I don’t know anything about cars.

Now that we have established that cars seriously undermine our privacy (look at the flurry of posts in this community in the last few hours), what can we do about it?

From a networking POV, if you remove the ability to connect to the Internet, it doesn’t matter what the car is recording as long as you can ensure there is no physical tampering. Depending on who you are, this is a good idea, and doable for the most part (very few people have the technical knowledge to pull out the right chip from a car).

So, how do we achieve this? I implore the community to invite mechanical/car engineers who can help us on this matter, and to form methods to prevent vehicles from accessing the Internet without express consent from the user.

Thanks!

  • @[email protected]
    19•1 year ago

    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.

    • @[email protected]
      6•1 year ago

      Wouldn’t it have been easier to block it from accessing the internet through a firewall? And having a firewall helps you see what’s going on with the rest of your network.

      • @[email protected]English
        4•1 year ago

        A lot of these devices will refuse to complete setup, or will silently do meshnet type stuff with other devices from the same manufacturer just to get the collected data out

      • @[email protected]
        1•1 year ago

        I don’t think I could have set it up. After it was connected, there’s no way to disconnect it, which seems to be a growing tactic. I’ve seen several TVs that have no WiFi disconnect button.

    • @[email protected]English
      2•1 year ago

      Unsure on the sharks but a lot of the roombas have an open source project (ha980?) that lets you run all the Apis locally and cut it off from the internet fully. Mines managed through home assistant now, it’s not perfect but it beats the heck out of that shitty iRobot app