Ford suspending accounts due to third party connections

[Jimrpa]

Nope, the suspended the account because my charger at home had access to my Ford Pass. If Ford decides to suspend your account when you are not in cell connection and you try to open and run your car without the key Fab, it could be a rough day. I am thankful they did not shut me down away from my home. At least I could get mad at them but still drive with my key Fab. I am thinking that using your phone as a key maybe a bad idea

No. This is what the keyless entry code and backup start password are for.
Why are you trying to connect your EVSE to FordPass? Sounds like a sure-fire security issue.

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[Jimrpa]

Also all of the mentions from OP of "if they block your account you can't drive the car" is FUD. You have a door code to open the door. You have a backup passcode to start and drive the car. You would have to use these if you use PaaK and your phone went dead, or was broken, or you lost it... Learn how to use those.

This!

 

[mkhuffman]

My Ford account was locked over a year ago because I was using it to connect Tronity to my car. Tronity eventually canceled the capability to connect to Ford vehicles until January of this year, because apparently now they are using the new API.

Anyway, I created a new Ford account linked to my VIN to use just for Tronity and the Ford Status Widget Android app on my phone, so in case it gets locked, I can still log into my Ford account using my original account info.

 

[BillPitman]

So this was the Autel app? And you linked your vehicle so it would display the battery % in the Autel app? That will do it.

I have the Autel Maxicharge, a recent update allows you to monitor SOC%,
I chose not to do it just for that 3rd party restriction ! Bill P

 

[woody]

This is a warning to all others. Software is such an importatn part of the equation, GM is having a huge issue as well. So it remains to be scene if Ford can get the engineers on staff to correct things and make it run smoothly. I saw the other threads after I posted this.

What is GMs huge issue?
Had our Bolt nearly 6 years now and never a problem of any kind.
The MME is another story- countless and never ending problems, 3 years now.

 

[su-ch+mache]

in a German MME forum we have a discussion whether it is OK by Ford to use the Ford Status Widget or not ending in closing the FordPass account. Have any of you using this widget have any experience?

As the widget is a third party, have any of you considered by providing email and password (FordPass login) and VIN could lead to theft of the car? you can open the doors and start the engine. How trustworthy is this third party? Any experience here?

 

[SWO]

Yup, it seems that Autel has not gotten the authorization from Ford to be poking around. Apparently Autel was hitting the Ford servers a lot today, the customer service rep said today was a bad day and many Ford Pass clients got nuked today. It has made me concerned that I could be away from my home with just my cell phone and unable to drive because they locked the account.. Looks like I will have to go old school again with the key fab

That should be a concern for everyone using a phone as a key, even if it works perfectly. What happens if your phone is lost or stolen? The obvious solution here is to use/remember your backup password.

 

[johnmark]

in a German MME forum we have a discussion whether it is OK by Ford to use the Ford Status Widget or not ending in closing the FordPass account. Have any of you using this widget have any experience?

As the widget is a third party, have any of you considered by providing email and password (FordPass login) and VIN could lead to theft of the car? you can open the doors and start the engine. How trustworthy is this third party? Any experience here?

The developer of the app is on this forum (forgot his name), it passes your login info to a Ford API and then gets an access token, none of that info is stored on 3rd party servers, and it's open source, so you can verify that if you really want to.

If someone hacks your phone, yes they can do bad things, but not because of that app. If I wanted to steal your car, I would use your Ford pass app directly. A man in the middle attack would intercept any communication with ford servers, regardless of which app initiated it. So personally, I don't see much of a risk of the status widget app.

 

[mkhuffman]

in a German MME forum we have a discussion whether it is OK by Ford to use the Ford Status Widget or not ending in closing the FordPass account. Have any of you using this widget have any experience?

As the widget is a third party, have any of you considered by providing email and password (FordPass login) and VIN could lead to theft of the car? you can open the doors and start the engine. How trustworthy is this third party? Any experience here?

I created a second Ford account and linked it to my VIN. I use that account for the Ford widget and Tronity, in case Ford decides to lock it. If Ford locks it, I still have the primary account that continues to work with my FordPass app.

You can remote start the car with FordPass, but you cannot drive it without a key. You can enter the pass code in the Sync screen to drive without a key, but that requires someone to know your pass code. Therefore just hacking into your account isn't sufficient to steal your car. More steps are needed.

 

[EMachE]

I use a Flo X so no issues here.

 

[Roood]

I work in a large corporate IT environment and see developers make changes to their apps without thinking about the impact of their changes. In this case I think Ford did what they had to do, not what they wanted to do, to keep their environment stable and available. A third party app bombarding Ford with status update requests would be similar to a DDOS attack (Distributed Denial of Service Attack) and Ford did what they had to do to not risk taking down the entire FordPass environment. You decide who is to blame.

 

[Mach Al]

As a note of caution to all MachE owners, if you allow your charger software or any other third party software to connect to your Ford Pass, they will suspend your account. So this is not necessarily an issue if you have a key fob but if you use your phone as a key fob, you will be locked out of your account and driving the car could be very difficult to say the least. Apparently once you disconnect the third party device, it will take Ford 24-48 hrs to unlock your account (lightening speed)

So software issues are plentiful, update issues are hit and mis and now this. Ford needs to fix software, they should have not gotten into EV's till they could have a adequate software solution. This is sub par at best, I could use stronger words to discribe how I feel but we got to keep it PG. LOL

If your charger software is connect to the Ford Pass, best to disconnect it so your account is not locked out.

Cheers!

I had this issue because my electric company was accessing the app to provide me with a discount for charging at night. Needless to say, no more discount.

 

[Vnorvi]

Old news, unfortunately. Using any third party app which access your car’s data via your FordPass account credentials runs a high risk of getting your account banned. Electric Utility programs are a big offender. You’ll need to jump through a bunch of hoops to get the account unbanned.

I must admit I don’t even understand what is being discussed here. But with all these evs (I have a Hyundai also) it seems like a good rule is to just keep it simple.

 

[Nikos]

Old news, unfortunately. Using any third party app which access your car’s data via your FordPass account credentials runs a high risk of getting your account banned. Electric Utility programs are a big offender. You’ll need to jump through a bunch of hoops to get the account unbanned.

I agree. Electric Utilities use a third party to do the monitoring for them.
I had the unfortunate experience of having my account locked 3 times.
Ford makes it known that they have the right to do that. Proprietary information breaching and they don't take it kindly.

 

[awp0]

I work in a large corporate IT environment and see developers make changes to their apps without thinking about the impact of their changes. In this case I think Ford did what they had to do, not what they wanted to do, to keep their environment stable and available. A third party app bombarding Ford with status update requests would be similar to a DDOS attack (Distributed Denial of Service Attack) and Ford did what they had to do to not risk taking down the entire FordPass environment. You decide who is to blame.

I agree, but modern services also implement more automated methods to manage this problem (throttling, quotas, DDOS detection, etc), rather than just locking people's accounts with apparently zero communication. To me it's just another example of Ford's lackluster software engineering capabilities.

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