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.

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[–] 15 points 4 months ago (2 children)

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.

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  • [–] 3 points 3 months ago (1 child)

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

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  • [–] 2 points 3 months 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.

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