What your car knows about you, and where ours sends it
New cars quietly report where you go and how you drive to the maker. The Astra doesn't, so we added that ourselves and put it on our own network.
What the upgrade added
When the Astra’s multimedia system was replaced, it got more than a bigger screen. The new head unit runs on Android — think of it as a phone built into the dashboard. It drives the reversing camera, handles music and maps, carries the ambient lighting in the cabin, and, like a phone, it can run ordinary apps. That last part is what turns a car from 2018 into something able to talk to the outside world.
The part where new cars phone home
Buy a new car today and a fair amount of it is watching — where you drive, how you drive, sometimes what’s said in the cabin — and reporting it back to the manufacturer, who can pass it to insurers and data brokers. We went through what that pattern has already cost drivers, and the rights you have against it, in a car that is a smartphone on wheels. The short version: you get the connected features, and someone you’ve never met gets the data.
Where ours sends its data instead
The Astra is old enough that none of this was built in, which turned out to be the advantage: there was nothing to switch off, only something to add on our own terms. A small app on the head unit records where the car goes and sends it to our own location app, running on servers we run in the UK. The map of where the Astra has been lives with us, kept the same way as its service record: our data about our car, on our side.
It’s on the network, not just reporting to it
The logging is only half of it. The head unit’s connection runs over the same private, encrypted network the rest of the estate uses, the WireGuard VPN, and everything it loads is filtered by the network’s own ad and tracker blocking. That filtering happens at the DNS level: the quiet address lookup every device makes before it loads a page, and one of the main places tracking hides. On our network those lookups run through us, so the trackers and junk most cars quietly pull in, ours never sees. You can check what your own connection is using with our DNS leak test. The car isn’t only sending its data home; it’s a member of the network, protected the same way every other device on it is, sitting behind the same door as everything else we run.
One set of rules
This is the whole idea of the network in a single object. The problem with letting a big company hold your data was never only that they hold it. It’s that you don’t decide where it lives, who else sees it, or when the rules change. Bring it onto your own servers and all of that becomes one answer: our servers, our country, our rules. The Astra is just the newest thing to move behind that door.
None of it comes from a fear of technology. The head unit is a real upgrade and the car is better for it. The only thing we did differently was decide where it all reports, and whose protection it sits behind. Most cars are the manufacturer’s device that you happen to drive. This one is ours.
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