Imo, the only solution is every device with an antenna must be legally required to put a manual off switch.
Cell service, wifi, Bluetooth, any future service. If it broadcasts it needs a physical off switch.
If I sold my car to a government official and they found out I had hidden a camera, microphone and GPS in the car, I’d get a visit from the FBI. Yet companies do it with impunity. Does the CEO of Subaru have recordings of Bernie Sanders driving in his car?
And each type of communication needs it’s own switch. Don’t let them pull some BS trying to make you enable all the hardcore tracking via a cell network just because you want to connect to Bluetooth.
its* own switch.
For phones, Pinephone is very nearly this. The only thing is that GPS and cell service are on the same switch (because they’re handled by the same chip on the board)
There’s always the carefully applied soldering iron.
If only I knew where.
Right to the temple of anyone who decided it was OK to do this kind of data collection.
Somewhere in the piece of plastic we somehow call a car. They don’t make them like they used to
They sure don’t, cars continue to be safer, more durable, and require less service every model year. The median age of the automobiles on the road gets older every year.
I’m not that nostalgic. Everything about my new car is better than my older cars. My 2023 minivan has a better 0-60 than my old V-8 Mustang while getting 2x the MPG. The only thing that is bad is the tracking.
For phones, Pinephone is very nearly this. The only thing is that GPS and cell service are on the same switch (because they’re handled by the same chip on the board)
I hope people realize that the solution isn’t really to just not buy one, especially since this is the way the industry is heading. The solution is regulations, strict regulations.
Stuff like this should be a slam dunk for congress but we all know which side they are on.
Agreed. It’s really hard to understate how ineffective “voting with your wallet” can be. The fact is simply that nobody honestly cares. Even if you get 100 people to boycott a company, would 100 out of millions of consumers really make a difference? Of course not.
And of course, you always have cases like this where everybody does it. Same thing goes for TVs - if everyone spies on you, the only real solution is to not have a TV. Yes, I know there are exceptions here and there, but bad practices like these force buyers into making compromises that they shouldn’t have to. Capitalism should be predicated on companies offering the best product to earn their income. It should not be about companies having the least bad product and trying every terrible thing that they can get away with.
(Of course, we all know that capitalism is a farce.)
A system with the goal being best or even optimal for all involved would never be called capitalism, even if capitalism didn’t exist.
Even if you get 100 people to boycott a company, would 100 out of millions of consumers really make a difference?
There’s definitely an economic impact to a vehicle looking or driving like shit. And I’m sure you’ll see some amount of consumer migration higher than 0.01% of the retail base.
But there’s also a lot of obfuscation, deception, and outright lying in the automotive sales industry. So its less a question of “Will consumers reject this feature?” and more “Will consumers even be aware of this feature?”
Capitalism should be predicated on companies offering the best product
What happens when the retail customers have be commodified? What happens when the product is Surveillance and the real big money clients are state actors and private mega-businesses that benefit from tracking rented vehicles?
As we move closer to a full Service Contract economic model - one in which individuals don’t really own anything and have to continuously pay to access even basic features of their home devices - I can see a lot of financial incentives in the system that preclude car dealers from leaving these features out.
Imagine a bank that simply won’t finance vehicles that can’t be tracked. Or a rental company that won’t add vehicles to their fleet without these always-on internet features. Or a car lot that uses continuous tracking to manage its inventory.
Very quickly, the individual consumer becomes a secondary concern relative to these economies of scale.
yOu ALwAyS HaVe A cHOiCe, sO It’S oKaY!
I read somewhere that the thought that you can vote with your dollars makes you feel good and empowered to make choices, but is overshadowed by the fact that doing so means that whomever has more dollars has more votes.
Regarding Congress, I was really hoping that this big fear of TicTok would result in some sort of GDPR type laws which empower the individuals to take control of our personal data, which could also be used to prevent our personal data from being used against us by foreign countries.
You made the mistake of believing TikTok was anything more than a paid hit by other Social Media corporations.
You’re saying that it was a threat to the incumbents who then sent their lobbyists to demand a ban in the name of national security? It’s plausible.
The solution is regulations, strict regulations.
Regulation by whom? Dems are already deep in bed with the automotive industry and Republicans hate the government on a purely ideological level.
Who is supposed to write (much less enforce) these regulations? Nobody in government wants the job.
