The alternative is to be aware of this abuse and unplug the cellular modem. It requires more or less effort depending on the car, but it can and should be done.

It’s not a good alternative though because it puts you into a losing competition with the manufacturers. Take out the cellular modem? Next one requires connectivity to drive the car and so forth.

You could “ban” it, but the amount of effort required to raise public awareness for that and actually have our dickhead representatives due things like that is basically the same amount of effort, perhaps more, as building better cities and transportation modes.

We build and subsidize highways, we could do the same with other methods of transportation and have competition instead of big gubmint cars.

In many parts of the US, individual vehicles are the only viable mode of transportation. In fact, even in the NYC metro area, a car is pretty much indispensable, unless maybe you live in Manhattan and only rely on home delivery for groceries and the like. If you ever want to do anything outside of the city, you need a car.

Right which leaves us without alternatives and beholden to car manufacturers and their collective decisions.

>Take out the cellular modem? Next one requires connectivity to drive the car and so forth.

Find the cellular antenna and replace it with a dummy load. The car will think it's sending the data just fine but all it's doing is turning radio waves into heat.

And so on and so forth up until it’s just not worth the hassle as it even is today for most people. This isn’t a good problem to be solved with hacking. It’s a public policy problem.

Public policy is failing at the moment, so you have to take matters into your own hands. If enough people do this, then it will effectively become public policy. Inaction is not a solution.

I personally am, but there's only so much I can do. I am involved in our regional planning commission for transportation, and routinely write letters and call my representatives. I may donate some money to some of our local transportation organizations, but I'm not sure that's a good use of money yet so I haven't.

I agree with you in general though that public policy is failing. Specifically it's failing here where we continue to engage in and direct poor public policy positions because the government is very entrenched and addicted to spending taxpayer dollars. Asking the public to continue to play a catch up game of voiding their car warranty instead of actually solving the problem via policy is, in my view, simply not going to work.

On the other hand, it is not mandatory to vote for politicians who continue to make our cities car centric.

You are not doing anything wrong if you are forced into buying a car due to the circumstances of your living. But voting to continue that makes your culpable.

So your plan would be to get rid of cars? Wow it's almost like government regulation imposed to dissuade people from free travel via personal automobiles through a thorough enshitification is working in the direction of their intent.

You mean they're actually asking for 15 minute cities? Yes sir, they are. Very good.

Well it's not free, we pay a lot of money to subsidize the highways and roads. If you like your highways and roads and want that freedom, what's better than having fewer cars on the road? That's one of the things that diverting some public funds from highways to other transportation options helps achieve. For those who could get to work or perhaps get to the grocery store by walking, biking, hopping on a bus, or taking a tram/street car that's cars off the road to make your life better.

We could lobby together for new federal and state laws to prohibit this kind of tracking without the affirmative consent of the purchaser—or, at the very least, make opt-out as easy as sending an email.