The Creepy Reality of Car Privacy Policies

0:01 the Privacy narrative in general has not like we're just waking up to it it hasn't yet been applied to Cars and Cars are horrendous and so much worse than you realize if you have ever read a privacy policy from a brand new car it probably there are companies and I'm not even joking we're filming your kids in the back seat andoss I wish that were the worst of it yes they're filming your kids but they're literally saying we have

0:27 permission to track your sexual activity they have that written into their Clauses sometimes there are companies yeah so there are companies that have that wait a second huh I'm not joking I'm you've actually seen this with your own eyes we are with my own eyes and mazilla just put out a report that said they have this great website called privacy not included where you can look at different apps and see how creepy they are on the creepy scale and they

0:50 just put out a report on cars and we actually just did a um a deep dive investigation to cars as well the United aut workers union is in your bedroom by way of the car so it kind of it it started out like if you think of your car we kind of think about them like okay well they're a vehicle it's like this private box with wheels that takes me where I want to go no your car is a

1:13 smartphone on Wheels it is a a system with hundreds of computers bolted on top the same way that you have a phone with hundreds of apps on top and each of those computers is sending data out to countless entities and how are they sending data that's a great question question well every car has a SIM card in it these days so they're just sending out all of that data just by having cellular connectivity and you can remove

1:37 that but quite often it will break your car um or every time you go to the dealership they're either exfiltrating that data or they're hooking up it's programmed to literally connect to the SSID that they want it to connect to automatically and the dealership probably has that SSID so it's just connecting to the Wi-Fi automatically or you're connecting it to your home Wi-Fi cuz people do that for some reason it's using your home Wi-Fi to send off

1:59 information so car is this data harvesting machine that sees everywhere you travel sees the people that you meet is literally taking camera footage is literally taking microphone audio uh in the car as well and like so that's just the data collection side and then we haven't quite yet come to terms with how hackable these systems are so I'm not just talking about the legitimate ways legitimate ways that we've signed over and said these people get your data I

2:27 one of my favorite things to do is go to hacker conference and I love them things like defcom and they're also terrifying so I kind of need to take some like anxiety I don't know meditation sessions after something go to the black hat conference with some valume oh basically because there are people who will give a presentation about how they yeah they literally just hacked into someone's camera in their car and then actually through that got

2:51 access to their home address and find out the entire medical history of this person got access to their contact list like the these cars are so hackable that it's insane uh because right now they have all these C so you drive into your garage and they've got all these cameras they got all these cameras so you can literally see when people are home where they are you look at your car app for these modern cars all the things that

3:13 you can access you know remotely someone else can access remotely so they can see your camera they can get access to all this data that's just the tip of the iceberg because there are all of these computers that are sending data they're not getting access to so like your tire pressure monitors every car was mandated by the government that every car tire has to have this tire pressure monitor on it and so that's actually pinging out

3:34 you know a certain amount of Hertz that people are now collecting as just a tracking tool to see movement of vehicles and and like it's it and it's like basically what these high pressure monitors are saying like it's they're not connected through a wire to this computer they're sending out this radio signal and the radio signal is basically saying I am Tire XYZ unique identifier one two 3 and my current tire pressure is this so if you're sending out a

3:59 unique identif why does the government care about my tire pressure B for safety so was it was deemed to be safer for a car to be uh using computers to manage tire pressure so you get that little beep that says your tire is low so we don't blow out tires also you got to realize when you're turning a corner these days you're not the one making that turn your car is very smartly like the technolog is amazing your car is

4:24 very smartly saying okay well I can tell that this tire has slightly lower pressure If you take this corner and you're currently going 60 M hour actually that's going to be a bit dangerous so I'm going to make the turn not as you know sharp as you're actually making it and so your car is actually doing a lot of the driving for you these days computers are managing a huge amount that we don't even realize so yes

4:44 it there is a safety element there then the byproduct of that is so much more what does that have to do with sharing it on wireless yeah well it's just being wirelessly broadcast to your Central Computers in your car okay and so but that's can also picked up by antennas and also like scarily I went to this I I recently went to shukan which is a conference in DC and uh this guy opens up his like pelic and case of dark

5:12 materials and he's got this big antenna he's like see this antenna here I'm like yes he's like and see all of these numbers here and I'm like yes those numbers are going through this wall and through that wall and through that wall and this radio is picking up the tire pressure signals from all of the cast passing by so I can actually keep this as a database and I've been doing this for a while so I can actually see okay

5:35 these people I've seen before these are the areas that I've seen them through you can just start to map people's locations because it's like every one of these things if it's enough uni if there's enough unique data points it becomes a kind of fingerprint becomes a fingerprint exactly but this is stuff this is like stuff that I don't think people can worry about right now we don't have Solutions going to file this under file this terrifying but I'm going

5:57 to walk the dog in the morning and not think about this okay I would say the best thing you can do let's just start the conversation when you go to buy a car just ask your dealership hey can you show me the privacy policy hey can I opt out of any of this can I choose not to have remote start you know or whatever because I see that's a feature that you're now selling to te every time I

6:17 start my engine just have a conversation because the more we normalize these conversations the more our society is going to start to prioritize privacy if you like this clip we've got more where that came from and don't forget to subscribe to the channel so you won't miss our new videos as they come out each [Music] week