TBH ending car dependency is a major part of any long term solutions. We should “regulate” this violent and planet wasting catastrophe out of existence replaced with rational and sustainable infrastructure.
I’m all for reducing the number of cars on the road but IMO this is a poor attitude to have to a problem that exists right now and is ballooning out of control, but has a very easy solution.
Moving away from cars will take a long, long time. Infrastructure doesn’t come from nowhere, and some places are so sparsely populated that public transport can be a very difficult proposition, or even an impossibility. Those places in particular will be stuck with cars for a while. Banning predatory data gathering on cars can happen right now if there is the political will to do so.
I know it’s easy for some to say “well I don’t care, fuck anybody who drives a car, they’re evil and I don’t like them. Why don’t they simply be rich and buy a house in a city where public transport is usable?”, but I think everybody has a right to privacy, and the default shouldn’t be for our tools to spy on us and report it back to the OEMs. Particularly when a lot of car drivers don’t have any choice but to drive!
You can work on strengthening public transport while at the same time improving privacy laws for cars. It’s not one or the other.
Not to mention that even if everyone were to switch to public transportation, you’ve still got the issue of RFID cards that track every trip you take on the system. Far cry from subway tokens for privacy concerns.
Cars are far from the only product that is actively destroying individual privacy in the name of corporate profits
Reducing the number of cars doesn’t fix the root problem.
Then your E-Bike is going to require an online sign in every time you want to use it.
The solution is -besides regulations for that - have governments push for much MUCH more bicycle roads and same for public transportation. With great public transportation and bicycle roads, most people won’t need cars to begin with.
I mean, if we are imagining government doing it’s actual job, isn’t it easier to pass regulations then to change how North American cities work?
Like I support walkable cities, I’m just convinced (majority of) regular people don’t actually want it.
Well a few things there:
1: yes they want it, most people don’t know what they’re missing. Everyone always asks me why the Netherlands is so friggin nice when they go there. Limit cars, bignoaet odnthe answer
2: even if they don’t like it, we’re at the point of “do or die”. Climate change keeps beating expectations in that it’s always so much impressively worse than expected. Just now I read that CO2 dumping into the atmosphere actually is increasing, we’re actually making it worse faster. Soon we’ll be at the point of “where do we get fresh water” and “all our crops are dying”. Then the wars start, not for “I want that oil of yours” but “I want that food of yours”. It doesn’t.need to be that bad, we still can fix it if only we wanted it.
3: bicycle infrastructure and public transportation infrastructure is so so much cheaper than all the car crap we’ve been building for the past 7 decades. Cheaper to build, cheaper to maintain, It’s quieter, it’s healthier, which lowers healthcare costs for nations, it’s prettier, cleaner and solves an enormous part of climate change. If only car and oil companies could stop
bribingpushing our politiciansThey don’t want it because they haven’t experienced it. The Dutch used to be super car-dependent, and now they’re known world-wide for good infrastructure, and it improves every year.
The problem is we keep getting half-measures, like a few lanes here and there, and maybe a cycle path for recreation that doesn’t go anywhere interesting. We need a big investment into infrastructure to show people what they’re missing. But when all you have is a hammer (car), everything looks like a nail (more lanes).
My area is super car-dependent, but people love our train infrastructure and want more. But we only want that because we were essentially forced to build it to host the Olympics (I’m near SLC). Before that, we paved over a lot of our tracks because cars were getting popular, and that was before we had any traffic issues. Now that everyone needs a car to get everywhere, traffic sucks.
In the USA, that boat sailed long ago… most cities are too spread out to pedal anywhere
My city is just too hilly. Cycling around is one thing, and they just put in new bike lanes (they’re not good ones, but still), but doing that with a grocery run or 60lbs of cat food and litter? No thank you.
Wife and I bought e-assist bikes, it makes it so you don’t really have to work much even when youre carrying groceries
Weight speeds you up downhill more than it slows you down uphill. The trick is to not coast - keep pedaling downhill, use the momentum to get up the next hill.
Wat? The law of conservation of energy tends to disagree. Commuters are generally starting and ending at the same elevation so there’s no trick. We’re not going to convince anyone to carry heavy loads on bikes by saying “pedal more downhill to smooth out the power requirements if you hate grinding it out on uphills”, the answer is just ebikes.
