It's perfectly legal for cars to harvest your texts, call logs(theregister.com) |
It's perfectly legal for cars to harvest your texts, call logs(theregister.com) |
* Automotive head units are just embedded computers. Most run Linux, QNX, or Windows CE, with some proprietary UI system on top.
* These machines usually store data in an onboard database in flash (sometimes just SQLite).
* Sometimes, phone data is captured using standard Bluetooth mechanisms (Message Access Protocol MAP and Phone Book Access Protocol PBAP) which require authorization on the phone side. Some vendors implement an additional "are you sure you want to share your information" check on the head unit side, and others don't.
* This data is cached on the head unit so that finding a contact to call or reading a text message doesn't require 10 minutes worth of Bluetooth nonsense.
* Some vendors inadequately purge this cached data when a Bluetooth pairing is removed from the head unit.
* Berla sell data extraction exploits to law enforcement, just like other forensics vendors do for mobile phones. Sometimes this can extract latent data and sometimes active data.
My advice:
* Never authorize a head unit to download your contacts or SMS.
* If you use a rental car, Factory Reset the head unit when you leave.
That's decent protection for most people. I didn't find any evidence pointing to a central server upload, a conspiracy to build an LE database, etc. It's just typical crappy hardware manufacturer-made software leaving data around that shouldn't be left around, creating an opening for forensic vendor exploits to slurp the data.
This is such an early 2000s idea. I'd much rather my car act as a dumb display that shows a copy of my phone screen then an intelligent agent that tries to replicate functionality already extant in my phone.
I was told that the infotainment systems were where a large chunk of their profit came from and differentiating their experience was important to the car company.
Of course, they wanted to use decade old CPUs and touchscreens to save money, so the experience was horrible. I left shortly after CarPlay was announced and our response was "That will never catch on."
All we need is a place in the dashboard to mount our phones. Phones already have big-ass touchscreens and anything else we want... except of course now the audio outputs have been removed.
We should simply have a well in the dashboard with replaceable inserts that snap in to accommodate different-sized phone models, which would connect to the audio system and power. But no... we still have phones bouncing around in the cabin or attached to hokey third-party claws, and janky-ass Bluetooth which (how many years in now?) can't handle simple music playback reliably.
Every car in my household has an auxiliary input for audio and no support for audio over Bluetooth. One is a 2013 Mini, so it's not as if they're ancient.
And that's just fine. And if it MUST be overcomplicated, then yes... AirPlay seems to be the way.
If I rent a car, I won't pair my phone at all, even going so far as to use a car charger instead of the provided USB ports.
i didn't even like having my phone data sunk to a my own personal car. it just made no logical sense on why that would be useful, so being me, i just assumed it was for nefarious purposes. people no longer get the benefit of the doubt of being lazy/incompetent. i immediately jump to the situation essentially being an attack vector.
Driving in the country was fine with just audio navigation, but I had to connect my phone to get the display once I was driving in a big city. "Take the freeway exit" "Use the right lane" "Use the left lane" was coming too quick if I relied only on the audio.
Stallman was right, about nearly everything concerning power, companies and governments using it, and the role the citizen is viewed to have in such a limited capitalist view.
Without government mandates to open the source of every chip and firmware, none of the modern hardware we use is trustable.
* There's an obvious, legitimate want for the vehicle's head unit to ingest this data, in order to display a UI (or provide a voice UI) which allows the user to call a contact by name or read a recently received text message. Is this a poor implementation concept which has mostly been supplanted by better implementations (Android Auto / CarPlay), sure, absolutely but it's not some thing that was added for the express purpose of "stealing" information. It's a long-standing set of features which use obvious, standardized Bluetooth technologies to fill an obvious, straightforward user need. Nothing weird there.
* There's no sign whatsoever that there was any collusion with law enforcement in the construction of these systems. They're just badly implemented, vulnerable software which is exploited by a forensics vendor (just like literally every other piece of hardware and software under the sun).
I, for one, simply wouldn't believe any such claim. Too much deception has already happened for there to be any trust left.
By extension, that means it is 100% legal for anyone, including any branch of any government to get a copy of your call and text history.
