OnStar freaked me out after an accident in a rental car a few years ago. We had no idea the rental car had it. We got rear ended by a drunk driver and spun 360 degrees off the road. Within a second or two of coming to a stop a voice was asking if we were ok.
Comment on Elon Musk uses cybertruck explosion to show Tesla can remotely unlock and monitor vehicles
halcyoncmdr@lemmy.world 5 days agoThis isn’t surprising at all to anyone paying attention to what the Tesla app lets you do with your vehicle, or if they have interacted with Tesla support. All of that info is available in the app, including viewing not only live camera feeds from sentry mode, but also saved recordings from the USB drive installed in the vehicle now. Clearly if you can do that from the app, the company can do that and more.
Similar stuff is almost surely possible with any of the other manufacturers that have mobile apps with similar functionality as well.
Hell, shit like OnStar had similar functionality to remotely unlock vehicles before Tesla even existed.
IphtashuFitz@lemmy.world 5 days ago
NotMyOldRedditName@lemmy.world 5 days ago
Are you… are you god? Am I dead?
ExtremeDullard@lemmy.sdf.org 5 days ago
Yeah but the crucial bit of difference was, if you thought OnStar was too invasive, you could turn it off or buy a car without it.
Good luck buying a car that isn’t online and snitching on you all the time, or disabling the telemetry today.
NotMyOldRedditName@lemmy.world 5 days ago
I’ve wondered how hard it would be to turn off the radio if you really cared enough.
I would suspect though that if you connected the car to your phones internet though it’d do all the snitching stuff that was queued. You’d probably need some sort of firewall on the phone blocking the cars communication, while still letting you play music.
ExtremeDullard@lemmy.sdf.org 5 days ago
You can but it’s not that simple: my neighbor found the antenna for his car’s spyware transmitter in the side-view mirror (can’t remember which car), cut the wire, and almost immediately, the dashboard reported a fault and started bitching and moaning that the car needed servicing.
grue@lemmy.world 5 days ago
This is why those of us who actually are paying attention have been planning to continue driving our 2000s-and-older cars indefinitely.
Rivalarrival@lemmy.today 3 days ago
You can disable your own access to the service. Short of ripping out the cellular module, you can’t disable OnStar’s access.
ExtremeDullard@lemmy.sdf.org 3 days ago
What I mean was you can not subscribe to OnStar, and then you don’t have OnStar no more. The spying hardware is there, just not use.
As opposed to modern cars with which you don’t subscribe to anything and they spy on you without your consent, and there’s nothing you can do about it short of - like you said - ripping out the spying hardware.