OnStar reports location and speed data to the car manufacturer. Sometimes they will sell this data to insurance companies to raise your premium, as several news stores pointed out a few weeks ago. I couldn’t really find an advantage to OnStar, (I have my phone to call emergency services) so I disabled it by pulling it’s fuse.
For my 2019 bolt, it’s f31 in the instrument panel fuse box, just down and to the left of the steering wheel. The fuse box cover comes off when you pull it hard from the bottom.
I was able to find which fuse went to OnStar in the owners manual and labeled on the inside of the fuse box cover. You should be able to find it for your model car there too if it uses OnStar.
I did have the casualty of my speaker for calls and texts. I’m not able to use it right now. I’ll see if I can dig in and reconnect it somehow, but we’ll see.
Who knows that other into they’re snitching back to GM, or what they could do in the future, so I recommend disconnecting it. Good luck!
inb4 manufacturers start baking it into the fuel injection cpu, and spending (your) extra money with encryption to lock the “owner” out like modern phones
My cell phone doesn’t have a fuel injection cpu.
Pathetic, how old is your phone??? Like a thousand years or something???
Cadillac here. I just unscrew the cellular antenna from the onstar module before leaving the lot. Looks like the onstar module is less conveniently located for bolts (it’s under my rear seats, I think it’s behind your screen), but that’s a good way to avoid collateral damage to other things on the same fuse. Since it’s a separate antenna from the gps, I even still get navigation, just without map updates. It’s all the good of a cell jammer, with none of the prison or fines. For now.
Even better because without the antenna load, the transmitter may burn out.
So if they’re charging more for bad drivers, they’ll charge less for good drivers, right?
If one company raises rates on bad drivers and uses the difference to offer lower rates to other drivers, they’ll get more customers.
You should do stand-up, that was hilarious
It was downright adorable
I literally started typing “please don’t reply if it’s just some knee-jerk response” then decided it wasn’t necessary. Yet here we are.
You’d think wouldn’t you!
The thing even some reporters who’re alarmed at this story like: usage-based insurance which does actually let people pay less if they’re provably safe. Safe, and/or low mileage. They also want drivers to be alerted when aggressive driving is detected to be given a chance to improve.
I think a program like that might be OK today for those who are very well informed about it. One day if every new car is web connected, I can imagine insurers trying to gouge anyone not in a driver monitoring program.
Such a privacy & liberty nightmare has a small silver lining I almost refuse to acknowledge: in a full-on Big Brother driving world, with human-expert-equivalent analysis of behavior, raging murderous drivers would certainly find it harder to do 100+ MPH with their lights off entering an active crosswalk while passing a schoolbus in the rain.
This turns out to be a bad thing. Enough people are uninformed or don’t care about their privacy that over time an option that doesn’t sell customer data loses customers and becomes more expensive and gets cancelled.
LMK if anyone finds the fuse my Kia uses to track my sex life per the TOS. Also unrelated, but please LMK if anyone finds my sex life. I seem to have misplaced it.
It’s in your glove.
Have you looked in your socks?
Infiniti put 3g chips in their car because they were cheap, now they don’t work. Guess I don’t need to worry.
the rare occasion when corporate penny pinching will actually be a good thing.
After I read about the Lexis Nexus shit I was like, hell yeah I’m never selling my car.
For older cars, if the only “smart” thing you have is GPS, you should be fine since it only receives and doesn’t transmit.
This post makes me really glad I didn’t buy a Chevy Bolt the last time I bought a car. I thought the whole subcompact electric thing was cool, but this is kind of insane.
It’s not just electric, and it’s not just subcompacts. It’s pretty much every car with a cellular capability (onstar and competitors), whether you have service enabled or not.
Check for your make here: https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/privacynotincluded/categories/cars/
Nissan even has in their privacy policy that they can collect your “sexual activity, health diagnosis data, and genetic information” and will sell to advertisers “Inferences drawn from any Personal Data collected to create a profile about a consumer reflecting the consumer’s preferences, characteristics, psychological trends, predispositions, behavior, attitudes, intelligence, abilities, and aptitudes”. Not so realistic until you sync your phone and text message history to the car.
Thanks! I checked and both my cars are too old to be a problem, and I don’t see myself buying a car made after 2019… ever.
Closing your eyes and plugging your ears and ignoring the problem won’t make it go away, it’ll allow it to grow unfettered until 2050 when your 40 year old beater finally gives out and you have to buy a newer car.
Ah, okay, let me just nip on down to the GM R&D facility and ask them nicely to remove these features.
Seriously, what do you expect me to do other than not buy what they’re selling? And if every car is like this, do I just never buy a car?
You can promote and share articles such as the Mozilla research that this outrage came from to raise awareness and a coalition of like-minded, privacy-focused individuals.
You can donate to non profits that are dedicated to bringing these privacy invasions to light and fighting them such as the EFF or the Mozilla Foundation.
You can write to your Senators or your Representative to let them know you’re unhappy with how these companies are treating your legislators’ constituents.
I have done all of the three above and I can at least say that I’m doing my part even if I’m not going to the GM R&D facility.
Or stop buying cars made by these companies.
They all do it, to varying extents. The only good way to avoid it is buying a car old enough to not collect your data.
Your first mistake is buying Chevy.
Only cheap EV, not much of a choice
I would rather ride a pogo stick to work than ever give Chevy another penny.
Why?
Because every experience I have ever had with them has been awful, and everyone I know who has owned a chevy has had constant issues. Transmission failures under 50k miles, electronics breaking on new cars, entire ac failing on a car with with only 40k miles, etc. I could keep going. GM clearly does not give a shit about quality control.
Hmm I’ll keep an eye out. Mine doesn’t have a transmission though.
Good luck!
