From your weight and facial expressions to your destination, cars collect a startling amount of data about you. Some of it may even raise your insurance costs.

  • Apathy Tree@lemmy.dbzer0.com
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    7
    ·
    17 hours ago

    Mine isn’t. I got a 2023 bolt and immediately upon taking possession, pulled the fuse that runs that shit. I could go behind the screen and remove the onstar module entirely, and I probably will to restore the nav and location-based charging at some point, but not a priority. Pulling the fuse didn’t disable anything I can’t live without, since my old car didn’t even have the stuff that gets disabled.

    I don’t use apps on my phone that connect to the car, and haven’t even synced my phone for calls. I have an old android I factory reset and created a local account on, which doesn’t have a sim card, just hotspot from my active phone, and I use that for the EV charge location apps, totally isolated from anything else because they, too, syphon data.

    I’d personally never buy a vehicle that couldn’t have all that shit disabled. It may still collect it, but if I cant intercept or prevent transmission of it, I wouldn’t buy the vehicle.

    I’m hoping that by the time I need to replace this one, we have at least started to invest in decent public transit that doesn’t take 3-10x as long as driving. It could happen. Else I’ll just never leave home because I won’t buy one.

    • Sineljora@sh.itjust.works
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      1
      ·
      9 hours ago

      Repair shops upload stored data automatically when they have to purchase a software license to do work on your car.

      • Apathy Tree@lemmy.dbzer0.com
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        1
        ·
        8 hours ago

        Do you have a citation for that? With how shit search has become I’m struggling to find anything about it. All i get are right-to-repair articles and stuff about data access being a problem for repair shops (I assume thats in the same vein)

        Wonder how that works when I haven’t consented to any data disclosures, even implicitly. I didn’t set up any of those things, because I pulled the fuse, and no consent screens ever came up. None of the paperwork signed was for it, either, best I could tell.