Just to make it clear, what I said was not an excuse, it was a warning. And it will not stop, period. Just like you can't stop sewer, or electricity, or mass transit, or Internet. The benefit to businesses is so many orders of magnitude higher than the cost of dealing with unhappy among us, it's as stoppable as a tide. And I'm not even going to touch the Second law of thermodynamics and try to calculate how much heat all this crap generates (I can literally see those of us who pay attention to batteries start nodding as they read this, they measured the current and know the Ohm's law).

Picture related.

 

The original question in the thread was how to stop surveillance via our cars. Privacy in general is a topic I care about, but discussions about it tend to be circular.

It's getting time for me to work up enough courage to rip out my car's trim and see if I can pull the LTE antenna cable. Haha, I hit the shark fin a few days ago going into a garage, so I almost had a short-cut solution to that problem (luckily there wasn't much damage).

 

I got an initial response back from JLR on my California CCPA request. I asked for six specific areas of disclosure, consistent with the California Privacy Act and all they responded with was a dump of vehicle service records, internal emails regarding a complaint, and some data from their CRM system (only answered a part of one of the six). They failed to address questions about sharing data with third parties, sale of data, vehicle telemetry data, or categories of data. I let them know their response was legally incomplete and am waiting for the full response.

More to come...

 

Sounds like you are on the right track ... my hope is that you wouldn't need to have the GPS antenna disconnected. It seems that connecting the cellular antenna to a dummy load (which will prevent it from pulling a signal at all) is the right next step. There are plenty of places around the US in more remote areas with no cell coverage at all and everything works just fine. We just need to provide sufficient attenuation on that cellular connection that it can't connect to anything.

 

@Kazimir Thank you for this effort and for the very clear photos! A few things:

First, are the cables to the module color coded as well and the same colors? If so, which color is the Cellular antenna cable? I was thinking it may be easier to access the cable at the shark-fin, and I'd assume the colors there would be the same.

Next, it's possible that the module can detect the impedance miss-match as you suggest. Ordinarily, one would attach a termination resistor (probably 50 Ohms, but I'm not positive about this case; it could also be 75 Ohms for example) to the connector to mimic an antenna and disable it.

Of course, it's also possible that the module just can't connect to the mothership and is complaining about that. The latter would typically happen in a very remote area, for example, and so I can't imagine the car would do more than issue a warning.

About the "one bar" situation: I saw some documentation that referenced a "backup" telematics antenna in the module itself. This would very likely be a PCB patch antenna. Looking at your photos, my guess is that it would be the small gold rectangular area a little below the green and purple connectors. There is a capacitor or more likely a resistor in series with it, which could be desoldered if you were that brave. (I wouldn't hesitate, but I have the skill and equipment to remove it and put it back easily. For others, don't try this at home, kids!)

The main cellular antenna would be responsible for both software updates and data transmission to the mothership. If the "one bar" backup is providing full functionality, I wouldn't expect the warning message. So it sounds like the "backup" might not have full functionality, but I have no information about that.

A question: I had heard somewhere that it was possible to obtain updates via your home WiFi. Is this true? If so, that would be good.

Also, I presume that one would need to clear the message at every startup? Annoying! But at least it's one easy button push. Does it get overwritten without clearing it once a map is called up?

Thank you again!

 

No antenna would be behind any of those metal covers. As you recognized, those are little Faraday cages designed to block RF signals (electrical RF noise from the enclosed high-frequency electronics) and would kill a deliberate RF signal too. I'm pretty confident that I identified the backup antenna on the PCB as mentioned above. You can see a signal trace peeking through a tiny exit from the nearby metal cover. I suspect that the main signals to the three coaxial outputs come from under the cover closest to them on the other side of the board. Separate modems and receivers, etc., are likely under that cover.

If out of service areas don't trigger a warning, then without the main antenna, I'd suppose that either the impedance miss-match is causing the warning, or else the backup radio+patch antenna isn't actually used for that purpose, or both. LR no-doubt buys these modules off the shelf, and may not use everything in it - though they sure do use a lot of it!

The sharkfin includes separate cables for GPS, satellite radio, telematics ("cellular"), clearsight camera, and one other presumably also associated with the clearsight camera. In a powerfuluk video, you can see white, yellow, blue and black coaxial cables, and one more complicated non-coaxial one (I'm sure for clearsight). The guy (what a character!) didn't identify which was which, so thanks for pointing out that white=cellular. He seems to believe that the camera output is via coax, which would be the fourth coax (black?), though I wouldn't be quick to take his word on that. Here's his video:


Apple's own maps, and basic carplay in general, does not identify and track users. But you can be certain that virtually all others (Wayz, etc.) that would be accessible via carplay, and any other non-apple apps, do! I don't use any of those.

A question: Can you compare the effort and likelihood of damage between accessing the module itself and the shark-fin, i.e. as the video showed? Which do you think is easier, etc?

Thanks again for your excellent practical research!

 

Awesome! Thanks for the diagram! Do you have one for the shark-fin?

I see your confusion, since your "white" connector is labeled as WiFi not GSM (and it's shown in yellow, too).

There are two GSM antennas. The "diversity" antenna is normally receive-only, but the module can likely use one or the other or both simultaneously for reception, depending on signal strength. If, despite the confusion, you did only disconnect the main one, then the diversity one is the likely source of the "one bar" symbol.

There's also some confusion at the shark-fin, since there seems to be one too many expected coaxes at the fin (GSM, GSM-diversity, WiFi, satellite radio, GPS). There are pretty clearly only 4 at the shark-fin, at least as seen in the video above.