Does anyone know about the legality of removing the built-in sim cards from your car, specifically in Australia?
I don’t intend on using any car smart-features when I get one. For context, I’ve never owned a car. When I do get one though, I intend to remove the sim card to prevent the car’s location from being constantly tracked. All I care about in terms a cars functionality is a radio, a CD drive (Yes, I use CD’s), and Bluetooth audio, so I don’t think removing the sim card should affect this much, if at all. Any knowledge and advice would be appreciated, thankyou!
Update: What I was referring to is an eSim, which appears not to be in the form of a physical card. Even so, if possible, I would like to disable the functionality of this eSim assuming the car I purchase has one in-built. From my research, I cannot find anything that explicitly forbids disabling or removing Sims.
As others have said it will likely be an ESIM or similar solution because there isn’t a need for the manufacturer to support physical SIMs.
Regarding being tracked though, Australia has ANPR just like most other developed countries, you will be trackable even if your car was just a Flintstones car with a numberplate.
I’d also add if you’ve got a phone in your pocket, that’s just as trackable
This is more about the car maker harvesting data, rather than just tracking the car. Car makers have been (quietly) building more tech into their cars to collect data for the purposes of selling it to third parties. It’s effectively the enshittification of cars.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-02-09/toyota-car-brands-collecting-driver-data-privacy-concerns-laws/103443500
It’s not Toyota it’s all of them and Mozilla did a much better report
That is not the problem, it’s the incredible invasion of privacy the cars have from the manufacturer not the state. Lookup Mozilla privacy report on cars for more information. It’s appalling.
I’m interested in this topic as well. I know I’m being tracked on my phone, but I’m much more confident my phone manufacturer is not selling/giving my data to police or insurance companies. Those are who I’m concerned with tracking me.
Apple is the manufacturer who makes the biggest hoo-ha over privacy, yet they gave user data to the police 90% of the time (Google was surprisingly lower at 80%)
Plus if you have a subscription to a mobile cellular network, as basically everyone with a phone does, that will also be constantly tracking you (and I believe also directly available to the police).
That’s all without going into whether you trust every single third party app on your phone and every website you visit.
You sort of left out a lot of context with that statistic that the article did include. Apple gets significantly fewer requests because the data they have is far less useful, that is generally a plus.
Cellular location data from the provider generally requires a warrant unless there are exigent circumstances. There has been a lot of controversy recently about warrants being granted that are too broad, the “every phone in this wide area” thing, but they are still warrants being granted by courts vs direct access.
That sort of “tell me every phone in the vicinity of this location” is the sort of request that Google typically has the data to fulfill and Apple generally does not (though the cell provider might).
Without a doubt they are absolutely doing this.
It’s not just the phone manufacturer, but the mobile carrier, and apps with access to your location (like weather apps, or map apps)