2nd Gen and Big Bruddah/Skynet/Et. al.

Ladies and germs and everyone outside and in between, I was practically born with a foil hat and a healthy dose of irony. I know I've got perhaps the worst thing ever to happen to privacy in my left pocket, yet I am worrying about what my 12+ year old vehicle is trying to say about me to Papa Yoda and whoever they sell data to. But, the great news is I am not alone!

In light of this thread:

https://www.tacomaworld.com/threads...the-dcm-telematics-silencing-antennas.821649/

Does the 2/2.5G have anything akin to these sorts of 'phone home' telematics, or was this part of the 3/3.5G upgrade? In the megathread I found some people touching on it around 2011, but didn't see anything else.

I wound up with a truck that has what I think is the most basic model head unit, but it did come with an XM trial and the shark fin along with the standard antenna. I'm currently under the impression that the only purpose on my particular truck for the fin was to support XM; but probably any tattle features as well, if they were that deep in to it yet back then. I'm also under the impression that without an Entune head unit, removing that antenna will affect exactly nothing (outside of the inability to get XM, which I don't care about).

Thanks for any insight!

 

Your next “tattle tale” will be your ECM. Think of it as a black box. Might not record audio or video but it does record driving habits like acceleration/braking and when airbags get deployed.

 

Yeah, I mean that one, believe or not, I actually get the purpose of. I'm under the impression it can only record so much and then it just rewrites, and they need physical access to the truck/ECU to extract it (by all means correct me if I am wrong!).

Where I draw the line is if they can back door driving stuff to insurance companies, know where I work, where I buy gas, shady back alleys I frequent, how long I spend at the gentleman's club, etc etc. They'll eventually get it one way or another but I at least want to make it as difficult as I can.

 

If your truck doesn’t have navigation I highly doubt it’s tracking and recording your destinations.

If it has mic and Bluetooth it can record, is it utilizing that data? Again doubt it.

3rd gen’s and 4th gen’s are definitely dumping your data for profit, your truck…. highly unlikely.

Honestly though vehicles are just another stone In the pile.

like you said, you have a phone. Way more intrusive than a vehicle.

Smart phone, navigation, Smart tv, Bluetooth household items, computer, laptop, Alexa or equivalent, work, social media, spouse, children, parents, family and friends with social media, debit card, credit card, ring doorbells or equivalent, community cameras, red light cameras, toll cameras, toll passes like easy pass, the list is gargantuan.

The average American has millions of pages worth of data online for whoever wants it. Tech knows more about your spouse, your children, your parents and yourself than you do.

Modern civilization has surrounded and engrained themselves in tech. If the antenna wigs you out, remove it. At the end of the day you’re not escaping. Welcome to the future.

 

Never denied any of that. But I do disagree with the sentiment that it's so hopeless we should just roll over and hand it to them with a little red bow, without making them work for it at least a tiiiiny little bit..

Case in point, anniversary today. Totally forgot (I'm a catch, btw). It actually makes my heart glow that the targeted spam and ads and stuff allowed that to happen. I must be doing something right, but jury is still out on how the missus will take that spin on it.

 

Any maintenance like oil changes they will have the data with the vin number. We were given a class by State Troopers that study accidents and you would be amazed what the vehicle records

 

Heh heh -- you got that wrong.

You won't just roll over and hand it to them with a little red bow.

Nope.

You will PAY THEM for the privilege of having them gather, store, collate, and sell your data.

You buy the devices.. and in most cases you pay for the subscriptions, too. Internet service at home. Mobile voice/data plan. Cloud storage fees for some security cam systems. Etc. etc.

That's the part Orwell got wrong, he thought Big Brother would forcibly impose all this stuff. Nope, rather almost everyone runs towards the stores to buy the latest and greatest. Free-market economics & consumer demand at work.

---

Getting back to the specifics of this thread --

The 2nd gen is relatively free of intrusive tracking tech, IF the factory EnTune navigation head unit is removed (or its GPS antenna is disconnected.) 2 and 2.5gens do not come with cellular modems/SIMs built-in from the factory.

