A loyal GM customer bought a 2022 Corvette, then couldn’t get a single insurance company to cover him. The reason wasn’t his record. It was what his own car had been quietly reporting about him.
Your car is almost certainly doing the same thing right now. This is the model-by-model breakdown of the always-on tracker hiding in Toyota, Ford, and GM vehicles, where it lives on each one, and what owners are actually doing about it in their own driveways. One of these three brands you can shut up in five minutes. One of them you can’t shut up at all.
Find your vehicle in the chapters below.
In some GM cars, there was a physical pin bridge that connected the cell radio to the telematics box (onstar). You could simply remove it once you got to the box that housed the two modules.
Now, it’s much more difficult. In some cases you can disconnect the telematics box itself or pull a fuse, but you’ll have persistent error messages in the display saying how something is wrong. Some features of the car will also be disabled; some expected (app-based controls), others less so.
As time goes on and this surveillance becomes deeply ingrained or dare I say it, legally required, it won’t be possible to do this at all. The idea of free movement without being spied on is mostly over now, but the doors will close entirely soon.
Between your mobile phone, your car telematics, flock cameras you can see, other cameras you cannot, electronic toll beacons, there are very few places you can travel in a car without being surveilled.
The worst part is that a lot of people will say that this is good, that this prevents crime. To be very clear about this, surveillance does NOT prevent crime. It might help to solve it after the fact, but a camera will not stop a murder. A telematics beacon will not prevent a kidnapping. The common belief that these things make people safer is 100% false. They are only good to find the body a day or two later. Show me the stats for lower crime rates before/after all this crap went in. The reality is that crime in the US has been on the decline for decades prior to all this nonsense. Wealthy neighborhoods have always had low crime. What have these things done to change anything? Where is the evidence?
The general public is being sold a lie when they’re told that cameras prevent crime, don’t believe the lie. The only goal of surveillance is to monitor and control the public, most of whom do not commit crimes. Everyone who is ok with the current state of affairs needs a wake up call, but most people do not think outside of their own little bubble. Just like politicians who are against something–until one of their children are impacted by it, then they all of a sudden change their tune.
Every person who cares at all about freedom should be against all of this. No more telematics in the car. No more cameras, no more mass surveillance of the population at large.