A while back, a Mozilla article came out that, among other things, delivered news about positive changes around vehicle privacy, including companies giving consumers more agency over their data and the FTC starting to put pressure on car companies to get their act together.
Also, I was in my dad’s car, and I asked him about what he did to request that Toyota not send any driving data. He told me that he set that on the Toyota app on his phone. He also noticed a sticker in his car basically saying “This car sends data places. To disable this, press the SOS button on the car.” He doesn’t think his specific model has this button, but I was interested by the idea that some models do.
I’m not saying this is a change to the status quo. I just figured I should share this since I haven’t seen anyone else here mention it.
Also, and this is a potentially dumb idea I had, what about putting a Faraday cage over the car’s roof antenna? Would that do anything?
To access the Master Data Consent in the Toyota app, please select the person icon in the top right of the main screen, then select “Account”, then “Data Privacy Portal”.
Declining the Master Data Consent will turn off all data transmission on your vehicle, and you will no longer have access to Connected Services, even if these services were included as part of your vehicle purchase.
It might not be practical to make a perfect Faraday cage because a true Faraday cage needs to be a continuous conductive enclosure with no gaps. Since the antenna housing is attached to the car’s roof, you couldn’t completely enclose it on all sides without also covering part of the roof itself.
A partial cage would definitely cause signal degradation, but it’s possible some signal would still be able to get through (I’m not sure). Probably a more effective way to disable the antenna would be to disconnect it. But you would lose whatever connectively the antenna facilitates (AM/FM radio, GPS, satellite, etc may be affected).