This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Any idea around what model year this started to take off? I drive a 2000 so I'm not worried now, but thinking of upgrading to something slightly newer.
There are EV conversion kits available, so it is possible to turn an old car electric. They won't have the storage capacity of a natively electric car, but it is an option.
Depends on the OEM, but generally late-2010s is when it became more ubiquitous.
Any car with an infotainment system is probably a "risk," but especially '20s cars with features tied to apps are the real vulnerability here.
Wish I had the money to even be able to drive one of these nightmare cars in the first place. Yay for being poor I guess!
Maybe a dumb question, but if all of the vehicle's bells and whistles are meticulously recording my every move... how do those data get back to the auto manufacturer anyhow? I read the article and the "how that works" link, and sure it mentioned phone connectivity, but if I don't connect my phone, then my car presumably has no way to communicate what it collects... or are there a bunch of extra radios that phone home (satellite, cellular...)?
Guess I'm happy my Toyota is the last model year that didn't have a connection to the app that's got privacy issues.
Thanks for linking this. Going to share it with some friends.
The more technology progresses in our ultracapitalist environment (and even some ultrasocialist ones like China), the more people are forced to become Luddite self-sustainable hermits in the middle of nowhere for their own good. It's not even to not buy a car - even something as simple as taking a bus or a train or even a pair of shoes is poised to become a privacy nightmare sooner or later.
Public transit in my area already has cameras with facial recognition and tagging. It's not even a good public transit system, too.
