RRZishe do the car manufacturers have access to whatever is displayed on the car screen via Android Auto?
Yes. In fact, it's perfectly legal for cars to harvest your texts and call logs.
What will Google know about me with Android Auto
RRZishe what does Google collect about me when I use Android Auto?
I'm also curious what Google is getting their hands on when using Android Auto. I'd like the GrapheneOS documentation to add a worst case scenario to describe the security implications for every toggle they add in general.
- Google Camera
- toggle: direct TPU and GXP access
- implication: ?
- Google eSIM
- toggle: execute proprietary code with privileges
- implication: Google learns your esim identifiers and phone number.
- Google Auto
- toggle: execute proprietary code with privileges
- implication: Google learns your location, destination and music playlist?
Android Auto must be running to detect a car. I wonder if Android Auto causes google to learn all your locations, not just when a car is connected. 🤔
RRZishe I don't think that article says if they used Android Auto or just connected via USB.
This is true. However, that's what Android Auto can do, if for example the "phone control" and "audio routing control" toggles are enabled, I guess it (both Google and the car) can get contacts, phone numbers, messages, recordings such as voice commands, etc. I remember Mozilla wrote a blog post about cars being a privacy nightmare on wheels.
If you want to buy a modern car in the future, don't read Sam's blog Web Hackers vs. The Auto Industry. Let's hope in the future there will be GrapheneCarOS, so we don't have to worry. 😉
- Edited
RRZishe what can they do with audio routing control?
RRZishe route audio through the cars microphones and the cars speakers, or through googles assistant.
The problem is that cars (and googles assistant) are known to keep recordings of the microphones. This is not done with bad intent. Perhaps it's just a cache for performance reasons or voice analytics, or some type of black box recordings in case you have a severe car accident. However, bad can be done even if it was not intended by design. If it's a modern car, it´s basically a computer with remote access for the vendor (and the state through FISA order). If it's not that modern, a bad actor car mechanic can still copy the recordings from your car for fun and profit.
It's not that bad, unless it's a risk to your threat model (you're a journalist, whistle-blower or a famous millionaire).
Off topic rant:
I always got around this type of threat by buying old cars. More fun to drive too! But in my country this is becoming hard to do, as you’re not allowed to drive anything other than very new cars in more and more places. This is a good thing for the environment and pollution, but really terrible to be forced into changing from driving a dumb mechanical machine to a semi intelligent, semi autonomous, tracking and listening computer on wheels.
I am also very interested in the privacy implications of android auto. I haven't given any of the google apps network permissions so I'm not too worried, but is there anything that gets sent to google if I were to switch on AA network access?
2 months later
digital If Google know that some random person is driving from point A to point B and listening to Mozart, well that's fine.
If point A and point B are genuinely random, that's one thing. If A is "home" and B is "work", and that trip (and/or the reverse) happens five times, there is a fair chance Google knows who was driving (and thus who likes Mozart).
There are various academic papers about de-anonymization of location data, but most seem paywalled. Here is an Wikipedia article: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_re-identification
Threat models differ, so many people don't mind Google tying a device to a person. But some likely do.