We just returned from an emergency trip to Los Angeles. Bozeman still has a relatively small and convenient (but VERY busy in summer (Yellowstone and Glacier National Parks) and winter (Big Sky ski resort) peak tourist seasons.
I was surprised, however, when I went out to the parking lot and asked Siri to help me find my car. Instead of pointing me to it, “she” advised me to go back to LAX and reclaim the crappy Avis rental we’d endured the 3 days we were there.
Yes, I’d used CarPlay for navigation while we were there. Is there some way to tell Siri which car REALLY belongs to me?
It is based on your phone’s connection to the car Bluetooth or CarPlay. If you forget the connection with the rental car in the Bluetooth settings, it shouldn’t be suggested again.
EDIT: I also just rented a car and I see my parked car location on Apple Maps. Go to the pin with the Parked Car and scroll down. You’ll see Remove Car. That should do it…
Does your experience tell you whether the location of MULTIPLE parked cars is retained, or just the most recent? For example, you park your car at your home airport, then rent one for a few days and use CarPlay. Either you do or don’t forget to delete anything you’ve done with the rental car, then return to your home airport. If you’ve NOT removed the rental from BlueTooth, will you still be able to find your own car at your own airport using the Parked Car interface?
And, how long will you know the location of the car you’ve rented? That sounds like an opportunity for car thieves: rent a car, pair it, clone its key (mechanical or radio frequency), then monitor where it is. Could be trouble…
If that’s the case, and any trip involves using a rental car, my phone would be useless when I return home. Seems like either an obvious oversite or un unavoidable architectural issue.
I GUESS I could deal with it by using my wife’s phone with the rental car and being VERY careful not to pair my own with the rental.
Except that turning off the ignition doesn’t extinguish the pairing (at least not completely). No matter what brand of car I’m offered when I rent, each time I pair my phone with the new rental I find names or nicknames of many previous users who’ve not made certain to delete their own pairings. I’ve not ever tried to search data from those previous users and have no idea whether there’s a risk of that being possible.
I see this as well. I usually do the rental company a favor and delete those pairings when I see them. Also so they don’t get in the way when I’m looking for my device.
I doubt it. Those pairings are just a cache of device names (including Bluetooth device addresses) and encryption keys. If you don’t have the corresponding device, they shouldn’t be meaningful, even if you could extract them from the car’s storage.
Some cars do make a point of downloading contacts lists, in order to allow its own phone dialer app to work. But the only cars I’ve seen do this also forget the information when the car powers off or if the phone disconnects from Bluetooth - it reloads the content every time it reconnects to the phone.
But I suppose that if a car is caching this information and not forgetting it at every disconnect, there may be a way to read that cache and get the contacts list from one or more of its previous users. But if it is possible, the procedure would depend greatly on the make/model car and might also require diagnostic software.
That would do it. I don’t know how careful you need to be about not pairing your own phone - that’s not the sort of thing that happens on its own without you actively setting it up.
FWIW, I usually travel with USB cords and use that with renal cars where possible. I want to keep the phone charged while driving anyway, so I see no reason to use that for the data connection as well.
I also use a USB cable when I want to run Carplay on another vehicle. This avoids Bluetooth pairing, which seems to be the source of the problem being discussed.
Of course some brands, like Tesla!, don’t support Carplay so I have to be careful of the models that I rent. I am cautious about not having Carplay in a strange vehicle because, when driving in Australia, I use a Carplay-compatiible navigation app called Metroview that has offline maps for the whole country and a brilliant speed alert function that warns me of speeding: https://www.vdrsyd.com/mp/speed.html
As it happens I also use a USB cable for my own car (since my phone needs charging when navigating) but it also connects with Bluetooth, which means that the “Parked Car” function of Maps still works.
It’s been a while since I’ve had to rent a car, but in the late 2010’s I rented several cars that had full contacts databases downloaded from previous renters’ phones. I can only hope that car companies have gotten smarter about it.
We recently hired a car here in France. The rental chap I spoke to said they were now VERY careful to delete all previous renter information in the car. Apparently, a previous renter in the US had found that the car he had been rented had previously been rented to a competitor and found his itinerary, and other useful stuff. The rental company was sued (after all, this was the US ) and issued a clear instruction that renter information must be wiped.
LOL Only here could a rental company be sued for some idiot uploading all his personal information onto somebody else’s property, never bother to remove it, and then cry bloody murder when somebody else stumbles upon his data through no fault of their own.
If you reward people for acting like idiots, it should come as no surprise when more and more become idiots. I’d like to say competitive advantage for those of us who resist degrading, but we all know in practice that’s only half the story. Warning: this coffee cup contains hot liquid. Don’t pour onto yourself.
Pairing is a permanent feature until you delete it. How would the phone know it’s a rental car and pairing should only be temporary? To the phone it’s just a car. For all it knows, it’s your car.
I always, when I return a rented vehicle, make sure I unpair my phone during the return process. While that won’t necessarily delete my data from the car’s storage system (so an expert could retrieve my contacts, for instance), it will remove my info from the system that another driver could access.
I listened to a fascinating presentation by a digital forensic expert (he does work for law enforcement to find digital data to help solve crimes and track down bad people) and he raved about what a treasure trove cars are for data. Most suck up all your contacts and even when you unpair, that data is still stored internally (there’s no guarantee it will be deleted). It does require an expert to retrieve it, though, just like deleting a file on your computer can be “undeleted” by someone with the right knowledge and tools and access.
The speaker said cars store all kinds of crazy data, from location data to driving speed and bad driving habits (like if you use the brakes too hard), to even what wifi networks the car sees as it drives by (helpful for cops to learn where the car has been).
Most of that data has no user access so there’s no way for you to delete it.
On a tangent, the original question makes me think it would be a good idea to leave an AirTag in my parked car if I ever fly again. With an iPhone 13 or later, after all, you even get turn by turn directions when you get close to the Tag, especially helpful in this application if your vehicle is one of the two or three colors 95% or so of all vehicles appear to be painted these days. (My car is a blinding red, but small enough that it disappears between the wheeled behemoths that have been so popular the last couple of decades.)
For what it’s worth, I started using Notes on my iPhone just after parking at airports to record floor (if it’s parked in a ramp/garage), aisle, and space number. Very helpful on returning, as long as I didn’t lose my phone on the trip…. (In fact, maybe a remnant of note taking in my school daze, just the act of recording the space information meant I remembered it without using the Note after most ~ week-long work trips. Doubt if my memory would still work that well.)
I should add: even then, my organizational skills were poor enough while traveling that I found the most reliable way to insure having the little time-and-date stamped card for payment and exit from the parking garage was to leave it in the cup holder in my car.
Never thought about doing that…I just take a picture of the nearest parking lot sign. I guess enough iPhones probably walk through the garage though that an AirTag would work as well.
My understanding is that my Contacts, Calendar, and other personal information aren’t loaded into the car’s memory unless I request it. What IS kept unless I delete it is my name and the information required for BT pairing. On the other hand, architecturally it makes no sense for the pairing to a rental to obliterate my own car, one side effect of which would be a complete obliteration of any help for me to find my own car in the parking lot of my own airport.
At places like airports, where I get a card on entry to the lot that I need to produce on the way out, I write down my location (lot number, aisle number, nearest shuttle stop, etc.) on the card (which I keep in my wallet after parking).
) and issued a clear instruction that renter information must be wiped.
Only here could a rental company be sued for some idiot uploading all his personal information onto somebody else’s property, never bother to remove it, and then cry bloody murder when somebody else stumbles upon his data through no fault of their own. 
