Your car is spying on you.

Reads like AI slop

Just to pick up 1 misleading statement: "Microphones and cameras in the cabin can listen into conversations and log what you’re talking about and with who." Yes they can. But they are not and will not. Simply because if they would listen and record , the storage of that data for each car and phone, camera, etc would be so hughe that would cost a fortune, and nobody pays for that. We can't even builld that many storage and also energy sources that it would require.

Not my car. Retro 1980's M3 E30 has no technology. It doesn't even have a Radio. The speakers are custom and they connect to a simple USB-only music player. It's full of Spotify-ripped FLAC files.

you're not escaping vehicle surveillance and if your ride has lic. plates it's all they need

Storage is getting cheaper and cheaper every single hour of the day. Price per gigabyte is like $0.0001 or something these days.

Tesla is storing every single camera frame and image and sensor data and everything all of their cars do every second in order to train for Full Self Driving.

That's just ONE example.

Don't underestimate what is being recorded.

I did most of my research on Ford, and I might have made a few general statements. However, it is something that is happening. ⚠️Ford's Privacy Policy⚠️ clearly states they are using your cars voice assistant to record and save your conversations.

We collect the categories of Personal Data... including audio and visual data such as... utterances captured when the vehicle’s voice recognition system is in “active listen” state...

It's not exactly clear if they're saving the actual audio data or if they're first dictating it on the car, but they are listening. Vehicle spying is a HUGE industry, and it is more than worth it for insurance providers or advertisers to have live audio.

Cameras are a completely different monster, though. It's possible they are saving some data, or maintain a live feed if they need to access it, but their privacy policy doesn't say anything. Video is just too big to store for so many cars for so long. Especially with the current price of hard drives, it would be ruinously expensive if they didn't already have the infrastructure. I don't doubt there is still some form of in-vehicle video surveillance (See ⚠️US 2026/0095520 A1⚠️), but it's nothing more than lip reading and facial expression tracking. Still very invasive, but not a constant 360 view of the area.

Nah, old cars are still just better to buy than a new car. Don't need to put in the extra effort to remove the surveillance tech, hoping that you did not miss anything they could use to spy on you as in new cars.

I understand the reasoning, but I still think that's a bad take. There are so many features you'll miss out on that are worth the few extra minutes it takes to disconnect the spyware. I can't find any fully electric or even plug-in hybrid vehicles that do not have some sort of app or cell connection. It's perfectly okay to drive an older car if you want to; I have nothing against it. It's just not a valid response to someone asking for advice on a newer vehicle. I wrote this post out of frustration from weird privacy policies and horrible responses on clearnet forums. Would you be mad if you got a new game, and started having issues with it; then asked for help with a specific problem only to for people to tell you that you should have gotten a different game that didn't have that problem? It's an okay take, but a bad response.

Driving is probably the most surveilled thing you can do, and it's the most likely place you will ever be forced to interact with law enforcement. I'm not sure what you can do about it other than be extremely cautious of any activities done in your car.

I agree. Every 10 minutes my car would send a signal to the nearest Microwave (mine) to enable popcorn mode and it would ruin my lunch. Every. Single. Day. So, I replaced my car with a 10 foot tall unicycle.