Owners may want to disable this in hardware rather than relying on a sketchy opt-out mechanism. The relevant part is the "data communications module". It has an LTE modem and a backup battery, so it's able to transmit even if the car battery is disconnected. It requires a little bit of dashboard disassembly to access. You can either remove it or disconnect the LTE and GPS antennas. Toyota has technical documents available for $25 at https://techinfo.toyota.com.
It would be great if there was some website that collected all the detailed instructions for removing the spy devices from different car models.
1. Cost. I'd rather not pay for hardware and software I won't use.
2. Environmental impact. Unused and unwanted hardware is waste.
3. Unauthorized users connecting to WiFi. TVs are often in common areas. The settings menus have no authentication. So an unauthorized user might connect the TV to a WiFi network.
4. Automatic WiFi connections. TVs might connect to open or partnered WiFi networks without telling the user. Hard to know without an audit.
5. Accidental WiFi connections. Settings menus might be unintuitive (or deceptive) enough to trick users into joining WiFi networks accidentally.
6. Future data leaks. TVs might be recording data and saving it to internal storage. The next owner of the TV could connect it to a network, and years of stored data would be leaked. Again, hard to know without an audit.
Please, stop using phone numbers. There is no reliable way to hold a phone number. The messaging protocols are insecure. If your service uses phone numbers or SMS, that means it's not secure or reliable.
I wonder how hard it would be to have my personal residence classified as one of these protected places. Incorporate some kind of business or non-profit, make sure it shows up the right way in Google Maps, then enjoy freedom from Google surveillance.
I fear services will force the use of certain devices, like those on the FIDO certified products list [0]. Will there be a way to use open hardware, open firmware, and user-controlled hardware attestation keys? Or will that be considered a fraud/bot risk?
The services I interact with that support WebAuthn usually only allow you to register one key. Backup and recovery is a confusing puzzle for most of these services.
Yes, and there are surveillance companies dedicated to tracking people and the returns they make [0]. Many retailers now demand personal information like ID cards to make returns. If their secret fraud detection algorithms flag you, you can find yourself suddenly unable to make returns.
It's chilling how quickly the tech industry has coalesced around oppressive and biased social media censorship policies. A scant few years ago, the tech industry was a beacon of free expression.
So it's sending some amount of telemetry, but it's not so bad compared to mainstream browsers. A more detailed comparison is available in this report linked by another commenter: https://www.scss.tcd.ie/Doug.Leith/pubs/browser_privacy.pdf
It's a matter of preference and threat models. Brave isn't perfect, and has had some controversy in their business practices. They also have some telemetry and cryptocurrency ads. For non-technical users I still think Brave is the best overall bet, especially on mobile devices. There's a great privacy comparison linked in a different thread.
For more technical people, ungoogled-chromium [1] is probably the cleanest option. It's completely free from ads, telemetry, "pings", "experiments", and the like.
Telephone numbers are fundamentally incompatible with privacy. Signal's leadership knows this, but they don't appear to care.