Always has been
> Here's the fix that 95%+ of the users impacted will never use
Hopefully you only had HN users in mind while writing your comment, otherwise you've intentionally downplayed one of dozens of security & privacy risks "our moms" are dealing with daily.
That is ridiculously onerous! Just because geeks can share arcane knowledge about how to be safe does not mean that this isn't horribly anti-consumer.
So it's effectively legal to sell backdoored hardware and software to spy on people. I wonder what would happen if I sold backdoored phones to Volkswagen employees, execs, and their children. To judges and politicians and lawyers. A-OK until there was "actual injury", and even then, it is only the injury that would be wrong?
I think the title is misleading. Unless I'm missing something, it sounds like the decision wasn't that it's legal to harvest text and call logs, it was that these cases did not demonstrate an injury was caused as a result of doing so. Presumably if the plaintiffs proved some injury other than not wanting it to happen, things could have been different.
It would be nice if some regulator would mandate an "easy-off" function for vehicle telematics - some kind of simple procedure which would remove a telematics module from the installation list and allow the module to be unplugged without triggering fault detection. This is possible on some cars using dealership tools to re-train (sometimes called "code") the configuration blobs in each control module to omit telematics, but it's not standardized and usually too difficult for a consumer to manage.
Also, how hard was it to find the section for removing the module, and how hard was removing the module in your case?
I have a Subaru, but still curious about yours.
I'm not going to go as far as to say it can't be exploited, but that is a significantly smaller risk surface.
I have not used Android Auto, but if it does auto pair Bluetooth, that would be a shame. I thought the whole point was that the car just provides a screen your phone can extend a display to, and no data ever leaves.
It’s especially frustrating with rental cars. But I don’t even trust my own personal car!
Check out GrapheneOS if you have yet to!
So.. It's okay if I record private conversation from high ranking states officials as long as I don't harm their reputation with it?
It's okay if I stole state intelligence as long as I don't harm my country with it?
This was a civil case. Civil cases tend to have more concrete harm requirements.
The claimed invasion of privacy is that a person with the diagnostic tools and physical access to your car can extract those logs.
Presenting this as "car manufacturers can steal your text and call logs" is disingenuous.
Don't get me wrong, it's clearly not a great thing for the car to be doing (especially in the context of rental cars for instance) but it isn't the catastrophe people are claiming.
The title and the conclusion are biased and of poor quality. It should be "car manufacturers didn't get fined for the way their old head units worked".
You might think why care if its your own car. But if you rent cars this can become an issue where if poorly implemented the next driver could access the information.
It is such an easy feature to implement and suppliers in Europe already do this due to GDPR. I remember working for an automotive supplier where we implemented this feature. The whole phonebook was actually downloaded onto the unit in an encrypted Database. The system would decrypt it on the fly as needed. When GDPR came around we had to implement a wipe feature that would allow the user to delete their profile which included that database.
I feel like GDPR for all its flaws had a positive impact in that it forced the supplier to actually care about this use case.
And especially not if you're forced to agree to use a specific feature.
But nobody really knows if car vendors really follow the laws. Facebook/Instagram seem to collect a lot of data anyways, and probably will just pay a huge fine in many years, when they get sentenced for it.
From what I understand the data the car acquires is not being sent anywhere. It just gets uploaded to the car and is used to speed up operations that would be slow if the car had to talk to the phone over Bluetooth when it needed the data.
The car vendor is not processing your data. They are selling you a device that processes your data. I'd have guessed then that you are the controller for this data processing and so you are the one responsible for GDPR compliance.
In the case of a rental car, I'd have guessed that the rental company is the controller, and their GDPR obligation would be to tell you that the car caches data if you pair your phone with it and for them to erase that data when you return the car.
It says “a plaintiff must allege an injury to ‘his or her business, his or her person, or his or her reputation,’” with “a bare violation” of the privacy law being “insufficient to satisfy the statutory injury requirement.”
It is particular to Washington state, not all Americans. And it may not apply to a prosecutor versus private plaintiff.
[1] https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/24133084-22-35448
Had the whole state pay for a stadium and a tunnel, in Seattle. So, pointless use of taxes and other wastes of my contributions.
Sadly, not an actually progressive place aside from Mutual Combat laws.
WA has a referendum system, though, so if people in WA care about this, you can get something on a ballot and vote it into law.
