Disabling Toyota's On-Star-like emergency call "feature"

anything in the manual?

 

It may be slightly different for your 2018 PP Advance. Pre 2019 model PP, only Advanced had the Safety Connect service. The service was off by default and you had to opt-in in order to activate the servive. If you did opt-in to the service, you had 3 years trial. At the end of the trial, you can renew or cancel the service. For post-2020 PP models, the Safety Connect service was standard in all trim levels. The service is opt-in by default. By agreeing to purchase a Toyota vehicle, a buyer was giving consent to having this service enabled. The only way to opt-out was to cancel the service via Toyota App or by contacting Toyota.

Here is my write-up on how I opt-out from the Saftey Connect on my 2020 PP LE.
No more Entune for 2020 Prius Prime, but... | PriusChat

And here is a similar thread that deals with canceling Safety Connect:
Canceling Toyota's Safety Connect Contract | PriusChat

 

Yes, just don't pay and it will eventually be shut off. (red light I think) Pretty sure you can access this service via the owner's page at Toyota.com.

 

Paranoid much ?
It should do NOTHING unless you push the button.
I don't see a problem.

But I do agree that we should be a LOT more aware of devices that communicate without our knowledge.

 

As @Salamander_King kindly mentioned, and as stated in Toyota’s Privacy Notice, you can contact Toyota to deactivate the Connected Services feature. It’s not clear to me, however, if this stops all communication and data collection: the Notice describes eight categories of information collected by Toyota, but only four of those are mentioned in the discussion of deactivation.

That may not be so: even after having been “deactivated,” I imagine the car’s cellular modem—which Toyota calls the Data Communication Module (DCM) or telematics transceiver, and which I discussed here in November 2017 and October 2020—still checks in with the network periodically, to see if the service has been re-activated.

That activity is almost certainly logged somewhere, and I can appreciate that some people might prefer not to create such records of their movements. (Such people would also be well advised not to carry a mobile phone, either, unless it’s turned off or in airplane mode, so it won’t register on the network.)

In addition to the DCM, the car uses radio for other purposes that may also have security or privacy implications. For example, the radio head unit has a Bluetooth interface, and the TPMS sensors transmit not only the tire pressure and temperature, but also unique IDs, which could in principle be tracked.

If just deactivating the service doesn’t provide sufficient assurance, you could remove or disconnect the DCM. You might be tempted to just pull the 10 A DCM/MAYDAY fuse, which has no other loads, but the DCM has a second power connection and an internal backup battery, since it needs to work after a collision that might have damaged the car’s electrical system.

In a glance through the Repair Manual (more info), I didn’t see anything suggesting that the car’s other computers are likely to store diagnostic trouble codes or otherwise complain about a missing DCM. That would make sense, since Toyota sells versions of the car without it.

The connections between the radio head unit (the large touchscreen) and the right front speaker and the microphone in the map light assembly do go through the DCM, so if you remove or disconnect it, you’ll probably want to splice those wires or, if you’d rather not do anything permanent, re-arrange the terminals into an ad-hoc junction connector. See the Electrical Wiring Diagram for details.

To complete the job, you’d replace the map light assembly with one that lacks the “SOS” button, part number 81208-47070-B0. Providing other means of emergency communications is left as an exercise for the reader.

 

True. "collecting" isn't really the problem.
Transmitting it without your knowledge IS.

 

Total, utter and complete BS.
Not even the phone companies do that.

 

Get a horse.
But be sure that he can't talk.


Just to be clear, I completely understand your concern.
I have removed the transmitter from my CPAP machine.
And we don't have an "smart speakers" or "smart appliances" in the house, partly for that reason.
But you need to think each situation through to be sure you aren't "shooting yourself in the foot" sometimes.
I think this might be one of those times.

 

Concur.

 

I presume that there is a combination of a GPS (GNSS) receiver and an electronic device (usually comprising a GSM GPRS modem or SMS sender) installed in the vehicle.
If you find it, look for a very small wire plugged into something like THIS.



Unplugging that might make it more difficult for the car to talk with the mothership - but....beware!
My 2020 (GM) has already undergone 2 OTA software updates, even though I pay for NO On* products.
Sometimes?
You WANT those updates.

If you find a way to put your car in "airplane" mode, without disabling some key feature or violating some obscure term in the wordy EULA for your vehicle, then you will become what I like to call "statistically interesting."

These are the people that dot.gov and dot.com pay MORE attention to.

or?
You can buy a used Veedubbaya Bug.

Your call.

Good Luck!

 

I think he is confusing that with their alleged collection of excessive amounts of metadata that they don't necessarily have legal rights to. At least by publicly known interpretations of the law, which don't necessarily bear much similarity to their internal secret interpretations.

I doubt that the gub'mint or phone companies have enough storage ability to record all the actual phone conversations in any usable fashion. That metadata helps them select which ones to record.