I am sure this article has been shared before, however I wanted to have a look at this topic.
The articles short summary is this:
All 25 car brands we researched earned our *Privacy Not Included warning label – making cars the worst category of products that we have ever reviewed
I am currently driving a 2014 Ford Fiesta which just has a radio with a CD player and Bluetooth. I do not need more than that in a car.
The reason I am looking at all is that that the Fiesta does not belong to me and the friend owning it will be moving out in a bit, so I kinda need another one.
There seems to be one brand that is not as bad as the other ones (but still bad): Renault; mozilla’s review…
Maybe I will have a look at their cars.
What do you guys think? Stick to older used cars and not use an EV or look at which of the manufacturers have the least bad privacy policy?
Your assumption about how datalogging works is incorrect.
In short, sensors almost never store local data which doesn’t even matter if those sensors are depowered. There is absolutely nothing to be afraid of here.
So yeah, sensors do not locally store data except in very rare and high-cost cases not found in basically any consumer electronics. There needs to be a datalogger or handoff to a datalogger of some variety. While the ECU or MCU of a vehicle logs data, there’s not a permanent memory of every action you’ve done with the car because it literally doesn’t have enough memory. Doubly so if some of the sensors such as GPS are physically unplugged or depowered as in my case.
So, no amount of malicious action from a dealer would extract location or even more basic data from a car. The only thing they’d see are the basics of the ECU or MCU which has been common for every car produced since OBD2 became… a thing.
I’ll also add that an easy solution to this is not to go to a corporate dealer (all Chevy dealers are shit anyway to be fair). While the independent mechanic might have to buy proprietary diagnostics from the manufacturer, they aren’t going to re-enable systems like GPS or telemetry if you tell them not to because they care about you coming back and thus have an incentive not to fuck you over.