Maybe in some cars, but certainly not all. I have a 2021 Highlander. We have no subscription to anything related to the car itself, but there is definitely a mobile connection sending data back to the mothership every time the car is turned on. I know this, because A) Toyota's manuals/literature say they do this, and B) There's an icon on the "infotainment" screen showing the signal strength.
All car manufacturers are extremely vague about what data they are sending, but you can assume it's basically everything: GPS location, speed, engine and maintenance data, control inputs (accelerator, brake, light switches), even seat occupancy. (Yep, mine has seat sensors for that.)
I spent several hours researching how to disable this thing and there is very little information on doing so for my exact year/model. What little info I did find says there's no easy and simple way. The fuse for it powers several other things. There is a module you can disconnect somewhere deep in the dash, but you lose other functionality like Bluetooth. And the car will probably constantly warn you about a failed module and turn your check engine light on.
My best guess right now is to find out where cell antenna is and bridge it with a 50-ohm resistor. (But that is not necessarily bulletproof either as dummy loads can still transmit, just with greatly reduced output.)
I have read that car manufacturers make these systems intentionally hard to disable because each one is a perpetual stream of income for them for as long as the car is on the road: They sell the data to data brokers who then re-sell it to insurers and various other customer profiling companies.
According to my Vehicle Privacy Support (https://vehicleprivacyreport.com), LexisNexis is the data broker that Toyota uses. I submitted Consumer Disclosure Report with them and 6 weeks later, a snail-mail letter arrived saying they were not going to disclose any of my information to me.
> According to my Vehicle Privacy Support (https://vehicleprivacyreport.com), LexisNexis is the data broker that Toyota uses. I submitted Consumer Disclosure Report with them and 6 weeks later, a snail-mail letter arrived saying they were not going to disclose any of my information to me.
What legal recourse would you have? They've got data on you, you'd think that at the very least they would be obligated to show it to you for a reasonable price.
At least 10 years ago you could remove the cable/bridge that connected the network board to the rest of the car. I'm not sure thats possible anymore. About 8 years ago you could get a fleet type vehicle that didn't include stuff like OnStar. Not sure thats possible anymore either.
That used to work. Not anymore. Now that we have embedded SIMs and integrated GPS/Cellular antennas pulling the fuse does a lot more than just disabling sending back data.
It also kills a very important safety feature, the one that auto-calls 911/112/999/... when you get into an accident.
