I wanted to let everybody know, since it isn't commonly known, that pretty much all cars past 2005 contain a hard drive which records location, acceleration, and other data. They are commonly used in car theft cases and insurance claims. From the forensics guys I've talked to, they noted that some modern systems phone home to the manufacturer, but that data is rarely made available to the police. You pretty much cannot buy a modern car without one of these hard drives. Stay safe and if you have questions I can try and answer.
I haven't heard of anyone using this to prove that someone was at a protest ect, but I would expect it in the future. The cops do need a warrant for this and because getting to the drive is a fairly destructive process, they will (generally) actually get one.
If anybody is interested in me summing up digital forensics stuff I can try and write something that is actually readable about it.
Yeah, I'm pretty much going to stick with 90's cars till I die. From the people I've talked to that do this work, they said that the earliest cars they see that they are able to do anything with are 2005.
Public transit definitely has the privacy by obfuscation angle. And I have to wonder if that won't be a way that people secure themselves in the future- eg tapping the link between the ecu and infotainment and pumping in massive amounts of junk data.
It seems like most of the ev conversions stuff you can be pretty sure about it not spying on you, luckily.
I think you must be getting some things confused.
An Event Data Recorder is built into every new car, as part of the airbag module. It only has memory for 60 seconds of recording or so, and is triggered by airbag deployment.
There are telematic systems like OnStar or those plug-in insurance dealies that can transmit data. But that doesn’t require a hard drive; they just read data off the CAN bus. (EDIT: clarification, there are two types of telematics. There's real-time, which doesn't need any hard drive space. Then there are more detailed telematics like for development vehicles, which are stored on the device so they can be compressed and uploaded all at once to save on data bills. I imagine this would also be useful for a taxi fleet or delivery trucks or whatever, so OnStar can do this too.)
I’ve never heard of any kind of long-term telematics storage built-in to every car. I’ve had to put telematics systems in development vehicles, too, so it would have been useful.
Huh. So what's happening here is that various infotainment systems keep caches and logs. Actual telematic systems (OnStar etc. for luxury vehicles, fleet vehicles, whatever) have to keep full data logs so they can upload the data more efficiently (they compress the log before sending it), and they only clear them as needed. There's usually not a whole lot of space dedicated to that. The normal infotainment systems just have whatever caches they use for performance or random debug logs the developer forgot to turn off. I saw one where they were able to recover the last few text messages, some phone logs, the last few GPS destinations, maybe key-on timestamps, but not really anything else. That's about what you'd expect an infotainment connected to your phone to cache. All the infotainment systems run Linux, so if you yank the storage and poke around you might find something juicy. Nobody working at a car company cares enough to encrypt anything, but knowing car company politics I doubt that's due to influence from the cops.
I think the hard drives were mostly a weird thing in the late 2000s, where GM and a few others had a system to rip CDs or otherwise load MP3s onto your car's crappy little 40 GB hard drive. It didn't last very long, but it makes for good pictures on those websites (although it looks like BMW still does that for some reason). Most stuff should be just whatever's cheapest within the warranty period and provides enough space, which is probably flash storage now ($2 per vehicle is massive at the big carmakers).
Excellent clarification! Thanks for expanding. I was mainly only aware of how they used the data, and what it resulted in. I appreciate your look at the more technical aspects.
rebooting this as a netflix series, but its a 2007 ford fiesta
How do these typically operate? Are they constantly transmitting this information somewhere, do they only transmit in the event of a crash, or is it just stored on the hard drive itself? How long are they keeping data -- would this hard drive have location data from a trip I took a month ago? A week ago? How easy is this data to access?
My knowledge on them is limited, but as I understand it only newer cars transmit the data, and only ones that have the cellular package. If you car does not have any kind of cellular then it most likely doesn't transmit outside of the vehicle. Most car manufacturers as I understand it don't transmit the data home, it's usually just the luxury brands, but it is very hard to tell who is and isn't. Most cars that have on-star, or a similar system, will transmit data in the event of a crash, but I do not know, and I don't know if anyone knows, if it transmits telemetry beyond crash location. The hard drives are typically 2.5 inch high vibration protection drives, so they will hold from 500gb to 2tb. They will just tape over themselves once they fill up, but I expect that some may filter what data is over written and what isn't. Realistically, even a 500gb one can hold a couple decades of logs, as they are just text files with time stamps. As with everything with these, what's recorded depends on the manufacturer. Typically you can expect the following information to be logged: car start, car speed, car location, car settings, cruise control, acceleration, engine error codes, door status, window status. The data does take someone trained to access it, but not overly so. Most cities will have a joint digital forensics lab that will have the capabilities, or can send the hard drive to someone with the capabilities. The actual data on the drives may be encrypted, but it also may not. Again, it depends on the manufacturer. Insurance companies are the other big user of this data.
They are located in the infotainment system, usually on the passenger side of the car's firewall. The exact location of the hard drive varies. They are usually in the unit behind the screen, and require near complete disassembly of the whole unit. Some vehicles have separate screen and compute units, the hard drive will likely be in the compute unit. Some vehicles may operate without them, but some may not. It is not well documented.
The big issue is that they aren't well known to be a thing, so there isn't much of a scene around removing them.
I can only assume it's significantly cheaper or something to that effect. Dunno tbh.
its probs just flash because hard drives DO NOT like moving around constantly.
I can assure you there are hdds. They do make some that are more vibration resistant for nas and industrial use.
So I guess this is just going to go unchallenged? This is bs. Until the point where cars have touch screens, this is entirely untrue. Its not even just that it's untrue, it's technically stupid. Such things didn't become technologically possible until smartphones became widespread.
