Bad-At-Privacy Car Companies Now Have to Answer to the FTC
Bad-At-Privacy Car Companies Now Have to Answer to the FTC
From local news outlets, podcasts, and TV to... the FTC?! Citing our research, US Senator Markey calls for an investigation into cars and privacy.
This is good news, hopefully the FTC actually does something.
Great stuff, great initiative by Mozilla to being this to light!
The government may do something. It will just take them five years to do so.
Edit: In the meantime, buy yourself a bike or a golf cart or four wheeler or something. Though maybe not a four-wheeler or golf cart, since I don't think you can drive those on regular roads, but you can ride a bike on regular roads, so maybe that. Or a motorcycle. That's putting your money where your mouth is because a motorcycle is highly not likely to have spy equipment just because of lack of space.
Edit 2: Motorcycles do not burn fuel as cleanly so are more harmful to the environment though so trade-offs
Edit 3: open source cars I wonder if that's a thing
There are low emission older cars too. Just saying. Not much tech BS.
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open source cars I wonder if that's a thing
I recently heard Mercedes have some focus on open source.
https://opensource.mercedes-benz.com/Motorcycles do not burn fuel as cleanly so are more harmful to the environment though so trade-offs
I'm assuming probably not on a "vehicle miles traveled" basis, though.
From a link someone provided above it seems legit.
the motorcycle used 28% less fuel than the comparable decade car and emitted 30% fewer carbon dioxide emissions, but it emitted 416% more hydrocarbons, 3,220% more oxides of nitrogen and 8,065% more carbon monoxide. The MythBusters’ conclusion: ‘At best, it’s a wash. Motorcycles are just as bad for the environment as cars,’ Savage said on the show. ‘At worst, they’re far worse.’
I recognize it's not an official study, but seems to be more concrete than anecdotal evidence and changed my perspective some. The article also quotes a researcher at UC Riverside which makes more sense on what's going on
‘We’ve been working to clean up passenger vehicles since the ‘70s,’ said Kent Johnson, who’s on the research faculty at UC Riverside and is director of its emissions lab, where the MythBusters’ numbers were analyzed. ‘We’ve been putting on catalytic converters and sensors to improve their ability to control emissions. We didn’t start doing that on motorcycles until the 2000s. It just shows you how far we’ve taken passenger vehicles and how difficult it is to do the same thing with motorcycles. First of all, there’s no room. And the incremental cost might double the price of a bike.’
(link)
Motorcycles do not burn fuel as cleanly so are more harmful to the environment though so trade-offs
That very much depends on the bike and if the owner is a douchebag that notifies it to be horrible.
Also, motorcycles can get around 50 miles per gallon. So that's a win vs other ICE vehicles.
Or you could drive a older car. You will need to learn how to do at least of of the maintenance yourself but being able to do simple maintenance like a oil change is a good skill and isn't hard to learn.
Just bought a 2014 RAV4
Looking forward to zipping around my friend's 2023 Bronco in 20 years when mine is still kicking at 400k miles and his transmission took a shit
The last car I bought is a 2014 model year. The one before that is a 2016. I'm not buying anything made after 2020, even if I have to squeeze gasoline from the rocks with my bare hands. Not because I don't like electric, but because I don't want a spy appliance to drive around in, even if it has emoji headlights.
There are electro cycles.
Open source cars are kind of a thing, if you're doing an engine swap, or building from scratch or something, that will usually require you to remove all of the privacy violating parts as a side effect. You could probably achieve a similar result with slightly less effort by removing the infotainment and replacing the ECU with an aftermarket one...
Most of the privacy violation parts are just in the infotainment though, so if you manage to replace that you'll be pretty much there. Only issue is newer cars have all the hvac and things like reverse cameras controlled through it...
Another option would just be to make sure it has no network connections.
maybe not a four-wheeler or golf cart, since I don’t think you can drive those on regular roads
Look up your local neighborhood / neighborhood electric vehicle / low-speed vehicle laws.
There are some places where they are allowed. There's also a lot of places where the cops just don't care enough to do anything about it, at least so long as you stay off arterial roads.
Though I cannot recommend a cargo ebike enough. Long-tail or bakfiets, though I personally prefer the long-tails as they ride more like bikes and the racks on the back tend to be extremely versatile for mounting weird stuff. The cheapest good ones are around $1,200 with near-0 cost of ownership. Incredibly useful vehicles.
Or just get an older vehicle.
This only works up to a point, and that's a little concerning IMO. It'll be true for longer than, say, cellphones, but no car lasts forever and at some point they could be prohibitively expensive.
This is what I love Mozilla for. They can be credited for making this an issue that is getting some attention.
one of the many reasons I don't want to buy an EV (or any vehicle that touts an overly "smart" feature set)
Every new vehicle is like this. Why call out EVs specifically?
Because traditional cars were a thing before spying technology was available. EVs only became widely available when spying was already a common practice.
That is - I don't think "buying an older car" is a longterm viable option, older ones would become harder to maintain as years go by. My main hope now is that people would find ways to physically rip the cellular connecticity devices out of cars and/or install privacy-focused OSs on them.
My e-Berlingo is very basic. It can't get remote update, it has to go to the dealship for them. I don't think it has a data connection. Claims to has some, but you can turn it off and I bet it's only for dealership download when it's in for repairs. It can't even keep time. It loses like a minute a week (which is the worse time keeping I've ever seen and I'm getting to be old now). So not doing NTP!
I count it's basicness as a feature not a bug. I just use Android Auto (originally on a de-googled LineageOS and now GrapheneOS with Google sandboxes. I use Organic Maps).
This sounds good and promising but it's should be noted that they do not have to answer to the FTC according to this article, it has merely been recommended in a letter to the FTC by one senator that they should investigate some specific car companies. There doesn't seem to be any new way in which they are more or less accountable to the FTC than they were or weren't already and there's no obligation on the strength of this letter to do any investigation nor any guarantee of a positive outcome if they did. A rare and nice little show of support from a member of the political class for privacy rights but nothing substantive or concrete.
Why only specific companies when Mozilla exposed literally every single manufacturer for massive privacy intrusions? Every car on the market got an F rating.
Hedging my bets in trying to make my statements correct. Phrasing as I did, my statements are true if it's just a few companies under potential scrutiny or all car companies in the US so it's the truest way to write with the facts I haven't my disposal.
I'm still sad about not doing the EV conversion of the 80s civic wagon back when I had a job that I made money in. Definitely wouldn't be able to spy on me. New cars have so much stuff that is a mystery and for some reason they need a lot more fixing.
Just pass a damn privacy law already.
Are they bad at privacy or good at data scraping? It's not like they intend to protect your privacy. That doesn't make the line go up.