2nd gens do have a "black box" in the form of accelerometers, pedal position sensors, etc. that can be used post-accident to help reconstruct the pre-accident conditions. I don't know how far back that data goes, I think I read somewhere on TW forums it might be as short as 30 seconds, perhaps. This "black box" functionality is basically an afterthought or byproduct of the SRS, traction-control, & related systems. All that info is being processed in real-time several hundred times per second by a fast, dedicated microprocessor and NEEDS to be stored for at least a second or two in order to perform trend analysis & calculate accelerations -- so why not preserve the data for 30 or 60 seconds? Trivial to do.

3rd & 4th gen owners who want to pursue privacy need to go considerably farther. I will re-post the same link OP posted as it's probably the best, clearest thread on this subject for 3rd/4th gens.

https://www.tacomaworld.com/threads...the-dcm-telematics-silencing-antennas.821649/

 

Looks like other folks answered this already, but the phone in your pocket will tell them all of this information without any input from your truck, or at least give them a good idea of what your habits are.

Your phone looks at GPS coordinates and cross-references that info to locations visited, routes taken to get there, speed at which you drove there, amount of cash spent there, etc. It's doing this every second of every day and that's just a fraction of the data your smart phone collects about you.

Your 2G Taco doesn't collect much data outside of the ECU, and even then, most of that data is to assist with crash info & vehicle performance. Also, I don't believe the 2G's have the means to transmit (back door) the data outside of a CANBUS cable hooked up to the ECU.

 

That's true about phones but misses the point.

If you don't want your phone to track you when you go somewhere -- you can just leave it at home. (Or put it in a faraday back.)

If you are driving a turd or fourth-gen Taco, you can't just "turn off tracking," you have to take special technical measures to disable it.

 

Fair point re: leaving the phone at home. Although I'd argue most people nowadays won't/can't get around without their phone, for one reason or another.

 

I hope none of you read the first sentence of OP's original post..

 

moon22 you got your answer though. The 2/2.5gen trucks do not phone home, so you're fine.

 

Indeed I did, just thought that was funny. Thanks for everyone's inflation adjusted $.02!

 

I did, but just to confirm is didn’t misread, what was it?

 

I said that I have a pinky promise from Jobs (that I had recorded on VHS) that he would never, ever, ever tell my wife I was at the gentlemen's club when she wasn't there working. Everything else is fair game, but I thought that was reasonable.

 

If you really want to be a certain way, get a Faraday bag for your phone while you're driving - this at the very least keeps your route from going into the Sky Brain, and with your phone in a bag in the console you're keeping yourself from fiddling with it while you drive.

If you want to get /real/ paranoid, look into getting an Android head unit and an RTL-SDR so you can do a sweep for transmitters in some common ranges every time the truck is out of your sight.

If you want to go even a bit further, you'll want an auxiliary ECU to record door and window position while the truck is parked, a wider band SDR to cover up to at a minimum the GHz range, and nothing to listen to but the Coast to Coast AM backlogs.

 

This definitely describes being some types of way.

 

Would love for toy to explain this to me as if I was in 5th grade. Not familiar with all these principles or acronyms but would like to be. Thanks.

 

A Faraday bag blocks RF signals. Your cellphone is, by necessity due to the way that the entire system works, a tracking device. Essentially, the phone system has to know where your phone is in order to provide service. The details of the GSM protocol are tedious, but suffice it to say that it is trivial to locate your phone within 10 meters or less in most places that you have cell service, and that is without resorting to using specialized equipment - solely the data necessary for you to even get service. The only way to surely and reliably prevent "them" from being able to get real-time as well as historical location information is to completely remove the power source from the device, or to put it in a Faraday enclosure. If you ask the internet about "Faraday cage" you will find a wealth of information.

The second portion of my snide and sarcastic comments is with regards to rigging your vehicle for tamper resistance/tamper evidence, and the use of commercially available hardware and software to perform active checks for transmitters (active tracking/recording devices). The reality of this part is that the go-to these days for location tracking of a vehicle is a simple, self-powered, GSM enabled device about the size of a single KitKat section that can be attached anywhere on the vehicle and either operates passively (the same "them" that put it there surreptitiously comes back layer for it to dump the data, either physically or via short range bluetooth) or transmits in burst mode, making it difficult to detect via its own transmissions.

These days in many areas even using a tracking device is becoming obsolete. Many of "their" vehicles are equipped with automatic license plate readers, and "they" also have huge networks of ALPRs installed in parking garages and lots, commercial spaces including random buildings/infrastructure towers, street corners, and other public areas, all of which feed into massive databases that can be queried by "them" at will.

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/They_Live