I worry that soon many cars will share ads and/or sell your location information with basically no way to opt out. If automakers are determined to make you run

I worry that soon many cars will share ads and/or sell your location information with basically no way to opt out. If automakers are determined to make you run their adware, they can just program their cars not to start unless you have the latest software. They even have a couple legitimate excuses to do this: maybe the latest software fixes some remote exploitable security hole that makes the car unsafe to use, or maybe always-on tracking is an anti-theft feature. If software updates are an all-or-nothing affair, then they can bundle whatever they want and force you to use it if you want a working car. If it's too obnoxious you could sell it, but the resale value might not be very good and we'd end up with a lot of people driving adware-infested automobiles because they can't afford anything better. I hope we have some sensible consumer protection laws to prevent this kind of thing coming to pass. This issue reminds me of a Vernor Vinge science fiction novel that describes battles between space-faring civilizations. If one side happened to capture a ship that belonged to the other side, they really couldn't do anything with it except melt it down for scrap metal because they couldn't trust all the embedded computers not to do anything nefarious.