for your data. Your LLM can assist in making it sound formal.

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