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FTC takes action against GM

2025-01-17 18:49:52.620261+01 by Dan Lyke 4 comments

FTC takes action against General Motors for sharing precise location and driving behavior. Yep, your OnStar subscription was a way to get you to pay to have your privacy violated.

Verge, /.

[ related topics: Privacy Current Events ]

comments in ascending chronological order (reverse):

#Comment Re: FTC takes action against GM made: 2025-01-18 15:50:49.805623+01 by: Definitely Not a Bot

If you need another rabbit hole: https://www.techdirt.com/search/?q=privacy+automobiles

#Comment Re: FTC takes action against GM made: 2025-01-20 17:41:07.993272+01 by: Dan Lyke

Yeah, we dropped our whole connected vehicle thing when the "free" trial ran out, and I'm actually okay with incentives for people to drive more safely because holy shit, drivers, but...

And it's amazing how much the car experience degrades when you don't have the connected subscription stuff. It randomly pops up messages about logging in, there's a "don't show me this again" button (not sure what that actually means, maybe it's this on/off cycle, but I'm sure I've caught it pestering me again) that only shows up when the car is stopped.

I think the only real answer is to move away from having a car...

#Comment Re: FTC takes action against GM made: 2025-01-22 13:24:22.700499+01 by: DaveP

FWIW, our 2024 Toyota Grand Highlander Hybrid is fine living without an online connection to their service as long as I let it phone home (via WiFi) for updates every now and again (seemingly every 60-90 days is enough). So now I have a special guest-internet zone for the car and various other IoShit things that I turn on every now and again so they don’t whine.

As for the car experience, the only thing that really degrades if you have an iPhone doing CarPlay is that many of the car settings are unavailable when CarPlay is running, so in order to adjust the high-beams (for example), I have to shut off WiFi on my phone so the car doesn’t see it and will present the car’s own UI for various settings. Or I can connect the dongle to the OBD2 port and launch the Carista app and tweak settings via that (but again, I need to disconnect from CarPlay).

I haven’t dug into what the car sends back when it’s phoning home. I’m assuming it’s all sorts of stuff I’d rather keep private, but I haven’t tried to figure out firewall settings so it can check for updates without leaking data. Too many hobbies.

#Comment Re: FTC takes action against GM made: 2025-01-25 17:38:58.63816+01 by: Definitely Not a Bot

It's sending your phone contact list and, I cynically guess, phone logs and text messaging and history.

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