In case anyone is interested...

I've stewed long enough to put together an initial thread. I am willing to go thru and take more pics if need be and show how I did this with out any issues. Most of it was simply following wires and using common sense. I'm already aware of the backlash I might get and I've come to terms with it so here goes. In my deep, dark, conspiracy riddled lair, I learned bad stuff. If you're adult enough to see reason amd logic, then in my garage, attached to my programmer, I stumbled across some interesting tidbits. I've seen the threads about big brother and all that, however, I actually put forth some effort to prove just that. Now for unwritten reason, I have left certain items out of picture that I will be mentioning. My truck is a 2019. I had her custom ordered for my birthday when I worked on the drilling rigs in North Dakota. If anyone here knows what roughnecks are like, you can only imagine what we do when we find ourselves without work. Covid gave me time to think and that's dangerous when you're a doer. This brings me to my project. I was building a new ecm from megasquirt and was going thru the factory ecm. I find a rabbit hole in the telematics department.. for the record I AM NOT TELLING ANYONE TO DO THIS that being said, feel free and prove me wrong. I'll place any amount on the table that you'll eat your words. This statement goes true with any vehicle from any manufacturer and its technically public knowledge if you know where to look. Ready? The ecm is NOT in charge of the vehicle. Sounds insane but it's true. The airbag module the brain behind the ecm and the bcm. In circuitry, you'll learn to look for sram and dram chips. You have all sorts of processor's and a maze of little roads leading to and from certain control points. I have found two things that stood out like a fat kid at a food bank. One, a satellite feed that has no link to the Navigation or radio. Where, praytell, does it lead? I followed it thru the harness to the srs system and from there it plugs into a reserve battery aka capacitor and a series of memory holding chips. This had me puzzled so I went thru all the modules and what do you know, it's recording more than what an accident would share i.e. the event data recorder. The microphone above your head, the camera both front and rear, even the wireless charger we love is collecting everything. I have since taken a random sampling of these 8 legged freaks (see pics) and have had them brought up on screen and it really is disturbing. When you disengage your blindspot monitoring or park assist or any factory safety feature, it feeds to a bank held in the mpx/bcm. From there, the network gateway which has high and low can, sends it to the dcm (entune) and it'll be sent out wirelessly and also saved. Any change in your insurance lately? How about the sudden jolt you took climbing over that obstacle in the trail? That sends a signal to the srs. It's stored there until another event sets it off. The jack and auxiliary input has a bouncer at the door as well. You plug in and that info is now stored. Some may like it or not care at all others may want this gone. The bottom line, even in the book that comes in the glovebox seldom ever do read, it doesn't tell you this. If anyone calls BS, that's fine. But at least do the work yourself to verify such a claim so you don't look like a fool. If this leads anywhere, I have been putting together some how to material to make your 3rd gen as great as the old ones. Remember, we all loved these trucks for the simplicity they loyally proved back in the day. They can still do that now. This is why my 84 hilux has 751k and still rolls.

 

Interesting

 

Tldr
Cliff notes?

 

Your truck listens to you, records your every move, then sells that data to insurance companies.

 

I don’t speak your language necessarily, but this is a fascinating read. It’s beyond my capabilities to prove or disprove it, but my faith and trust in government and much of our world in general sinks to a new low fairly regularly. None of this would surprise me in the least.

 

They install all this crap on our Tacomas to know what our farts smell like but yet they don’t install it on commercial airplanes like Malaysia Airlines Flight 370.

 

https://www.newsweek.com/privacy-co...ers-selling-massive-amounts-your-data-1634478

 

Take off your tinfoil hat. You will be better off, I promise

 

Install all this crap and no front locker from factory. SMH.

 

https://www.toyota.com/privacyvts/#:~:text=We share your Vehicle Health,12 monthly vehicle health reports.
they admit it openly.

 

So I've been thinking about stuff like this as well, though I haven't found nearly as much motivation to chase down the wires all through the truck (7 to 5 plus school and cooking is murder for extracurricular activities). I found it weird as hell that if you disable the DCM (I just pulled the fuse to it) the Bluetooth mic stops working, which gave me all the more reason to leave the fuse pulled. I may not be able to take phone calls in the truck any more (meh) but the weirdest part is that Text-to-Speech still works for Instant Messaging. I don't understand that, just as much as I don't understand what legitimate reason Toyota would have for routing the mic through the DCM in the first place. I could understand routing it through the head unit then passing it to the DCM for SOS or something, but this just feels... nefarious.

I'm curious about what all of those modules do that you removed. I hate to ask for an itemized list, but I'd love to read one if it exists. Also, since ripping all of that stuff out what side effects, good or bad, have you noticed?

Great work, man. This level of "money where your mouth is" isn't seen often and I appreciate it.

 

I mostly would think that truck doesn't have enough bandwidth to continually sent telemetry plus video to a server somewhere.

If it was I wouldn't be surprised. But I think the spying is more limited than continuous broadcasts.

 

I'm not saying that the vehicle doesn't send data to servers for various reasons, including marketing. I'm saying that it's not news, you agreed to it when you bought the vehicle and it's not associated with your identity or anything that identifies the owner/driver. This has been happening for years. They admit it openly and you agreed to it legally. The real news here is that people sign all kinds of documentation without either bothering to read it or understand it.

 

I'll also share some non toyota gold.. this is my 2002 cummins. I'll be honest, I can't leave anything alone. I swapped injection pumps when the computerized one failed. I didn't stop there. That dash unit I designed is set up with pigtails so I can it with me so nobody steals my million dollar ride. That's the whole system in that ugly little box. Every fuse, relay and gauge right there. Proof we don't need electronics to live by

 

Its via Entune, so when you connect to get your updates for weather (usually when you pass a toyota dealership) would be when it transmits a small packet of data.

 

Bandwidth

Just drink the kool-aid

 

Though this makes me curious, if you swap the stock headunit out, can it still send?

 

I'm sure it's attached to VIN that insurance companies can look up to find who.

 

To a point, you're right. We all signed if we bought it new. What we didn't sign for is what they haven't told us.

 

California passed some laws back in ‘18 that requires auto manufacturers to be transparent with the data they collect and how. They have to make the data transparency statement easily accessible for owners of every vehicle. It’s a separate statement just for California, so people outside of California typically never see the more detailed version of their privacy statement. Here’s the California statement directly from Toyota that says everything you spent way too long finding out the hard way
https://www.toyota.com/support/california-privacy/