Does anyone know about the legality of removing the built-in sim cards from your car, specifically in Australia?
I don’t intend on using any car smart-features when I get one. For context, I’ve never owned a car. When I do get one though, I intend to remove the sim card to prevent the car’s location from being constantly tracked. All I care about in terms a cars functionality is a radio, a CD drive (Yes, I use CD’s), and Bluetooth audio, so I don’t think removing the sim card should affect this much, if at all. Any knowledge and advice would be appreciated, thankyou!
Update: What I was referring to is an eSim, which appears not to be in the form of a physical card. Even so, if possible, I would like to disable the functionality of this eSim assuming the car I purchase has one in-built. From my research, I cannot find anything that explicitly forbids disabling or removing Sims.
Are you sure your car actually has a simcard?
edit rereading I see youre asking about a potential car for the future.
I found very little info- except this, which hints at having network connectivity without a simcard (and also discusses swapping sims). But I found very little else
https://intotomorrow.com/can-you-swap-the-sim-card-in-your-car/
A second link about someone asking whether they should remove the card before returning the car. The advice says to take it out. Which implies to me, for this car at least, itll function without a sim
https://www.fpaceforum.com/threads/leave-or-remove-sim-when-turning-car-in.47642/
I can’t speak to the legality, but if you own the vehicle 100%, I can’t see removing parts from the vehicle being illegal as long as they don’t impinge on road safety.
I would recommend removing more than just the SIM card, if the radios have their own fuse, take the fuse out, or physically remove the radios themselves.
Yep. It’s your car to do with it what you want. The ADRs (Australian Design Rules) only apply at point of sale. Once it’s yours, it merely needs meet roadworthy requirements. As long as you keep a functioning speedo, wipers and lights, you can rip out every bit of electronics in the car.
I doubt any modern car with those features have a physical sim card you can remove. They are probably all using some sort of esim. On some cars the antennas can be unplugged but that depends on the specific model. If you’re unlucky, you will not even be able to remove the tracking features at all because they are integrated with other components needed to function.
With regards to the legality of that, I unfortunately cant help you there. Probably best to search for local cases or ask a local lawyer.
Your best option in probably buing a used car thats old enogh not to track you. Hope that helps a bit
With how big Australia is and how long the stretches are in which there are only things that want to kill and/or consume you how wise is it to do that? I’m not trolling, if I got jumped by a rowdy gang of drop crocs I’d rather people at least knew where to start looking for the pieces.
A good point, but if privacy is their key concern then I would imagine it would have to be a two step approach - rip out the SIM and radio, but also have a couple of plan B’s such as phones with location tracking (the irony isn’t lost on me), land-based EPIRB’s, or satphones or whatever’s needed.
That, or invest in some drop-croc martial arts!
Good point but people have been driving to and from the outback long before the arrival of the connected car. Except the car, nothing else has changed much and it’s still possible to drive around with a “basic” car. Besides, there’s always the mobile phone if connectivity is required.
As others have said it will likely be an ESIM or similar solution because there isn’t a need for the manufacturer to support physical SIMs.
Regarding being tracked though, Australia has ANPR just like most other developed countries, you will be trackable even if your car was just a Flintstones car with a numberplate.
I’d also add if you’ve got a phone in your pocket, that’s just as trackable
I’m interested in this topic as well. I know I’m being tracked on my phone, but I’m much more confident my phone manufacturer is not selling/giving my data to police or insurance companies. Those are who I’m concerned with tracking me.
Apple is the manufacturer who makes the biggest hoo-ha over privacy, yet they gave user data to the police 90% of the time (Google was surprisingly lower at 80%)
Plus if you have a subscription to a mobile cellular network, as basically everyone with a phone does, that will also be constantly tracking you (and I believe also directly available to the police).
That’s all without going into whether you trust every single third party app on your phone and every website you visit.
You sort of left out a lot of context with that statistic that the article did include. Apple gets significantly fewer requests because the data they have is far less useful, that is generally a plus.
Cellular location data from the provider generally requires a warrant unless there are exigent circumstances. There has been a lot of controversy recently about warrants being granted that are too broad, the “every phone in this wide area” thing, but they are still warrants being granted by courts vs direct access.
That sort of “tell me every phone in the vicinity of this location” is the sort of request that Google typically has the data to fulfill and Apple generally does not (though the cell provider might).
This is more about the car maker harvesting data, rather than just tracking the car. Car makers have been (quietly) building more tech into their cars to collect data for the purposes of selling it to third parties. It’s effectively the enshittification of cars.
