Privacy and Stealth
How to maintain personal privacy and stay on the down-low while living in your car
One of the most important factors of living in your car is privacy. This includes what I will call inner privacy and outer privacy. Inner privacy means you inside your car and people not being able to see inside mostly. Outer privacy is how much attention you or your vehicle draws to itself from people outside around your vehicle and people who are able to "mark" you and recognize that someone is in that car and even worse if they don't like the look of it and want you to leave or something.
Outer privacy means don't draw attention to yourself or your car. The cleaner and more normal your car looks the better it will belnd in and not be noticed. Any damage to the vehicle will draw attention to it, so try to avoid or fix it if there is any. If you cannot, then perhaps try parking in locations that don't accentuate the vehicle's unique characteristics or flaws, such as parking next to a wall, away from bright light or heavily travlled areas, etc. Determining subtleties like this will require some discernment and ability to think on the fly from you. However, it may not be that big of a deal in the end and you can just do what you can do. Don't over think it.
A big NO-NO in my book and one that I see people violate all the time is LITTERING. Don't be throwing trash outside your car unless you want people to know and dislike the fact that you are there. If you want someone knocking on your window in the middle of the night asking you to leave then by all means throw your trash out the window... I personally don't litter much in life and certainly not outside my car where I'm parked for an evening.
Something else regarding "outer privacy" is the LOCATION of where you park. Parking in the middle of a commercial or industrial area may look perfectly normal in the middle of a business day, but at 2 a.m. you might be the only car for a 1/8 mile radius and you will stand out like a sore-thumb and any police officer driving by may find it suspicious looking and investigate further.
Some of the best places to park overnight, at least in my experience, are large parking lots of 24 hour businesses. After all, these businesses are open at 3 a.m. so there is nothing unusual about a car in their parking lot, you could just be a customer shopping or an employee working the nightshift for several hours. Wal-Mart was notoriously the best option for this, but unfortunately since the Coronavirus ordeal they have actually started closing their store overnight. Wal-Mart could still be a good option even now, after all, they still have employees working overnight, but it may not be as good of an option now as it once was. Wal-Mart used to have an unspoken policy of actually knowingly allowing people to sleep in their cars overnight in their parking lots, but that may not be as reliable anymore. I have seen security guards tell people who were staying in vans to leave the Wal-Mart parking lot.
Some grocery stores are open 24 hours and even ones that are not are still decent options for parking your car in because they are large parking lots and often there are at least a few other cars parked in the lot either of employees, abandoned cars, or just people who are temporarily leaving their car there because they were drunk or are going out of town with their friend for a few days or something.
I personally like to park my Jeep facing a wall, or trees, bushes, an open field, etc. and not face towards the parking lot where a lot of people are and could possibly see inside my car. You can get a big sunblocker to cover the inside of your front windshield, but these tend to draw eyes, being shiny silver, etc. They look perfectly normal during a summer day, but at 2 a.m. at night especially in the wintertime draw some suspicion.
If you do park in a large parking lot, there could be advantages and disadvantages to parking where the employees generally park. The obvious disadvantage is that an employee may notice you living in your car and that could lead to you being asked to leave, which happened to me once at a grocery store. I had been parking right next to where the store manager parked apparently(because it was otherwise such a good spot) and after a few days I was asked to leave. The windows can fog up with moisture which can draw attention as well.
An advantage to parking where the employees park is that there will almost always be other cars parked there so your vehicle won't be standing out as the lone car in the middle of an empty parking lot, and the cars will be parked for a long period of time, several hours, so yours should fit right in. You need to be otherwise rather stealthy to not be noticed by the employees who will be walking right by your car. However, in my experience most lowly employees of these big stores don't really car if someone is living in their car there anyways, as long as they don't cause any problems. Still, better to just not find out in the first place and stay off the radar.
The biggest fact or "INNER PRIVACY" is blocking your windows so no one can see inside. Perhaps the ideal way to do this is with really strong tint like "limo tint", but super dark tint can be illegal in some places although I have never heard of anyone actually getting in trouble for it. I drove a car for about a year with the max tint that the tint shop would install which was 20% (really dark) and no police ever gave me any trouble. You can get tint professionally installed on your car for about $100-$200. Sometimes super dark tint does look suspicious though, especially if it's on the front driver and passenger windows, so maybe the best option is to get super dark tint on your back car windows but a medium-level tint on your front two windows.
Another common option for blocking your windows is to simply put something over them on the inside. There are many ways and items to do this with and some work much better than others. I have seen some people simply hang a towel out the window and roll up the window to catch the towel on the top. Technically it worked, but the stealth factor was 0. The towels were even white so they stood out like a flag telling people "Here is someone living in their car look over here!" That is definitely not my way of doing things. I have also seen people put some kind of shiny foil looking material on the indside of their windows and again, I guess they are not worried about others noticing them. More power to them I guess but that's not how I roll.
What I have done, and I have been using it for quite awhile now and it has worked very well so far, is the following. I got extra heavy-duty cardboard boxes from Home Depot (they have really good cardboard boxes). I cut the cardboard into the perfect shape of the windows, one for each window, the I got a black bed sheet(I think polyester works better than cotton because it stretches less) and cut the bed sheeter to cover the entire cardboard piece smoothly, then taped all the edges on the backside with black duct tape (Gorilla tape). I also put a small nut and bolt on the corner of each cardboard piece so that I can grab it and pull out the cardboard window blockers more easily and they don't get stuck in the window frames, however I have not found the nut and bolt to be all the necessary actually. The produced "window blockers" fit perfectly in the window frames and block excellently! Sometimes, especially on a warmer day, the window blockers will fall out of the frames so I cut small pieces of cardboard to wedge in the window and hold them in place. I have been using these for months now and they have worked excellently without almost no room for improvement. Making them was quite a project though. To get the right shape of the windows, I taped pieces of paper on the window and onto each other, the cut and/or folded the edges to match the window frame. I then carefully removed the pieces of taped together paper and viola a template the exact shape of the window. I then outlined the paper on the cardboard and cut it out, then cut and taped the black bedsheet onto the cardboard. You only need to make one paper template for each of the two windows on opposite sides because they are merely mirror images of each other (the front driver side window is the same shape as the front passenger window, just an opposite mirror image). (MANY PICS) Now, personally, this is not necessarily a project I am going to suggest anyone undertake because it was not easy and took quite a few hours and was a bit of a mess with cardboard shavings everywhere, and there may be easier approaches, though I can't hardly imagine anything more effective than this finished product.
Whatever you put inside to block your window, it is still better to have at least some degree of tint already on the window or it will be more obvious that there is something there blocking the window. The window blockers I use are black and my tint is about medium-level and honestly you cannot tell that anything is in the window from the outside even up close and on a bright Sunny day, you just can't see through them like a black wall is all. Some cargo vans don't even have windows, which is a double-edged sword because you can't see out if you want.
Other factors regarding privacy, try not to make a lot of noise, don't idle your car, don't blast the radio, don't move around a bunch shaking the vehicle, don't have bright lights on inside if it could escape from the windows, if looking at your phone, don't face it toward a window so someone could see the light from outside, don't have weird-looking stuff inside that might draw attention. I never keep anything in my driver's seat even if I'm staying in the car in the same spot for a day or more because people who park and get out of their car usually don't put stuff on their driver's seat.