I’m just relating my experience - when I was younger, I commuted 20 miles round trip every day, and I worked at a bike shop with weenies that were always trying to shave weight off their bikes, so I did whatever I could to add functional weight (so no filling the tubes with lead, that would be cheating) including building up a dually, two rims side by side on a Sachs 3x7 hub. My average speed was higher when commuting (lots of rolling hills, but overall uphill in the morning, downhill going home) than it was on days off, when I was mainly riding around town where it was flat.
And it certainly wasn’t because I wanted to go to work…
I appreciate your lived experience, but at the same time the rest of us will seek answers in basic physics concepts, none of which help explain such phenomenon. Is it possible you just got stronger or subconsciously tried harder because you wanted the heavy bike to be faster? Did you add weight but also make sure your bike was well tuned? Tire pressure and a greased chain go a long way. I certainly agree that the weight weenies can go way overboard though.
Nah, it’s never too late. All you need is the will, the rest will come.
Are any of you even able to afford new cars? Who the hell’s buying this shit? I probably won’t have a new car ever.
Also mind that soon these new cars will be used cars with the same bullshit.
Buying a new car never really made sense to me even when you could afford it. 2 - 3 year old model is effectively brand new but a lot cheaper. Why pay more if you can pay less?
2 - 3 year old model is effectively brand new but a lot cheaper.
I’ve always heard this, but where is this actually true? When I bought a Camry like a decade ago, I could get a brand new one for $19.5k or used ones with 50k miles on them for…$18k. so yeah I paid the extra 1.5k to not have to deal with potential random shit.
When my wife bought her car a few years ago it was a similar situation. The only used cars that were “a lot cheaper” had like 100k miles.
Mostly social signalling
Fuck social signaling.
Total new vehicle sales has remained roughly static for a little less than two decades. So yes, people can afford new cars.
For most, they can afford to finance them, but the rates aren’t looking too good lately
https://www.statista.com/statistics/290673/auto-loan-rates-usa/
Well yeah, they follow the prime rate.
Yeah rates alone have made financing a new car pretty stupid. Save as much cash as possible and spend within your means
It made sense to me when I could take advantage of a tax credit for EVs in 2017. Now that car companies/dealerships simply jack up prices to eat that discount, it doesn’t make sense even in that case.
Yes
People are buying new cars. I’m guessing it’s mostly leasing.
People who have a college education and well paying jobs.
✅ well paying job
✅ Dropped out of college and went full time
I have a college education and a well paying job the monthly payment on a new car has doubled since I bought my last one in 2020. No way am I buying a new car at these prices/rates.
Fair enough
back in my day Spock had small hair
With my last raise I’m over 130k a year and I still don’t buy new cars. My 2010 Audi is still running just fine.
That’s great, but the question from that OP was “are you able to” and your answer should be yes. I make less than that and I definitely am able to. But I’m waiting on the market to correct first
Though it also depends on how you define “able to”. Like I could fit a car payment in my budget but it would eat up most of my disposable income and I’m not willing to give that up, even if new cars weren’t so enshitified. I bet there’s a lot in this “technically capable but it would be a stupid financial move” group.
That’s probably a sound decision
I feel like not buying a Honda would be a pretty good way to opt out. In fact since the majority of car manufacturers are doing this bullshit I feel like simply not purchasing a new car is a great way to opt out of this.
Plenty of older not smart cars that are perfectly usable or fairly easily restored no reason to go dropping the money on a brand new one that’s not only a privacy disaster but a repairability disaster on top of it.
I think my favorite is how almost all new cars now come with a sealed transmission with absolutely no way to replace the fluid in it with the claims of it being a “lifetime fluid” there is no such thing as a transmission fluid that can last and do its job forever, what they mean by LifeTime fluid is that it will last long enough to satisfy the warranty. And what they have deemed should be the usable life of the car.
Shit I hadn’t heard about that sealed transmission thing, that’s fucked up. Transmission fluid replacement seemed pretty important on the maintenance schedule of all the cars I’ve had
It’s been happening for a long time, even some cars is far back as 2012 have a supposed lifetime fluid. Although they at least still have the drain bolt so that you can say yeah that’s cute and do it anyway. But lately the drain bolt has gone away and they are completely sealed meaning you can’t change it even if you want to
Just today I said goodbye to my 2012 chrysler minivan because of the “lifetime sealed transmission.” Now Chrysler minivan transaxles have always been garbage, this is known. But mine said in the owner’s manual, “lifetime, sealed transaxle” “no fluid fills or dipstick.” I worked at a Chrysler shop and asked the service manager - “nope, don’t need to do nothin’.” OK, all good.
