Monday edition of *Car privacy is an absolute nightmare*: image Subaru's employee portal holds a year's worth of location data for all internet-connected cars. image We know this because it was vulnerable (now fixed). You could pull a year's worth of driving just with a license plate. image Props to Sam Curry & Shubham Shah for exposing it. Pic is a years' worth of Sam's mom's #Subaru locations. I seriously doubt any owner has a clear idea that this data is being collected on them. But the same thing is replicated for almost every car mfr (see the #Mozilla foundation report on car privacy link) Literally no car owner has asked for their whip to be turned into a surveillance portal. And yet.. Car companies feel basically no pressure to do right by customers, but experience a lot of incentives to mine their movements for money. Sidenote: same (now closed) vulnerability also enabled remote unlocks & starts and a bunch of other highly undesirable things. Reading list: The Subaru research: News report on it: Mozilla Foundation's key investigation into car privacy:

Replies (22)

meanwhile mozilla foundation still makes a browser that nags you to enable privacy destroying DRM
Government is not the solution it’s the problem. Get rid of huge cost drivers like all these unnecessary “safety” requirements and allow free imports without much paperwork so we can import $12k brand new tuck tucks. And watch these surveillance nightmares go out of business.
bootlace's avatar
bootlace 1 year ago
any listings of instructions to disable it on different makes and models? I think I disabled something buried hidden deep in the menu of my dashboard settings
The engineers and managers responsible for this should spend the rest of their lives in prison, or be executed. We do not want people willing to do this in society. It's obviously reckless and evil. Quite likely this would mean the end of Subaru as a functioning company – good chance that knowledge and involvement of this goes all the way to the C-level management. That's fine. Fuck them.
and i need a new (to me) car right now. convincing a woman to avoid modern cars is gonna take years off my life. 🤣
Dumbidea's avatar
Dumbidea 1 year ago
Just another reason to love my old shitbox car.
Things are sadly heading towards *all cars, all the time* and more and more car systems like infotainment break-ish when you try and disable these features.
Empka's avatar
Empka 1 year ago
A friend told me he found a sim card in his car and removed it, he also managed to turn off the power to the 4G modem, possibly by removing a fuse IIRC. Worth investing if that's a valid approach for your make & model
Toxicota's avatar
Toxicota 1 year ago
Meanwhile Tesla: (it can even tell if you are overweight based on your stature, and what you had for Bfast… probably). image