Legislative attention: Senators Expose Car Companies’ Terrible Data Privacy Practices | Electronic Frontier Foundation
And: US senators claim car makers sold driver data for pennies • The Register
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The future no driver wanted is here: Who wants in-car ads tailored to your journey, passengers? • The Register
Ugh… Kill me now.
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Technically, no, it’s not “here”. And best case scenario it is genuinely a defensive patent that will never be implemented by Ford.
I believe that for safety reasons this shouldn’t even be legal. If someone has an accident and claims that the accident was caused by being distracted by an advertisement at an inopportune moment, look out for a mega-lawsuit. Legislation (road rules / regulations) should demand that it at least be possible to disable this functionality completely.
No doubt Ford will claim … oh but we use in car monitoring of the car’s speed and location etc. to determine when the car is just cruising and it’s safe to hit the driver with an advertisement or even … oh but we use in car monitoring to determine when the driver’s attentiveness is declining and we use advertisements to liven the driver up.
(My car occasionally badgers me to keep my hands on the steering wheel even when I have not taken my hands off the steering wheel. Not sure how that works. Or doesn’t work. Low priority problem though.)
We are in agreement though that the future of cars looks grim from a privacy (and security) perspective - across this and many other issues.
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Punk’s not dead!
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Ford Motors has patent on devices in vehicles to listen in to passengers and/or driver conversations so their AI can better build a profile so ads are targeted.
- Who authorized them to place a bug in every vehicle so Ford can listen to conversations.
- Who said it was OK to send ads through the vehicle and other devices that have been attached at one time or the other.
Would you let a mattress company put a bug in your mattress so they can learn what you’re doing and send targeted ads? Have you checked it for bugs? 
The problem is. They will do it with or without our permission. Once you buy a car, or lease it, you give up your rights to privacy. Even if you paid cash.
All in the game of shoving ads at us, in our vehicles and any other devices we use.
I think it only proper, fair and good for public relations if vehicle manufacturers want to put a listening stalker in our private property, we should be able to tune in and listen to manufacturers CEOs, all Board members, their families, friends, passengers, shareholders etcetera.
IMO
George Orwell’s 1984 is not a story. It is an instruction manual for corporations and governments.
*SMIRC
Stalk you
Monitor you
Inject Code to
Record and
Control you.
~s
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Amazingly, the U.S. gov’t has its own agenda in this matter:
So if I understand correctly:
-
If you purchase a Chinese-made car before the proposed deadline of 2027, you can avoid having your car listening to your conversation and show you relevant adds - but you will have the PRC tracking your location and monitoring your whereabouts
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if you buy american-made, you can avoid Chinese state surveillance, but at the risk of dying in an accident because an obnoxious commercial was shown to you at the worst moment
What a strange world we live in…
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Ironically, the only ‘American Made’ car is the Toyota 
Everything else is made elsewhere
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Really? If this is indeed the case, we should expect some amazing chain supply schemes!
This industry hasn’t been hit yet with this sort of attacks, but it surely will. BOM/SBOM will be such a terrible headache
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What vehicles do they make in Detroit? Ladas? 
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If you could import a used Lada from the front it may come with its own frequency jammer.
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What country makes the most cars that have a stalker built in?
~s
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Most likely the People’s Republic of China: List of countries by motor vehicle production - Wikipedia
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Wow - that US propaganda machine works wonders. At least the US is up front with their known stalkers placed in US assembled vehicles.
The US, and Canada too, “Most likely” don’t tell about the unnamed stalkers they build into vehicles…
Thanks for the reply
~s
BTW If we remove the words like might, most likely, maybe, possibly, probably, could be, allegedly, anonymous, and anything using single quotes to paraphrase, as in ‘She did say she hated the news.’ there would be more truth rather than dark propaganda.
So, ‘most likely’ means most likely neither of us really know. 
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Since hardly any new cars come without some kind of tracking, it stands to reason that the country that makes the most cars would also probably include the most installations of tracking software.
No propagandizing required.
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One thing that I wonder about is … if you have a lower spec model that doesn’t have built in 4G, is it able to upload its surveillance via a paired mobile phone?
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If not that way, then it’s likely possible to collect and transmit it as soon as the car gets connected to diagnostic systems at the dealer.
Speaking of which, I’ve been pleased the last few times I took my older car in for service, and the report indicated:
“DATA RECORDER WOULD NOT COMMUNICATE WITH VEHICLE’S DATA LINK CONNECTOR.”
That could simply mean that the manufacturer stopped collecting data.
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Although I would contend US made car stalkers are corporate sponsored rather than state sponsored. Its a business decision, and in the corporation’s interests!
(That it aligns with 3 letter intelligence service motives, is just a convenient concidence, and no doubt utilized as needed. They no doubt pay the corprations a hefty license fee to use it. Also in the copration’s interest.)
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It’s absolutely possible as far as the phone uses software that has the rights to do so. See DHL and its parcel locker stations. But in reality cars will communicate more and more via 4G and 5G to make it possible that you install a malicious app on your smartphone to get tracked even outside of your car, just to get “useful functions” like “looking how much energy the battery has stored”.
So we can decide to destroy our planet further (no e-car with just a bit privacy issues) or to compromise our privacy much more.
But even if we get a new car brand which wants to fill the privacy market → we will get tracked with no consent by the other cars through outside cameras. The public space is close to be lost. Going by bike is the best way to avoid surveillance as much as possible since some bike ways are away from streets. But it’s neither absolut (we still have to cross streets) nor practical for everyone in every situation.
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I just leased a new 2024 Toyota Corolla. This is a low end model and historically, shouldn’t contain a lot of luxury or advanced features. And yet, it has a very integrated tablet mounted to the dash, from which too many of the car’s basic features are tied. If you take out the tablet, then you would loose too many critical basic features that are critical to the normal operation of the car. I don’ t like that. I don’t want any learning curve and that learning curve is big. And to sync to my phone, I have to have a one-inch tall Toyota notification (the whole Toyota logo) stay active on my phone’s drop-down notification bar at all times. If I disable notifications to the Toyota app, the car refuses to work with my phone at all.
The radio does display visual advertising on that big display which becomes the radio when you select the radio icon from other menues. I get the Visual advertising, weather I like it or not. The large one-inch square icon that displays the radio station occasionally changes to display an ad. It does that on AM, FM, and on Serius XM. The radio app doesn’ look like a radio at all. It looks more like a Netflix menue of large icons. There is no pretense of making it look like a real car radio with familiar controls. It gives me a big page of XM and local radio station presets and doesn’t display my favorite stations most of the time. You do get a real physical volume knob. But tuning using anything other than with the available icons requires you to navigate properly to the correct menue. Everything else about the radio and the car’s other controls is also found in various menues that are not intuitive to find and use.
The car accepts “hey Toyota” voice commands. So it’s listening all of the time and responds every time I call on it. It does a lot of things from voice commands. I only know how to use it to change the radio station and that is often because too often, I don’t know how to navigate Android Auto to get to the radio interface. So I just say something like “Hey Toyota, Serius XM channel 8”. I set that one as a Favorite. But that icon is rarely on the selection page. Big icons for stations that I hate are always on that page. I don’t know how to remove them.
I doubt that I have any privacy in that car. But since I don’t plan to have sex in it, nor to commit any crimes with it, I guess I can live with that until a better option becomes available (probably never).
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