In the end, the KIA car company made its cars into subscription models, I really hate this because in the end the car we buy with our own money doesn’t feel like it belongs to us. Should we finally buy an old school car ? so as not to be affected by this subscription models or is there a way to crack the software installed in it ?
looking through that list fully half are internal only , or tied to the remote that comes with the vehicle. no 3rd party required.
i understand all the cellular-required bits… ‘find my car’… but remote start? my brand new vehicle has remote start with no subscription.
My car offered a remote start on the key fob and even the dealer told me not to buy it because the range was so short. I ended up installing an after market Viper system that is cellular and costs ~$100 per year when I get 3 years at a time. Do even the after market solutions have subscriptions.
Based on the context of the other features, I assume this isn’t “start your car through your remote” but “use an app to start your car”. Same with all the other stuff.
Some manufacturers give this stuff out for free… for a while. There’s no money in giving away free services, so assume any internet operated service by any manufacturer can and will make you pay for a subscription.
They’ll make you pay for it, while simultaneously collecting usage data via the app, and further turning a profit off you.
“Usage data” for these types of features is completely worthless to anyone but car manufacturers, and KIA isn’t going to sell their own analytics to a competitor.
More likely, this data will be used to justify shutting down servers for certain old models of car when only a few people still use them.
If it was worthless they wouldn’t put a fucking 4g modem on all of them “for free” and siphoning all the telemetry away
It doesn’t matter where the data goes, or if it’s kept proprietary. Businesses wouldn’t collect metrics if it didn’t translate to dollar signs for them. It forms their business decisions.
And it not being shared with other businesses is only one point of concern from a privacy perspective. Another is that large corporations are hacked or otherwise infiltrated quite frequently, resulting in user data leaks.
You assume they are only collecting usage data with their apps, which is typically not the case. Some of them request every permission on your phone just to collect as much as they can.