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 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