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How bad is Android Auto for privacy
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this post was submitted on 13 Jun 2025
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Privacy
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Android Auto is just a projection of the information on your phone so, as far as I know, it's as private as your phone is.
Of course there's always the possibility that the vehicle itself is doing a screen capture and processing the information on the display to send back to their servers but...seems unlikely on account of the processing power required for that.
I was recently very interested to learn that, if I run a VPN on my phone, Auto immediately calls out the VPN as a problem and refuses to connect to my car until it's disconnected.
I'm guessing Android Auto wireless. And if so it makes perfect sense. You can't route everything through a VPN when your connecting to a device with a local network.
I think this has something to do with how networking works.
When connected wireless to my car with a VPN active on my phone, my phone won't connect to my cars WiFi network to initiate the android auto connection.
When connected by USB with VPN active on my phone it's not issue, android auto connects and my VPN is active.
I remember seeing someone smarter explain this a lot better online somewhere then I can at the moment. But simply trying to connect wireless with a VPN active will not work.
This. Some convenience features simply don't play well with non-standard setups and that's fine IMHO. Of course wireless android auto cannot work if you manually overruled how your phone should connect to networks
I've found that if my VPN is disconnected when I first connect to Android Auto, connecting it after the fact won't cause it to freak out.
My VPN automatically turns on when I'm connected to anything but my home network, so if I start my car at home, when I lose wifi and connect to the cell network I don't have issues.
That's even more concerning!
Is that android auto or wireless android auto?
For me, wireless. Wired still worked through VPN.
Wireless android auto hasn't worked with VPN's for years. It's because the service is now baked into the OS, preventing it from split tunneling.
Switch to wired and it'll work
I can get it to work if I whitelist the android auto app from my VPN.
Which means it isn't using the VPN.
I'm saying split tunnel is very similar to a whitelist and is available to some VPN's. A split tunnel would also bypass the VPN.
Also, while Android auto is a system app now, it is also identifiable by my VPN software and able to be whitelisted.
Yeah same experience for me. I assumed it was an issue with the routing table, but manually updating it didn't seem to help. I assumed I was just not good enough at networking on android. I'd believe google would try to crap on that too though.
Wireless for me also. Actually pretty sure I've never used wired.
I just ran into this too. Had to whitelist the app. Felt dirty and probably is...
You guys have no idea what a VPN does or how wireless Android Auto works.
https://www.techradar.com/pro/vpn/google-needs-to-stop-blocking-vpns-on-android-auto-heres-how-to-fix-it
Maybe we're just using VPN's differently than you'd expect. For example, I use Blokada, a local VPN for reducing ad/tracking services embedded in apps. I don't actually send my traffic to a remote server.
Yeah, agreed.