A vehicle section would be a great addition to the site.
If wanting to keep a modern vehicle, one method is to either remove or disable the telematics control unit (TCU). Either get an auto electrician to remove it or DIY if it’s possible (search car forums on your make/model to find location. Not always possible to DIY due to difficult location etc). You can also disable the TCU by removing it’s fuse (follow your owner’s manual to identify which fuse).
Also consider removing or disabling antenna/s, cabin microphones and external cameras.
The problems run a lot deeper. In the American context, local municipalities install license plate scanners as a form of passive income, to automate sending out tickets for expired registrations. In reality, they don’t personally operate them, they contract them out to private companies… namely, data processing and AI companies based in Israel and founded by ex-Israeli intelligence assets who have a professional background in creating heatmaps of populations.
You cannot legally operate a vehicle in the US without a valid license plate, and you can’t avoid getting your plate scanned and tracked at random, and all of your full personal details are held by the state and accessible to ordinary government workers like police officers and this data is being shared with data processing companies in a foreign government.
It is a disaster and I know of no legal method to avoid this egregious privacy and national security breach.
I had recently looked into this issue for my car which I bought a few years ago after I drove my 2004 into the ground. It took me down a rabbit hole without very much reliable information, but fortunately I was able to scrape together enough to accomplish something that I believe was productive and meaningful for my use case.
Initially I thought about getting into the shark fin to see what I could do with the antennae. I came across a post of someone who had done just that but stated that when they get close enough to a cell tower, the car still connected and would be able to transmit information.
This led to looking into disabling the SIM card, which is embedded into a telematics module for my car, and I would venture a guess that other manufacturers have a similar setup. I found the associated fuse and pulled it as the most simple solution I could think of, but found that it knocked out Bluetooth microphone and the passenger side speaker. Digging further I found out that the wiring for these routes through the module, explaining why they were disconnected with the fuse pulled.
This left me with the only other solution I could think of which was to figure out how to physically remove the telematics module from the car and see if I could short the connections for the microphone and speaker. I was able to find the module mounted with the head unit after disassembling the dash and remove it completely. I came across an online vendor that sells a bypass plug which shorts the speaker connection and reroutes the microphone to the head unit itself, which spared me the pain of finding wiring diagrams and attempting the electrical work myself.
The final result is a removed telematics module (ie. SIM card) without the Bluetooth microphone or passenger side speaker affected. The SOS button does nothing now. I don’t use the built in navigation or SiriusXM so can’t comment on that functionality. Bluetooth connection is fully functional for streaming music and hands free phone calls. Wired Android Auto works as well. Car cameras for lane assist, auto collision braking, reverse driving remain functional.
Slightly worse than that actually. There are private firms, car repossession firms in particular, that run their own automated license plate readers. They build up a database of what cars can be found at what locations at what times of day, etc. If/when a finance company gives them a contract to repossess a car they know exactly when and where to find it.
If the local government entities are unwilling to spend for their own automated license plate reader setup and they know a private company is already doing it, they can get the information they desire from that company without spending their own money. So just because your local city or town is not officially running license plate scanners doesn’t mean there may be someone else doing it in your area.
This is really cool to see. If you’re comfortable with it (totally understand if you aren’t), letting people know the year make and model would help others replicate what you did. Probably even with just the same manufacturer.
American laws are held back in an era where technical limitations gave a semblance of privacy and the free-speech/citizen’s oversight interests protected a lot of public recording and photography, but as these technical limitations have slipped, the laws have not been updated to cut back on the more egregious abuses of mass photography, recording, and automatic data processing, and more than that there is a lack of political will to do so, as governments would prefer to spy on their populations and abuse their privacy.
I’m not even remotely sure of that. My thought, however, is that car manufacturers probably don’t feel the need to implement piggybacking off a phone connection as a fail-safe in this rather fringe scenario, as the overwhelming majority of people wouldn’t think to do this. It is definitely a possibility though.
Edit: Actually now that I think about it, I don’t think that is happening. Before I removed the module, whenever I brought the car to the dealer they already had updated mileage in their system. I also occasionally got service reminders pushed to the car. Ever since, they have to check the car and manually input the mileage, and those reminders have stopped.
Not really. This knowledge is pretty obscure and mainly found within high end car theft circles, but on any vehicle today you can disable tracking easily within 30 seconds and still drive it. There are many tunnels or remote areas without service, if tracking was a requirement they wouldn’t work in such conditions.
On low end car models some only track you if you pair your phone, since there is no modem on board. Example basic civic will have less tracking components than a touring model.
Lets say a vehicle has on star tracking. You can: disable the service from the screen, then remove the fuse for the onstar, then remove the whole onstar box, remove the microphone.
If you want a demonstration of how to disable tracking within 10 seconds, watch the national geographic documentary “trafficked” special on car theft. A car thief calls his friend, who tells him the location of the 3 antennas on the vehicle and he quickly pops them all out.
Note, if you financed your car, its possible the dealership installed a secondary (third party) tracker that is hardwired into your car somewhere. You can find these and cut them out too.
Yeah is also really bad in my country and is gettings worse every year. It was a big topic in the news 2019ish because of “terrorist” and “criminals” now nobody talks or cares about it anymore. It was also the reason I got in to motorcycles.
I don’t know the laws in USA but in my country pre 2006 scooters don’t need a license plate and motorcycles only need a back plate. The helmet is also plus for privacy.
When I was looking for a motorcycle I went to a motorcycle convention I asked a Hells Angels member about license plate scanners he shows me his iron 1200 how he bended his license plate in a way that it was harder to be scanned. Good idea, but I don’t really think it will work.
That is good to know.
But I have one question. You refer to “telematics” and the communication module as the same thing. Have you checked if those are two separate things in your car?
In my research people told me that is the case for many models. Meaning your car may not be spying on you on real time, but they may still be gathering the same information, that will be downloaded when you get it serviced in a dealership.
Which is how they spied on us when they converted cars into rolling hard drives, but before they converted cars into rolling cell phones.
