It is legally problematic to remove until you switch financing...
In addition, if tracking bothers you, your tire pressure sensors all have trackable (if there are enough sensors around a city) IDs, and if bluetooth is on, and it probably is, that as well...aside from your cell phone...
My next (secondary) vehicle will 100% be a dumb vehicle from the 90s or earlier.
I have never heard of this. Do you have any reference to learn more?
Who exactly does this installing - someone hired by the bank? The dealer? If I pay cash for a vehicle, does that guarantee that the dealer won't install a tracker? How can I find this out?
If you pay cash, you probably can't be 100% sure there isn't one, but it would still be illegal for them to do this. Otherwise, when you loan/lease the car, it's legal for the dealer to put a tracker on 'their own car'/do it as required by the bank ('their own car' or a car they have a 100% value lien on, for those of you in lien states).
Via the article, the FTC was supposedly probing these to determine 'if the availability of car loans outweighed the privacy issues', but nothing came of it (which is why i'm not hopeful for https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32426633 ).
It was just hanging off the OBD2 port, so if you're concerned about it when leasing or buying a new car then just make sure to check that port.
I still have it in a box somewhere. I'm not sure if there's anything interesting that can be done with it...
[edit: minor grammar]
A while back I set up a Ubiquity Wi-Fi system for a friend who lives near a fairly high-traffic street.
The default Ubiquity scan interval for spectrum and Wi-Fi network awareness was enough to map schedules for a shockingly high number of people driving by.
I imagine something custom built for this purpose would be significantly more, umm, “effective” for this purpose.
Is it?
Unless their financing T&C specifically tell you you are bound to let them track you, can't you just pop it out and tell them to pound sand?
What kind of janky banks are you working with?
My spouse and I financed a couple of cars recently, one new and one slightly used, and did not have anything of the sort. Different manufacturers, different banks, different dealerships.
Sure, if you finance through the dealership, then dealership personnel could stick it in there before you drive away, I guess. It plenty of people finance through third parties. Surely Wells Fargo, for example, doesn’t send an agent down to stick a tracker in your car while you’re sleeping or at work…
Had me scratching my head for a minute there. I guess it's a thing now, though we used to just call them jumpers.
To me, it's still a jumper, shunt, etc.
ALL buy-here-[pay|finance]-here car dealerships put a GPS tracker in your car. Where it's located and how it's connected to your car's electrical system will vary, but they ALL do it using[0] companies[1] like[2] these[3].
[1] https://www.spireon.com/gps-auto-tracking/
[2] https://passtimegps.com/industries/franchise-car-dealerships...
Once that was done I originally pulled the daughterboard housing the entire modem but this bricked my compass and GPS. To keep those working I ended up altering the modem itself with a soldering iron per the pdf posted here:
https://www.chevybolt.org/threads/internet-without-onstar-wi...
The guy there on that forum did so in an effort to use your own sim with the HMI, but using 0 ohm resistors or just solder bridging the relevant connections is enough to prevent my vehicle from getting online, but leaves the GPS intact. You can test by trying to make phone/onstar/data related actions - it just won't work.
Another good measure is to remove one of the antenna leads, I forget which one is cellular primary, but the other is more GPS/aux. Doing it all this way allows you to still connect your vehicle to wifi should you so desire to, for updates and such.
There are other secrets and tricks to these things, including a git repo I cloned that is now gone from the public internet, where a guy figured out how to solder an EMMC reader to a few points on the mainboard to get and modify the filesystem.
Edit: here's a mirror https://repo.or.cz/bosch_hmi_hacking.git
They really go out of their way to keep you from owning your vehicle.
Also bought a device that lets me plug HDMI inputs into the truck, unfortunately some kind of refresh rate or resolution issue prevents it from working properly.
As an aside, if you bought and financed through GM, they may have attached a secondary GPS/cell tracker to your OBD2 port, and used sticky tape to hide it somewhere - make sure to remove that once you're not financed through them as well (it is illegal to do so I believe before using alternative financing or paying it off).