Yeah this was probably some rank and file employee that was trying to cash in on that sweet patent filing bonus Ford probably provides

Whisper

OBD2 diagnostic data and telematics are different subjects

In most legacy manufacturers (e.g, not Tesla) vehicles you can disable/remove the communication module, which is a cell phone modem that interfaces with the car.

For Toyota specifically this is called the DCM (data communication module). It’s a little black box. In Fords/Hondas it’s called a TCU (telematics control module).

In some cases, you can just pull the fuse for the telematics box.

In general, when you research whether you can physically remove this tracking stuff from modern cars, the key word is to use is “telematics”.

I’m afraid it’s going to get much worse. Right now you can at least disable/take out the little box out of most cars without losing functionality for the most part. Soon it’ll be crippling to do so.

What’s worse is that in the EU, the connectivity is mandated with eCall, which calls the police with your coordinates in the event of a crash.

Though the EU has strong data privacy so at least you can be semi confident you can opt out and have your data forgotten from the manufacturer

Don’t worry Honda has this telematics garbage too

https://mygarage.honda.com/s/hondalink-marketing

If you are in the docker ecosystem, this is fantastic https://github.com/haugene/docker-transmission-openvpn

You can configure sonarr and radarr around this so that when the torrents are completed, they are renamed and placed in the nas as well as send a webhook to jellyfin to let it know it has been added (instead of it having to to do a manual search)

It is a business risk for Apple to mine data on data they have explicitly confirmed in this ToS to be e2e encrypted and private.

If we’re going that far, none of the Broadcom/Qualcomm/Exynos/Snapdragon chips have open source firmware. Additionally google services are all closed source and proprietary.

Backdoors exist but all phones have backdoors in them and should be assumed they are exploited by state actors.

From a privacy standpoint, on stock mobile OS, Apple is the lead. I certainly won’t disagree that there are custom roms without google services that are superior though.

Generally Apple apps e2e encrypt your data and can not be read/mined by them. There are caveats such as Siri (anonymized voice clips uploaded for example) or (iirc) Apple News. Things like notes, fitness/health, or iMessage are your data.