Hah! No, they argue that the injury is right.
For example: https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/sikh-nijjar-india-canada-tr...
After the diplomat assassination kerfuffle, it appears that Canada invoked a communications backdoor for national security purposes. It's hard to feel bad for the dimwitted killers who plotted the entire thing on a smartphone, but it's also a statement about how widespread and de-facto surveillance is today. Even when backdoors surface, we shrug them off.
So... yeah. Until there is actual injury, and the injury isn't someone who people don't like and also don't care about. Then it will be a problem, and God help us all then.
e.g. that fact that there's a local call/message log on the car, and the car also has a mechanism for transmitting some data, does not mean that there's a privacy violation given that the car does not transmit the call/message log. That's the only reason this lawsuit got thrown out. It would be like saying "my phone receives messages, and stores those, and could transmit them to apple/google, therefore I should be able to sue them for the privacy violation they could do".
As far as I can tell, the car itself doesn't have a mechanism for transmitting data. It just stores the data.
Transmitting only happens if/when someone gets some Berla "vehicle forensics" hardware and physically connects it to the car. The Berla equipment would do the transmitting.
From the complaint linked to by The Register[1]:
> 26. Third party Berla Corporation (“Berla”), based in Annapolis, Maryland, manufactures equipment (hardware and software) capable of extracting stored text messages from infotainment systems in Honda vehicles.
> 27. Berla also manufactures equipment capable of extracting stored call logs from infotainment systems in Honda vehicles.
> 28. Honda infotainment systems thereby transmit stored text messages and call logs to Berla.
And from Berla's web site[2]:
> An acquisition may require systems to be removed from a vehicle and disassembled or be performed in place in a vehicle. In either case, acquisition hardware must be attached to the vehicle or system to acquire data.
---
[1] https://regmedia.co.uk/2023/11/09/honda-infotainment-class-a...
This is frankly a shortcoming of trying to use civil law for something like this. As far as I'm aware, this is nearly always the case that you have no grounds to sue unless you've suffered quantifiable monetary damage from someone's actions. If we just want this kind of thing to be generally illegal, then it needs to be made illegal according to criminal law or it needs to violate some law overseen by a government regulatory body with the power to levy its own fines.
I am extremely skeptical of this, no matter what this judge says. This seems to be a clear case of illegal wiretapping [1]. Having an illegal act perpetrated upon one, whether it is wiretapping or assault, seems a very clear "injury". It is baffling that there would have to be some kind of financial price attached to be recognized as harm by a court. A disgusting reduction of justice to mere finance, something I would expect from the cartoonishly greedy Ferengi of Star Trek, than a real court.
Where is this being done without authorization?
TBH, in this day and age where it's difficult to replace batteries when they wear out, I strongly prefer slow-charging over fast-charging. Fast-charging wears out the batteries more quickly.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECall
https://www.atic-ts.com/vehicle-accident-emergency-call-glob...
Gov Gavin Newsom preparing to run for President, is OK'ing these uses quickly and without public discussion
Additionally: if you were a person travelling for an abortion, not in your car because your state is all fucked up(!), can the cops request copies of texts you've received/ sent?
Or they ask the rental company nice enough for a few monutes they may not even need that, as a prosecutor would argue that you waived 4th Amendment protections by not taking sufficient measures to "ensure your privacy". Third Party Doctrine.
If we can keep cars from the 40s running, keeping cars from the early 00s running is no big deal. Honestly older fully mechanical/analog cars with manual transmissions are often cheaper and easier to maintain than modern ones with high complexity and DRM on every part.
Sadly my desire for privacy will likely prevent me from ever buying electric unless I build my own car, which I might.
Me too. I'm not that sad about it, though. Saving an older car from being scrapped also brings environmental benefits.
So now I own a brand-new Chevy Bolt. You just yank a single fuse and that takes out OnStar and nothing else.
Absolutely. I don't buy cars that were made relatively recently.
Chocolate has fantastic profit margins. No Apple chocolate. ... mhhhmm, apple chocolate, that sounds yummy.
A bit closer to home, fabbing microchips has great profit margins. Apple pays good money to TSMC.
Just because it's good money isn't enough reason, I am sorry.
