Never used Android Auto before. Any privacy best practices or tips on GOS?

Designed1668

Sorry if these questions are confusing. I'm trying to understand how my car works, how Android auto works, and how grapheneos works simultaneously.

I ended up buying a new Toyota car that comes with Android Auto. My old car was 15 years old so this is all new to me. My old car let me make bluetooth calls and listen to music/turn-by-turn directions from my phone through bluetooth and I mounted my phone so I could see the map navigation.

There really isn't any place for me to mount my phone like in my last car. If I want to see maps, I'm likely going to have to use Android Auto. i'm also unsure if my car even has normal bluetooth or if everything just goes through android auto. If it does have bluetooth, I'm not sure if the privacy implications are different from using it compared to my old car. Maybe people are more familiar with how new cars work?

I've read that new cars are some of the worst data harvesters and that car play/android auto significantly adds to it so I've been scared to try anything.

I'm thinking about isolating Android auto and all of the apps I might need with it to another user profile or my private space if that would work. Ideally, i could turn this profile/space off when not in use.

If i plugged my phone in or connected wirelessly to android auto, how do i make it so it only has access to a specific user profile or private space instead of my whole owner profile or other profiles?

I want to avoid giving my car access to too much stuff. I'm still not sure what it needs though. I'm expecting to use Google Maps/Organic Maps/Magic Earth. Maybe some music stuff. Not sure if it needs access to my phone/signal/whatsapp since I really just want to be able to make/receive hands free calls, but I don't necessarily want my calls to be recorded or for my car to see my previous call logs and message history.

How do you recommend I set everything up? Which apps do you recommend?

Should I create another Google account specifically to use with Android auto? Does it need a Google account? Which apps and permissions should I give access to?

Thank you.

goslife

Designed1668 I am not sure about what the car actually gets from Android auto. What I do for mine is have Google services in my owner profile with Android auto, music, podcast app, Google maps and any of the other random apps I need to get from Google Play or needs play services in that profile and then I have a private profile with all my open sourse privacy friendly apps. Proton, Molly etc. I mostly use the stuff in private space. I will disable all downloaded apps in owner profike except for the stuff I use for aa since don't use the others much. I just leave my private space unlocked so I can get molly notifications.

Michiel

I would set it up in a separate user account in your case. AA requires google play services, but I don't think it requires a google account, unless you also want to use voice commands. AA works fine without them though and you can also make phone calls and use SMS. It requires lots of permissions for this, but you can use contact scopes to limit its access to your full list.

You can push your navigation and music apps from the owner profile, but you'll have to copy your music files manually to the user profile. Also your contacts must be copied.

Magic Earth has traffic information, so I prefer it over Organic Maps for navigation.

Designed1668

Follow up questions. What are the privacy implications of using android auto on my main owner profile (where I'm already logged into my main google account with play services) compared to using it on a secondary profile? From what I've seen, I need to log into a Google account in order to access some features such as text-to-speech directions and google assistant powered voice commands while driving. So is creating a second profile for this purpose just privacy theater, especially since Android Auto is already "sandboxed?"

My biggest concern is sending phone data to my car since my car will send data to the manufacturer and other third-parties. For example, I don't want my car to see my Google account data, message history, contacts, or to see the contents of apps that I don't manually designate for android auto. I also get worried about my car trying to exploit protections by my phone's OS - not sure if that is even possible on normal android or grapheneos.

Michiel

Magic Earth has its own test to speech implementation, so no need for installing Google TTS for that. Since AA and your car's software are closed source it is difficult or maybe impossible to answer your other questions.