Hello internet users. Someone in my family is looking to buy a car and wanted some recommendations for a private one. They are looking to buy new, and need Android Auto and CarPlay. I know all new cars suck for privacy by default, but I was hoping someone here could offer some insight as to which cars can be made better and what cars offer the best experience with minimal compromises on privacy and no subscription bs. I also have a Home Assistant instance that they can access remotely if there are any cars that can work well with that.
Edit: Android auto and CarPlay aren’t as important as I thought.
Unlikely to find a new car without a calling home function.
Definitely not one with car play.
Best you can do is find the cell antenna port and put an RF sink on it (they’re used for testing radio output).
Tell me more about this rf sink
The technical term is “dummy load”, most antennas are around 50ohm “impedance” which in an incredibly roundabout way means the antenna is indistinguishable from a 50ohm resistor at whatever frequency it’s tuned to…which means you can replace the antenna with a 50ohm resistor.
This all assumes you care about leaving the radio functional (radio amplifiers will burn up if they can’t dissipate the energy they’re creating) and in most cases it’s probably fine to just cut the trace as close to the source chip as possible. That said, if the system is especially evil and well engineered it’ll throw errors in some cases so better to leave everything functional but unable to hear or transmit.
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I think if you remove internet connection from the car and use it with a phone with graphene os is it would be OK but I could be wrong.
If you’re using the android Auto app then I don’t see how the OS even matters. You can turn off Google location services but I’ve never tried that with android Auto.
You have to sacrifice something. It’s generally not possible to use cloud-based services while maintaining total privacy - at least not in a way that’s convenient.
Here’s what you can do - get a car with minimal tech built into it’s head unit. Get a new head unit and get a car audio shop to swap it out for you. This will void your car warranty if it’s new, but some HUs have navigation built in (not Internet dependent ) and support simple Bluetooth .
If you want full Android Auto capability then idk if it’s even possible to meet all your stated requirements.
The os lets you revoke permissions from it.
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Wala
“Wala?” Voilà perhaps?
Na kopeng, mi pensa im say you a welwala…
Hey look everyone, we got a dirty belter here!
Belta lik pashang! Keting dzemang to vedi du, paxoniseki?
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It’s voilá, not boneappletea.
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See, you could have just said “Oh, silly me! Thanks!”, and nobody would have thought less of you, but now, everyone thinks you’re a prick.
Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak and to remove all doubt.
You fools just can’t handle the supreme knowledge I have bestowed upon thee
Just buy a used car. Look for low KM and good climate rating.
Why care for privacy when in the end your using android auto or apple play?
And a home assistant breaks the point even further.
Not a home assistant. Home Assistant™, the open source privacy focused home automation system.
As I said, it is for a family member. I agree about buying used.
I think android auto can be reasonably private with Graphene OS’s implementation.
I don’t know what you are saying about Home Assistant.
Edit: Home Assistant
sorry. Didnt know what home assistant was.
I bought a 2015 Dacia. It’s just smart enough that it let’s you connect a device through Bluetooth, however it’s not smart in any other way. It’s barely got kilometers (sub 1k) and will last me a while.
Cars have been doing this for over 20 years at this point. Buying used won’t help unless you go really old.
Sorry, but I have bad news for you. Privacy in major car brands no longer exists.
You don’t say where your family member lives, but you might look into smaller regional brands that focus on cheap cars for less overdeveloped areas of the world. Be aware the tradeoff is probably in safety features.
There are things you can do though.
GM for example you cannot remove OnStar from their vehicles. But with my Subaru removing the starlink module was a ~20 minute procedure. You’ll need an aftermarket harness in order to maintain the front speakers.
What country are you in? Apparently, all carmakers are really bad about privacy right now, but Renault seems to be the best of the bunch: https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/privacynotincluded/articles/its-official-cars-are-the-worst-product-category-we-have-ever-reviewed-for-privacy/t
Your link is bad (accidentally added t at the end), here is a working one.
And, holy fucking shit, I had no idea it was this bad. Thank goodness my car was built in 1987.
Thanks for catching the extraneous ‘t’!
Android Auto and CarPlay or Privacy. You won’t get both.
Your use of ‘need’ is quite a stretch.
You could always simply not use android auto or carplay? Surely that would be a start.
When you go just ask if there’s cars or models without the car itself having a SIM card but that still has carplay. People love to drum this stuff up but they still make dumb cars. There’s usually like 3 variations maybe 4 of each model. Go lower on the model to get less features but still the right amount of them.
in the eu all newer models are required to be able to call emergency services in case of a crash and share the location of the vehicle. so no newer cars in the eu without an integrated sim card.
I don’t know how that’s implemented but I suspect it’s done without a SIM card since SIM cards exists for authentication and not for functionality. The emergency call is probably done without any authentication or fee.
