Can we prevent cars from sending data to servers if we remove their antennae?

You could, but some antenna are printed onto circuit boards so disabling them without breaking the board entirely will be interesting.

With that Mozilla study out I hope some car manufacturers get sent some very pointed questions by government regulators.

Never thought I'd see a day where people feel compelled to circumsize their cars

Just ask the dealer to disconnect the modem upon purchase.

Better yet, refuse to buy shit you don't own and make this known. Go to the dealer force them to stand around while you read the privacy agreement. Use an attorney because they have stupid legal agreements. Waste everyone's time because they are the ones doing this to you. It must cost profit. Then walk away from this bullshit. Tell them why you are walking away.

All of this exists because people are too stupid to care. If you ignore this, you are one of them, and part of the problem. Legal agreements are theft and slavery. Signing them blindly is the stupidest thing you can ever do in your life. Anyone that needs a legal agreement for you to make a purchase is a worthless criminal. Signing their bullshit is saying you are okay with being their little slave bitch.

The manufacturer that i work for has esims built into every vehicle they build that cannot be removed without bricking the vehicle. I feel like this is pretty much industry standard at this point. They used to have a removable sim, but there was an esim along side that so you could not completely disconnect.

Edit: added words

I wish I were a billionaire. I would literally start a company that made cars, phones, tech of all kinds on the basic premise that I don't give a fuck about you or your data. Make it private. Make it have no EULA that says anything beyond IP protections. Make it so consumers never have to worry about underhanded bullshit. Sure, I may not make tons of money, but I think I could be happy turning a small profit, paying employees fairly, and knowing that I am selling better products and undercutting all the assholes to send them careening directly I to the ground.

Sincerely, the best thing consumers can do is to drive dumb cars and use them for as long as possible (cars aren't like phones, and can work reliably for over a decade).

How exactly are cars connecting to the internet? Cell providers give them free data?

I did something like that with my robot vacuum. I opened it up and ripped the soldered-on wifi card. Now I can't control it from my phone, but it can't phone home to Shark either. I was willing to risk it for a $400 robot vacuum, which I also happened to have a second defective one to practice on thanks to their return policy. I'm not sure if I'd attempt this on an electronics behemoth worth several thousands of dollars that I can't afford to lose.

I've had a thought I'd love to have a chance to try one day...

I'd like to see about not only disconnecting the antenna, but also basically wrap the cellular circuit module in metal screen, basically a crude Faraday Cage.

I've never had any chance to try such a thing, but I can only imagine it would probably do the trick.

Edit: For those that believe this will cause the vehicle to malfunction or even brick itself, have you never drove through a tunnel and found you lost Internet? Your vehicle won't stop functioning just because it lost Internet, it literally cannot do that.

That would be like the absolutely most unsafe thing any vehicle could ever do, to stop functioning because of an internet connection failure.

That might help in some situations, but some of the data is stored on hard drives and retrieved later, either at dealerships or when police "request" it. I think it would take some invasive modifying to really render your car private.

Wrap the car in a large faraday cage? As a general rule it should be assumed that any device with a direct to internet connection capability has the potential to track the user, even of it's at a very course level like IP history that in theory could be made more precise if the ISP was inclined to keep tabs on a mac address.

My own vehicle has the ability, if not the subscription, to use one of those manufacturer sponsored satilite connections. Plenty of new vehicles have such things as paid DLC and just lock it up behind software but the hardware is still there. Physical interferance through disconnecting the relevant modules in a clean reversible way has potential for some enterprising sort to either open a school or a specialty repair shop. Now if we could just do something about the phone the driver has with them at the same time.

I thought they would disable my esim after the grace period was over, they gave me the option to pay for a subscription and I said “Hell no!”. But I guess I’m more valuable driving that thing than I thought. So yeah, probably only hacking it to disable the esim.

Probably not without bricking your car. I doubt they are gonna tell you how to disable the telemetry, and with how connected the systems are these days, if you break something the whole thing stops working.

I hate that this is even a consideration, but is that even legal?

It would probably be easier and less damaging to find the fuse for the antenna/transmitter and pull it. That being said, it will probably stop the buttons on your keyfob from working. I think the keyless/touchless entry would still work. IIRC, that system works with active RFID near the door handles.

Most vehicle head units are still running a low power version of Java 6 and have difficulty with nested levels of DNS CNAMES. I wonder what other problems that Java stack has that can be exploited?

Does the car report this info to your insurance?

Not gonna lie; everyone seems to be over-reacting to what is common practice in law documents; terms are overly broad for a reason, and undoubtedly if you dig in the case histories; you'll probably find an absurd lawsuit or two on the books.

That said; I doubt the car is capable of collecting this data; but they can collect information you freely volunteer to them.

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