You are seriously positing that car manufacturers would install decoy sims in their vehicles to discourage people from finding the true sim, all so they might collect data without potential user disruption?

It is crazy how paranoid people can be, IMO. They don't seem to understand that these companies don't really value one person's information highly enough to do stuff like that.

It is everyone's information that they value, not that one guy who goes to the trouble of killing the radio.

This boring paranoia always comes up in discussions about "smart" devices. In theory possible, in practice too many legal issues, so in reality it's never happened. I find it rather dull when someone brings it up.

There's some paranoia here but there's also some truth.

Okay, nobody is putting in a placebo sim, but in software, we DO have placebo controls. If you flip a switch saying "don't track me", that usually means "track me slightly less". If you delete something, that doesn't mean delete it - that means keep it, but say it's deleted.

If you go through the Windows install, for instance, even if you flip off all the stuff it will tell you "we're still going to do this, just in less circumstances".

What are those circumstances? I don't know. I'm not even sure Microsoft knows.

yes

What do you imagine their profit per analytics profile to be? I'm genuinely curious. I would think any random individual's data would not be all that valuable.

It doesn't have to be directly about money. Remember EV manufacturing and export is subsidized by CCP and they really like "national security".

There are a lot of smart TV's (name-brand ones!) that will try to connect to any open wifi. Monetizing from analytics and telemetry are literally priced into the cost of the gadget. A lot of smart TV's will even ship with their cameras turned on. And Hyundai/Kia and Subaru literally disabled certain in-car features for people in Massachusetts after the repair bill passed (https://www.wired.com/story/right-to-repair-cars-hackers/)

Given that, I hardly think that 'decoy sims' are much of a stretch.