Yeaahhh… That’s not entirely true. 160k on the odo and it lost the desire to ‘go’ in drive (no forward progress in drive despite the little engine trying it’s best), a hell of a scream coming from the engine bay and a light show of errors on the dash. Limped it home and the code reader said that gears 1 & 3 had a “ratio mismatch” which should only happen if they lost teeth, and a couple others I don’t remember. Figured it was scrap. Had a mechanic friend look at it; he popped off a tube, fingered it a bit, sniffed it and said to try changing out the filter and as much fluid as I could. Did that, dropped about 5qt in (with no goddamned dipstick, how do you tell how much it needs?) and the thing ran great for another 3 months. Until today when it started making the whining noise again. Dropped it off and said goodbye.
Fuck “sealed” transmissions. Sorry, I had to rant. I loved that van - no tracking, had a Sirius radio that has 50 song and 50 artist alerts and 300gb on board mp3 storage, and the 2 screen DVD system (great for parents that don’t want their kids on tablets but still want to occupy them on long trips)
I believe Honda started this in the early 2000s because they found that transmissions were compromised at earlier mileages at a much more frequent rate from leaks, bad fluid changes, or missing the intervals, than were actually failing from use. So they designed the cars for how they were actually being used and maintained. It’s kind of a non-issue unless you’ve got 300k+ miles on your transmission, at which point you’d expect to potentially replace it anyway.
Cars are just catching up to HVAC systems… In the last 3 years I’ve had to replace both inside and outside fan motors because their (maintenance free) bearings failed.
I don’t think I’m going to ever buy a car made after 2020. Maybe earlier. None of the new features really appeal to me, and there are a lot of things like this that actively turn me off from wanting a new car.
If they could just give me an electric version of a 1985 VW Golf I’d be happy as a clam. But they want to put me in some lumpy, heavy, clumsy CUV with tracking technology and all the touchscreens and I don’t like it.
EV conversions are definitely a thing. And the Golf platform seems to actually be one of the most popular.
After a quick Google, it looks like there are even some premade kits for the Golf specifically, even with installation available. Although I can only find UK/EU links quickly. May be more built-it yourself in the US.
I’m never buying a Honda again after buying a 2018 Civic model. Less than 10k on it when I bought it and the A/C went out. There’s an issue with the condenser on the 2018/2019 Hondas. They offered to pay HALF of what it’d cost to fix - I’d still be out more than a thousand. And from research online, apparently the replacements tend to fail too.
Pretty much every time I see the same model I ask if the owner has AC. They always have the same problem. It’s going to be real wonderful driving when it gets to the 100’s this summer…
So we were told: “it may be covered by this recall, if it’s the parts that are covered by the recall that are the cause of the loss of A/C. If those parts aren’t the reason, it won’t be covered, and the diagnostic to determine that would then be $1,000$.”
So we have to take a $1,000 gamble to see if our 2018 car is covered under a fucking recall. Fuck Honda in the ass with a rusty anchor.
2018 civic owner here. Had the same issue with the A/C. Has anyone else had the paint flake off on the mirrors/door handles?
Damn that’s unfortunate. I had my 2023 Honda for over a year and a bit over 20k miles. Been lucky so far that everything works fine, I’ve driven it up a mountain a couple times when I’ve gone camping too.
18 crv checking in. Have it now.
Simple, just buy a new Honda… Motorcycle /s
For those who haven’t yet bought a Honda:
- you have the option to buy from alternative brands to say fuck you using your wallet
They’re basically all doing it, so make sure to research who is doing it the least.
Or at this point, the one whose tracking is easiest and safest to avoid or circumvent.
How easy is the telematics unit to remove and whether disabling it affects the functions that are important to you.
The only car makers that give data deletion options are Dacia Renault:
Only two - Renault and Dacia, which are not sold in North America - offer drivers the option to have their data deleted
Good news! Has the time finally come for us to buy a Dacia Sandero?
10-15k for a new car where do I sign up?
