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Carmakers Will Give Your Location to Police Without a Warrant, Senators Say

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Re: Carmakers Will Give Your Location to Police Without a Warrant, Senators Say

#41

Post by jstanley »

worik wrote: post #32
mikece wrote: post #4

There is a growing number of cases where the salesperson will activate OnStar (or a non-GM equivalent) without asking or telling the buyer about it. As far as I know, there is no (legal) way to deactivate OnStar or similar GPS trackers built into cars. Of course if you're driving in a city the proliferation of ALPRs is so pervasive that your movements are being tracked in real-time even if you're driving a 1958 Ford…

> As far as I know, there is no (legal) way to deactivate OnStar or similar GPS trackers Naively... Is it illegal to cut the power to the GPS unit? I do not see why a car needs a GPS built in. So why can I not simply disable it? What am I missing?

It's inside a complicated box that you can't reach.

Re: Carmakers Will Give Your Location to Police Without a Warrant, Senators Say

#42

Post by sambull »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #9

Your location isn't that big a deal. They can easily get that from License Plate Readers. What will be interesting, is if they ever use the data to give you tickets. I know that there was a discussion of a plan to use the New Jersey Turnpike tollbooths/EZ-Pass to judge speed between two points, and mail you a ticket. I don't think it ever made it out of the starting gate.

Just another data broker selling it

Re: Carmakers Will Give Your Location to Police Without a Warrant, Senators Say

#43

Post by sidewndr46 »

TheDudeMan wrote: post #8
cranberryturkey wrote: post #2

My car was stolen a year ago. If it wasn’t for the iPhone app tracker I had I never would have gotten it back. Police didn’t have any way to track it.

I suspect that you mean "Police told me they didn't have any way to track it." Maybe they had a way but no motivation.

This is more accurate. Police do not exist in the US to help you recover lost property

Re: Carmakers Will Give Your Location to Police Without a Warrant, Senators Say

#44

Post by worik »

steelframe wrote: post #26

This is exactly why I bought a car that has a fuse for the Data Communication Module (DCM) that I have pulled, and I will never buy another car unless I can physically disconnect anything in it that sends radio transmissions.

There needs to be a central repository of instructions to do this for different models of car

Is there one?

Re: Carmakers Will Give Your Location to Police Without a Warrant, Senators Say

#45

Post by crmd »

jandrese wrote: post #12
mikece wrote: post #4

There is a growing number of cases where the salesperson will activate OnStar (or a non-GM equivalent) without asking or telling the buyer about it. As far as I know, there is no (legal) way to deactivate OnStar or similar GPS trackers built into cars. Of course if you're driving in a city the proliferation of ALPRs is so pervasive that your movements are being tracked in real-time even if you're driving a 1958 Ford…

What's illegal about removing the fuse for the OnStar system from your own car? Certainly the doctrine of first sale applies here?

On late model Toyotas, pulling the fuse for the DCM (Data Communication Module - component that sends nonconsensual telemetry back to Toyota) also disables the car's bluetooth microphone and front right speaker.

There is a procedure to disable the DCM and restore at least the speaker, but it involves partial disassembly of the dashboard.

Re: Carmakers Will Give Your Location to Police Without a Warrant, Senators Say

#46

Post by steelframe »

apazzolini wrote: post #3
cranberryturkey wrote: post #2

My car was stolen a year ago. If it wasn’t for the iPhone app tracker I had I never would have gotten it back. Police didn’t have any way to track it.

If someone steals my car, I hope it's never recovered so I can get the insurance payout. Who knows how the thief drove it (e.g. put it in neutral and floored it for 10 minutes) and what unseen damage lurks.

If someone with a penchant for committing grand theft were left unsupervised in my car for any amount of time, I too would vastly prefer for it to be totaled at that point.

Fortunately my car has a manual transmission, so chances are any idiot kid who tries to hop in my car and steal it will give up a few seconds after they realize that they have no idea how to operate it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jtYLNFBeCr0

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1S9putayloM

Re: Carmakers Will Give Your Location to Police Without a Warrant, Senators Say

#47

Post by dgfitz »

jstanley wrote: post #41
worik wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> As far as I know, there is no (legal) way to deactivate OnStar or similar GPS trackers Naively... Is it illegal to cut the power to the GPS unit? I do not see why a car needs a GPS built in. So why can I not simply disable it? What am I missing?

It's inside a complicated box that you can't reach.

Not with that attitude you can't.

Re: Carmakers Will Give Your Location to Police Without a Warrant, Senators Say

#49

Post by theryan »

HankB99 wrote: post #48

Makes me wonder how this case remains unsolved. (Or if solved, unreported.) https://cwbchicago.com/2024/05/bucktown-hit-and-run-bentley-...

That looks like a ~2005 Bentley Continental which may not the ability to call home.

Re: Carmakers Will Give Your Location to Police Without a Warrant, Senators Say

#50

Post by google_expat »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #27
moduspol wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a lot more precise data, and getting it from private companies without a warrant makes the bar potentially quite low. My concern is more that it's ripe for parallel construction in cases that otherwise wouldn't make it out of the gate.

From what I understand, LPRs are very precise; especially the car-mounted ones that I see around here. The biggest issue with LPRs, is the private corporations that run the infrastructure, sell the data to non-law enforcement people. Basically, license plates were designed to give authorities the ability to match the car with an owner, and are designed to be public, but the matching data is supposed to be behind a lo…

Precise but not accurate. I've gotten multiple tickets for running tolls from San Francisco that show commercial work vans or trucks (one of which didn't even have a license plate on it), despite having a compact car several states over that's never even entered that dystopian city/state.

The big databases are unlikely to retain pictures that may be used to prove innocence -- so coupled with the legal principle that computers are presumed to be operating correctly these are nothing more than automatic probable cause machines with no upside.

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