Cheap Aftermarket Car Screens Are Loaded with Spyware

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At a time when even refrigerators come internet-connected for zero practical benefit, companies are using the devices you pay to own to spy on you in turn. TVs are making plenty of headlines for this lately, prompting some customers to turn to AI “hacks” that promise to debloat factory firmware and stop it from snooping. What are modern TVs if not big tablets you navigate with a remote, and what are automotive head units if not tablets stuck to your car’s dash?

You see where we’re going with this. One Civic owner purchased a cheap aftermarket head unit off Amazon, and decided to have Claude work its magic on it, like it would a smart TV. What was reportedly discovered isn’t surprising, but is worth knowing about.

Among the pre-installed bloatware—or spyware, if you’re being less charitable—was a voice assistant equipped with WebView, an Android system component that lets apps display content off the web. This apparently always used about a third of processing power, even while idle, which isn’t great. There were also Baidu location services, a call recorder (!), a DAB radio client that is pretty much useless in the U.S., and Adobe Acrobat, presumably so your passenger can entertain themselves with PDFs on the go.

The most amusing part was a script, set to reinstall QQMusic and Ximalaya—two Chinese-market media subscription apps—plus an app store if they were ever found missing. Naturally, all of that was ripped from the operating system.

The Reddit post goes into more depth about the whole process of defanging the data grabbers and replacing them with services the owner might actually have control over. It’s a nice explainer on what’s required if you want to try your hand at this (or rather, employ Claude’s).

To be fair, if you did live in China and wanted to install this head unit in your vehicle, you might actually want to keep some of these apps and services around; at the end of the day, this example feels more egregious because it involves software that is irrelevant outside that market. But people are buying these products to replace the old tech in their old car, and vendors don’t communicate what they contain. The way items are cloned and sold under a billion different, fake, all-caps garbled nonsense brands—and Amazon seemingly couldn’t care less—I wouldn’t even expect the seller to know what’s lurking in there.

All this to say, if you come across a cheap head unit online, take the plunge at your own risk. Maybe even seek one out with a hack that’s easily replicable. You shouldn’t have to get your hands so dirty for a product you just bought new and paid good money for, but hey—it’s 2026, and enshittifcation comes standard.

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Backed by a decade of covering cars and consumer tech, Adam Ismail is a Senior Editor at The Drive, focused on curating and producing the site’s slate of daily stories.

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