It is the lack of planning to prevent it that is years later branded as a feature to sell when company leadership looking to boost numbers or build political capitol start talking to law enforcement. Often after an acquisition or two.
I personally know a release engineer that was required to quietly send all new code changes to an NSA ftp server, presumably to make sure none of the bugs they rely on were fixed.
If something is in popular use and -can- collect data covertly, it will be co-opted to do so by someone for power or money without fail.
Destroying the means of surveillance, capturing targets, and reverse blackhatting is what will work.
... what would they have your acquaintance do if a bug they relied on were fixed? Push back on the change?
Could be they just decide to go take maximum risky advantage of the flaw before it is patched.
"Oh it wasn't our fault the software was wrote poorly. Not like we wrote laws around it or paid companies to share data with us."
What else do you believe that comes from the govt's mouth? Would you simply never believe they'd take advantage of us unless caught in some precise way, in some precise situation?
Government can start showing us it's loyal to us, or face attack of its own networks.
lol tell Subaru owners about this. There are tons of them complaining of batteries going dead the last few years, just from sitting a few days in the driveway, while the always-on cellular is at edge of range, hunting. Subaru's solution to this has been to in some cases pay for a bigger battery for those customers.
You'd be amazed what kind of PDFs are left open in Acrobat, just because people are too lazy to close the application. I have seen contracts, bank account statements, residency permits, letters of incorporation, private messages logs, ....
All without doing any digging, I just get assigned a computer for printing, turn on the screen, and it's there.
Observation tells us it's a lost cause to teach people about privacy/security of this type and have the large majority of people observe prudent ways of preventing their data from leaking. We've known about this since before the internet when people would chuck old documents in the garbage under the assumption no one would ever bother to go through their trash digging for information. But, we've learned from police, private investigators and espionage accounts that huge amounts of data can be extracted from trash simply because people aren't careful.
We also know there's always been a small percentage of people who have been careful, they're the ones who never throw out old accounts, letters, envelopes or even notes with phone numbers on them into the trash but they're so small in numbers that those who are scrounging for information know that the majority of their pickings will be successful.
The only effective way around this is to build systems that automatically obfuscate data from anyone but their owner. As we know, this is easier said than done.
worse, because it's so few people, this is suspicious behavior (in the eye of LEO)
"So far" is the right qualifier. As electric scooter rentals have clearly shown, it's trivial to add in the connected BS.
I wonder how that could be true. Most car companies have pretty terrible infotainment systems, and I've never met anyone who genuinely loved the infotainment system in their car. (Most people I know tend feel that it ranges from "somewhat annoying" to "good enough".)
These days, even when I see the rate infotainment system that is pretty good, people still want CarPlay/Android Auto because that's what they're used to, and it already integrates with settings and data that have already been configured on the user's phone.
Money talks. I know it's hard when you want that nice car, but considering the above, the only way is just not buying the car with software lock-in. Only this stimulus can have some effect.
If you haven’t actually been hurt yet, suing doesn’t result in anything.
Generalised lawbreaking is a public concern. It’s prosecutors’ and regulators’ jobs to protect consumers ex ante.
Easy to argue the good/bad of it, but the California statutory damages lawsuit wave related to ADA accommodations definitely got a lot of business owners to pay attention. [https://www.thakurlawfirm.com/single-post/2020/06/15/ada-law...]
It's perverse and bizarre. If you avoid harm, you deprive yourself of the tools that you might've used to save others from the same harm.
The tricky part here is when someone is steadily stockpiling things which seem likely to cause truly irreparable harm in the future. But that act is not itself causing harm yet. For example, stockpiling tons of sensitive data.
Another example, a mine with a nearly overtopping tailings dam full of toxic chemicals is a disaster that is almost inevitably guaranteed to happen.
But civil law gives little to no method of stopping that disaster until it has already killed countless people, since - as noted - it hasn’t actually happened yet. And there is no actual guarantee that it will! Potential options do exist, but are so time consuming and high risk, good luck.
But it does give methods for those people’s relatives to get compensation after the fact at least. Which is better than some alternatives.
Which is why other types of regulatory frameworks exist, at least in some cases.
Unfortunately, as in the tailings dam case, and the icy sidewalk case, the actual smartest move is to just avoid them all together - somehow. Move? Take a different route?