You can opt out by simply not buying one :)
Remember when gov’t banned Furbies (sp?) in some places? Seems like they would make the same decision for a lot of people in important positions regarding their car purchasing.
I’m sure they’ll have a separate government configuration. I’m pretty sure they already do for fleet vehicles.
I guess when/if I buy another car, I’ll look into gov’t fleet auctions.
Pulling the fuse that includes OnStar at least keeps it from calling home. But there’s usually some collateral damage.
What kind of damage?
Personally I’d call that a safety issue. A few years ago my wife and I were driving a rental car that was rear ended on the highway by a drunk driver. The impact caved in the left rear wheel and spun us 360 degrees across 3 lanes of the highway. Within a few seconds of coming to a stop an OnStar person was talking to us, asking if we were ok and confirming our location.
We had no clue ahead of time that the rental car had one of these services, but at that moment we were very happy it did. I honestly have no idea about the privacy ramifications, etc. but having been through that experience I’d think long and hard about disabling it outright. I do take my privacy seriously, but I’d have to weigh that against the safety of me & my family in that kind of situation and disable it only as an absolutely last resort… Just my own personal $0.02 on the matter.
I think my car only came with a free trial for that service, I think you needed to pay after a certain amount of time. Cell phone works well enough for me.
Playing devil’s advocate, in a crazy accident you may not be able to get to/reach your phone, or even be responsive. If you use the personal assistant function on your phone, it’s no different than using OnStar, in terms of privacy.
All of this said, last I heard OnStar was pretty expensive for the average household income. I don’t have it, and I don’t worry too much about it.
With how everybody and their mother have smartphones in their pockets, I wouldn’t be too worried.
Depending on the crash you could be unable to reach for the phone.
No! I mean everybody else! Someone else is going to call for help.
Don’t make life choices based on outliers
A hammer is great for hammering nails… and heads.
Humans, eh?
OnStar never knows where you are. It only knows where YOUR CAR is.
Think about it and decide whether your car’s privacy is worth the cost.
Oh, true. Luckily I never go anywhere in my car so none of my positional data will correlate with the car’s.
My car microphone stopped working
deleted by creator
I think there needs to be more government involvement and protection in how data is collected
There’s plenty of government involvement. They have access to this data, they can either buy it or simply request it. They don’t want to go back to the days of the pesky 5th amendment standing in their way, that’s why this will never be regulated out of existence.
you should use the term government regulation, not involvement.
The us government LOVES being involved in our lives.
I’m missing something. How is the data actually collected? How does it get out of my car? My car doesn’t have any cellular features other than CarPlay. It has wifi, but I’ve never used it.
Potentially when you put it in for a service, could also be using bluetooth
People take their cars to dealership garages? Fuck that noise lmao
I hear you, but wiith new cars its often a condition of the warranty to use official dealers
It seems a lot of the new ones have a cellular modem. On the surface it’s to let you remotely access the car or do a remote start. Even if you don’t pay to subscribe and use it for your purposes they can utilize it to transfer out the data.
Cellular is usually how the vehicle provides Wi-Fi, it is effectively just a cell hotspot like you would get from a ohone carrier, but tied into the vehicle. So I think that would be the common way they get the data out.
That one is easy: do not get a new Honda.
Don’t buy a new car, there, FTFY.
Before I click in, does anyone have any background on the source link author org/individual, haven’t seen this outlet before?
Ahhh… gross.
Thanks.
The hero photo for the article shows a camera over a road that likely is likely running number plate recognition software…
Honestly I’d be more worried about where that data is going than the tracking software in your car. They’ve got the most critical information (where did you drive and when), and they’ve got it for every car instead of just Honda drivers.
This needs to be fixed with legislation, and it needs to be fixed actively. For example by getting rid of number plates entirely and replacing them with something like the transponders used in aircrafts and ships, but with an encrypted rolling code that only shares your data when authorised to do so (by the owner of the vehicle).
Apple “Find My” works like that… your location is encrypted, and it’s uploaded without any identifying information. When the user brings up a map looking for their keys, that’s the only time encryption keys are handed over allowing the already stored information to be accessed. The car version of that could be police asking you at every traffic stop to hit a button on your dashboard that unlocks your registration/insurance details so they can run a quick check against their outstanding warrant/etc database.
