this post was submitted on 29 Sep 2026
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Your car is a smartphone on wheels: A team of researchers tested 21 vehicles and found that all of them transmitted data to a third-party domain. And over half were pinging advertising companies. (www.consumerreports.org)
submitted 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) by beep@piefed.world to c/technology@lemmy.world
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cross-posted from: https://piefed.world/c/tech/p/1432229/your-car-is-a-smartphone-on-wheels-a-team-of-researchers-tested-21-vehicles-and-found-th

Data sent by vehicles and companion apps included locations, VINs, and other identifiers. Amazon, Google, Meta, and Microsoft were among the top receivers of driver data.

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[–] Boost@lemmy.world 4 points 6 days ago

Many cars have the modem / LTE as a module that can be disabled. On my car, a 2018 Chevy, the LTE antenna plugs into a networking module in the footwell. I bought an antenna cable and dummy load resistor on Amazon for ~$10 and simply unplugged the LTE antenna in the car and plugged in the dummy antenna. That disables all cell network connectivity but doesn't effect things like Bluetooth. It's also easily reversible if someone wanted to do that for some reason.

You can probably Google something like "year make model disable LTE" or "disable telemetry" to get an idea of how hard it would be on your car. Some make it very cheap / easy and some make it very difficult.