Disabling e-Call on your new car

AdrianC

Surely the solution is simple...?

Round here, we have no mobile signal. All you need to do is move house. If you can afford to consider a McLaren before buying a Porsche, that'll be straightforward.

Anyway, the actual legislation...
https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/PDF/?uri=CELEX:02015R0758-20180331&from=EN

McLaren are exempt because of the small-series approval exemption.

Oh, and btw - you can put the tin-foil hat away. The "minimum data set" that's sent in the event of a collision contains only location of the crash site, the triggering mode (automatic or manual), the vehicle identification number, a timestamp, as well as current and previous positions (so direction of travel can be ascertained). Nothing is sent while the car's being used normally. Of course, you might not believe that - in which case, surely you don't believe the car isn't sending it anyway, even without e-Call...?
https://eena.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/eCall-factsheet.pdf

bengalknights

Sooooo if i can find the sim and pop it in a mifi router i get unlimited data????

MEM62

peter_the_piper wrote: »

I'm curious as to why its such a big thing that the OP will not buy a car.

Paranoia .......

Ergates

peter_the_piper wrote: »

I'm curious as to why its such a big thing that the OP will not buy a car.

Because if you were to count the number of sandwiches required for a picnic, and then count the number of sandwiches held by the OP, you would find there is a difference of 2.

I'll leave you to guess which way round.

SaturnV

I can offer some insight into this. Firstly, this has nothing whatsoever to do with the health & well being (safety) of the citizenry. As ever, there is far more to it. The European Union has a long term vision to introduce pan-European, pay as you go road pricing and the componentry contained in “e-call” is a key enabler – hence the compulsory dimension.

Going back in time, to the 1990’s, as an exercise in empire building the European Space Agency wanted to justify the deployment of a fleet of satellites as an alternative to American and Russian global positioning systems. The budget was set at €1.1bn and one of the selling points to the parliament was that it would provide the required infrastructure for road pricing. The budget was approved and the programme went ahead.

Road pricing being universally unpopular the task of selling it to the public was given to life long euro civil servant Luc Tytgat who in 1999 devised e-Call and sold the compulsory fitting of the devices into every vehicle as a “safety feature”. Bringing things up to date, the budget for the Galileo fleet of satellites is now estimated to be €20bn+ and Luc Tytgat has become a director of the European Space Agency. It will take perhaps ten years for the saturation point to be at a level when the road pricing legislation can be introduced by the Commission and a little longer still until it is actually implemented.

Addressing the privacy issues, auto-makers have a very poor record on the security of their vehicles buying as they do the lowest priced componentry they can. There is a cottage industry for hacking into cars and academia have demonstrated how some cars can be hacked and taken over. Land Rover’s new Defender is 5-G enabled and amongst its other features, it is simply a node on a computer network and this will be a characteristic of most if not all new cars going forward. A computer virus in your car? Just a matter of time.

Further, data being the new oil and surveillance capitalism the new “seven sisters” it is inconceivable that auto-makers are not harvesting data on their vehicles and occupants at any opportunity. Only last week Apple Corp. released the following statement

"We realize we haven’t been fully living up to our high ideals, and for that we apologize," reads the statement from the company. Several new changes to the privacy policy were also announced.

First, by default, we will no longer retain audio recordings of Siri interactions. We will continue to use computer-generated transcripts to help Siri improve.

Second, users will be able to opt in to help Siri improve by learning from the audio samples of their requests. We hope that many people will choose to help Siri get better, knowing that Apple respects their data and has strong privacy controls in place. Those who choose to participate will be able to opt out at any time.

Third, when customers opt in, only Apple employees will be allowed to listen to audio samples of the Siri interactions. Our team will work to delete any recording which is determined to be an inadvertent trigger of Siri.

Apple are simply the latest company to be “found out” doing this kind of thing, there are countless other examples and it displays a child like level of naivete to assume that e-call and its future derivatives won’t be used to hoover up data about you now or in the future. The criminal conspiracies of V.A.G. over diesel-gate in which the European Investment Bank were also implicated as well as some Japanese car makers provide insight into the ethics of all of these companies.

With regard to the state surveillance aspect, Edward Snowden will be hunted for the rest of his days for exposing just some of the excesses of state surveillance; Obama himself had to apologise personally to Frau Merkel for personally authorising the hacking of all her cell phones, this a woman who was extensively surveilled by the STASI in her past. Just as Snowden showed how every phone call, SMS and email you make and to whom is logged and stored it is improbable to think your physical journey in your car will not come under the same scrutiny. It is inconceivable that the state allowed e-call legislation to be approved without a "back-door" into the devices, not least to disable their own vehicles from being hacked/tracked. The Sunday Times submitted a Freedom of Information request to ten police forces asking whether they were using eCall to track the movements of drivers. Five forces refused to disclose the information on national security grounds, two forces did not respond, one stated it would be too time-consuming to provide the information and two forces confirmed that they did not track drivers. Draw your own conclusions.

Looking into the more distant future we see autonomous cars on the horizon which of course, will be nothing of the sort and here we see a perfect example of the “boiled frog syndrome” at play with what began as mandatory seat belts “for you own protection” reaching its zenith where your cars will be little more than state controlled taxis with EU approved operating systems deducting tolls per kilometre from your (mandatory) bank account and controlling where, when, how and if you reach your destination - all watched over by machines of loving grace.

Perhaps the most interesting aspect from reading these interactions on here is not the technology and its implications but the vitriol directed at the O/P for simply expressing the basic human desire for privacy and seeking to inform other like minded people; it expresses a certain ideology and finds its perfect analogy in those loyal to the CCP attacking the Hong Kong democracy protesters and is something I find disturbing and depressing in equal measure. You should be ashamed of yourselves but the terrible indictment against yourselves is that you never will be.

AdrianC

I hope you stick around, SaturnV. You're hilarious.

Ergates

SaturnV wrote: »

I can offer some insight into this.
Blah blah blah...etc

Sure thing, Ian.