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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: August 8th, 2023

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  • On the technological side of things, you’re pretty much fucked no matter what. Virtually all car companies now have proprietary app integrations, partnerships with Google and Apple, and other anti-privacy features.

    Some practical things you can do-

    Opt out of as much data collection and sharing as you can. Read the manual and menu dive to disable optional features you don’t need.

    If you finance or lease from the dealer, there are likely additional data disclosures and third party sharing that you can opt out of. Read all the paperwork when you sign your purchase or lease documents. In my case I had to literally fill out and mail something in (they don’t want it to be easy to opt-out because they make money from sharing the data with third parties).



  • I mean, the bug and the feature of an Apple Airtag is the ubiquity of their devices and their ability to backchannel BLE over cellular networks using millions of end user devices with their pseudoconsent.

    Just by the nature of how that expansive network functions, there is no similar alternative that you can control the privacy of.

    The alternative would be a GPS transponder intended for vehicles, such as LoJack, or something similar. They are going to have power and subscription requirements, usually cost $1000 for the hardware etc. And in that scenario you still have to “trust” the vendor to a degree.












  • If I had to come up with a steelman argument for small “AI focused” systems like this, I’d say that the more development in this space, makes the cost of entry cheaper, and actually eventually starves out the big tech garbage like OpenAI/Google/Microsoft.

    If everyone who wants to use AI can locally process queries to a locally hosted open-source model with “good enough” results, that cuts out the big tech douchebags, or at least gives an option to not participate in their data collection panopticon ecosystem.