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.
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).
To become truely free and information-secure in your own car, you would have to start with a used car frame and body. Strip it all down to the bare metal, and then build everything back from scratch, using parts that you purchased or built yourself. With no hidden sensors, no hidden computers nor microphones nor cameras, all you need is some 1970’s technology. You can find a rebuilt carbuerated engine with no computer required to run it. If the law requires a back up camera, you can buy a small camera on Amazon for $25, and install the display-only (no tablet) in to the dash yourself. I wouldn’t mind cranking the windows up and down manually and having strictly mechanical door locks if I got my privacy back.
Saying it’s ok to give up your right to privacy because you don’t plan on committing any crime (“I don’t do anything bad anyway”) is plain giving up and abiding by the manufacturing of consent
For those who are familiar with boolean logic, the word “nor” means not one thing and separate from that, not the other thing either. So not having sex in the car and not commiting a crime using the car are unrelated things, the sex not being a crime. I thought I would bring that up also since it seemed to be a topic of interest earlier in the thread.
And it is also a weak statement to say that a person doesn’t mind being spied upon because they don’t plan to break the law anyway. But we’re fortunate to have one truely free hardware/software phone in the world that respects privacy. Until Purism makes a privacy respecting car, we might just as well accept the fact that there is no privacy in your own car. That’s not right. But it is how things are. So why worry about it when you can’t fix it?
You are wrong - at least in some countries and situations. For example you are homosexual and have sex with same sex partners. What’s crime does not depend on logic.
I am not speaking about SteveRs case, but in general.
Because it will get much faster much worse when nobody cares about. And because if the right person see a market for privacy respecting cars, that person may create a start up to build such cars.
Btw:
When you build up a car from zero (just the frame), you also can build in privacy respecting computer-hardware (like L5 as board-tablet-replacement). You even can install privacy respecting AI to have all the functions that never uploads data.
The question is less “what features you have”, but more “how they’re implemented”.
You already proposed a solution to your own question, so ignoring it in favour of waiting for Purism to create a privacy-respecting car denies your responsibility to proactively respect your values.
Lol. Pretty sure that getting caught having sex in a car in a public place would result in arrest almost anywhere, for anyone, regardless of their sexual orientation.
Now, if the car was parked in a closed garage, you would probably be safe getting your freak on…
In Germany it’s allowed (even completely in the public space outside of the car), as long as you choose a place where people usually would not recognize it. Even if you are caught, everything is fine. The problem starts when you do it at a place where you will be sure to be caught.
But arrest? No, you have to pay money up to 1000€ (in worst case) - depends on the real szenario. I think there are a lot of countries that handle it similar, but hardly to know without researching about.