A Seattle-based appellate judge ruled that the practice does not meet the threshold for an illegal privacy violation under state law, handing a big win to automakers Honda, Toyota, Volkswagen and General Motors.
OK, I finally read the original allegation and this is grossly irresponsible reporting. We can put our pitchforks down. The plaintiffs never even claim that the automakers can access your text messages in the first place. This is entirely about the car’s hardware locally caching the messages it displays, some of which could possibly then be read from the cache using specialized and not commonly available equipment.
Is it something to be aware of? Sure. Is something the average person should be concerned about? Not really.
That’s a very good reason to not connect your phone to your car.
That’s a very good reason to not buy any car which has this interception “feature”.
That’s a very good way of saying don’t buy anything built in the last five years
I bought my first car this year, I am very happy with it, it is a 2021 Seat Leon PHEV, but shit like this is terrible.
I remember several years ago when I noted that cars had started comming with emergency SOS buttons and apps, that made me realize that there had to be a built in mobile phone connection, and after reading some more, yep, I was right, automakers put in a cell phone module with an eSIM that is allways connected, meaning the car keeps talking to the automakers servers, even if you don’t connect a phone.
This means that it is worth it to the automakers to add a phone module and continously pay for a subscription for every car, even if you don’t use the feature, that is scary.
Working for a Mobile network provider that does connectivity for cars among other things i can add to that, that they are paying a fairly high price for this stuff too.