They might also have something like an Esim that authorises the car to call specific services. I doubt that car manufacturers are paying much or anything at all for the emergency services calls and I doubt they would put in a full connection unless someone paid for it (if the consumer bought smart features for example)
Nope, emergency calls don’t work without sim cards anymore, at least in germany. Because burglars checked the functionality of stolen phones by dialing 112, so they made it require a sim card. I think it can be locked tho, not sure.
I don’t have a great answer to your question, but you might be able to find a relatively cheap car that isn’t “smart” and doesn’t have a touchscreen or anything. Do they make those anymore? Then, you could add an aftermarket stereo receiver to it, like some of the options in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4t1GdI9UsEI
Yes, that’s still a “smart” stereo but it’s NOT connected to any of the car manufacturer’s metrics or systems, right? So the separation makes it seem more privacy-friendly to me. I could be thinking about this incorrectly, but it seems logical to me. There might be some stereo receivers that are more private than others, but you’d have to do your own research for that.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://www.piped.video/watch?v=4t1GdI9UsEI
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
Do you know of new cars that don’t have all the smart nonsense?
Damn, I’m looking around and don’t see any, even the cheapest Toyotas and Kias have a big touchscreen with Android and CarPlay. I’m not sure what happens if you take that out and replace it with an aftermarket receiver, but it appears to be possible because Crutchfield sells receivers for a 2024 Corolla: https://www.crutchfield.com/g_473950/Digital-Multimedia-Video-Receivers.html
I’m also seeing people online saying that there are cars made for businesses that still come with no “smart” features. But I have no clue how you would buy one of those, I doubt they have them at dealerships: https://www.reddit.com/r/whatcarshouldIbuy/comments/124n5qw/what_cars_less_than_5_years_old_are_recommended/
Or, you could just get a used car, save some money, and check all the low-tech boxes.
I think the mitsubishi space star could be an answer, base model doesn’t have a smart anything, but it might not be available where you are
They are looking to buy new, and need Android Auto and CarPlay
I was active on an automotive forum around the time when that sort of thing started to be seen as a “need” by car salesmen and some of their more enthusiastic customers. The big new thing was “infotainment” and it seemed like the whole industry was insisting we’d all soon see how essential this stuff was. I was disdainful of the idea then, and have only become more so. Cars should have an AM/FM radio receiver, and aside from lights and a horn that’s all they need for communications.
That’s not the answer you’re looking for, but it seems reasonably on-topic here. If you must get a new car, the easiest route to having it not spy on you as much as it can all the time is to make sure it doesn’t have a SIM card (or remove the one it does have) and never connect your phone to it in any way except perhaps via a 3.5mm audio jack.
I don’t understand why everyone seems to be latching on to carplay and android auto in this thread as if it’s the car stealing your data. All carplay and android auto do is take a video feed from your phone an display it on the car’s screen. You still have the privacy issues, but it’s not the car doing anything, they’re the same as if you had a dumb car and google maps up on your phone in a phone mount.
Most are missing the point. You’re right, running AA or CP is akin to just using your phone with a vent mount, albeit arguably safer. The privacy issues come with things like OnStar and similar services that connect back to the manufacturer. As someone already pointed out it doesn’t sound like there’s a way to remove OnStar, but some others might be removeable, or not available in cheaper models.
Your faith in the safety of allowing your car and your phone the opportunity to share data with each other is touching, but until I see the source code I will remain unconvinced that it isn’t a bad idea.
In most cars the telemetry data is stored in a separate computer outside of your head unit. There’s minimal communication between the head unit and the telemetry box. In the case of my Subaru there’s 0 communication, the telematics box just does or doesn’t pass audio to the front speakers. You can also read through the documentation on Carplay and AA. Last I saw there was nothing that allows for any real communication between your head unit and the phone outside of the audio and video signal. Carplay 2 may change things
Being paranoid for paranoia’s sake isn’t productive. All it does is scare off people who may be interested but aren’t willing to cut out every single convenience from their lives.
Bluetooth connection is a must too, but it doesn’t need to access my contacts. Just as a music player or headset.
I’m just leaving a comment here because if there is a positive answer to this, I also want to know. I think we’re just hosed as far as cars go.
Doesn’t Lemmy let you save posts or is that just my client?
Well, I’m one of today’s lucky 10000 I guess. Thanks!
Would love some info on where all this shit is located in the car. Someone should make a database of the different cars and how to block shit
Dacia, least bad one. Made a dedicated phone for the car without personal info as well. Rooted calyx OS , microG, organic maps and spottube. No simcard and VPN on WiFi. Not sure how much is still leaked but a lot better at least.
Find a old car that doesn’t have a lot of miles. Its not the best deal but it will work.
Couldn’t you ask the guys at the dealership to remove the router and such from the car? Say you don’t want internet. If so, I’d say that’s the best you’d get in terms of new cars.