Not always possible though, and being constantly on the lookout for these things is exhausting and infeasible for most.
Not sure how that is possible privacy law wise though, even for the most alert? Never engage with anyone or give anyone anything true?
Along the same lines, a company gathering extensive details on the communications of and connections of others (especially without their permission) is putting others at risk. And, much like the previous example, the damage isn't actualized until it is. But it needs to be stopped _before_ the damage happens. Which means it needs to be criminal.
But it's worse pretty much everywhere else. A few years ago, my data was in a breach of a health-care company I'd never heard of and never dealt directly with, they were some sort of back-end broker several layers away from us patients. Recently I went to sign up for new insurance, and I asked for a list of all companies that might handle my data, and copies of their most recent cybersecurity audit. Of course I didn't get a useful reply, and as a 'customer', I have no useful levers to pull. I have no useful information to use when selecting an insurer. And I have no recourse unless someone starts siphoning money out of my account AND I notice and can prove that it happened because of a breach.
"Never engage with anyone" equates directly to "Go be a hermit in the mountains". If that's where our privacy laws have gotten us, I think we're doing something wrong.
That might be your personal prefernece, I particularly abhor the phone-centric world not to mention that a 5 inch “big-ass” touch screen becomes tiny when driving and that its UI is meant to be operated sitting down paying 100% attention to it not while operating a machine at 60mph down in the road surrounded by hundreds of people in the same situation.
If you look at CarPlay, it chunks the functionality down to a few big icons on the screen at a time. No reason that can't be done on the phone itself in a "car mode."
Anyway, this is what I ended up doing: https://imgur.com/gallery/krRXQwP
I've been using Brodit/ProClip USA mounts to solve this. They sell holders designed specifically for your model of phone which attaches to a custom-fit mount for your car's make and model. It's pricy, at about $75 for a holder-mount combo, when cheap Amazon alternatives are closer to $10, but it overcomes a lot of the problems you list. I use it regularly for navigation, since my car doesn't support CarPlay or Android Auto.
So you rant about Bluetooth in cars ... without owning a car that gas Bluetooth?
Just checking, because we put after market radios (with BT) in our last two cars and, while not a miracle experience, music playback and handsfree telephony worked without problems.
Bluetooth implementations are trash. Rented a brand-new Toyota over the summer and its radio suffered from all the same playback defects that Bluetooth has been offering for a decade or more. Playback randomly starting when not told to... showing the wrong info on the display... showing that no songs were available but playing songs anyway (four out of five times; once it did decide to show a song list).
They really are.
> Playback randomly starting when not told to...
Yup. Toyota and Subaru are particularly egregious about this. Something about using old cable/ipod implementations which would immediately reach for the default media player and telling it to start playing (and download a list of songs or some other BS).
> showing the wrong info on the display...
Yup. Especially if you have the audacity to use Spotify or something else.
There's some really shitty bluetooth audio interfaces out there. REALLY shitty.
Keep up the "good" work, guys! Don't spend all your licensing fees at the pub... unless you're buying a round for the house!
And I even installed extra inputs for a guest to plug into on road trips, and the original CD player.
I have an old car without any sort of fancy infotainment system, and I always end up with my phone overheating during long drives into the sun.
Where I live, even touching your phone while driving is illegal. Doesn't stop most people, but I'd still not mess about.
I do remember reading news of someone getting cited in california when the model 3 was new, for "mounting a screen visible to the driver" which was the stock touchscreen.
Energy is necessary for modern society to function. It's not going anywhere nor will it decrease just because one source of it is inconvenient.
What are you basing this on? You realise we have localised grids that go 100% renewable regularly, and could easily keep doing that with electrified transport?
I’m genuinely curious if someone is credibly speculating we are unable, versus economically unwilling, to replace fossil fuels with clean options.
Too many regressive releases to keep track of...
Anyway, we should transition to EV and these cars manufacturers bad practices are just keeping old inefficients cars on the streets.
About the land area of New Mexico, if we went 100% solar [1]. Remove current hydroelectric, potential geothermal and then mix in wind and nuclear, and you have a realistic mix that could replace fossil fuels.
[1] https://www.axionpower.com/knowledge/power-world-with-solar/
The phones are too tall to fit there now (even the original SE), so there's going to have to be some rework anyway!