this post was submitted on 03 Mar 2026
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Ha the undisableable built in gps does that much better.
Except it isn't, because you have to access the data of that GPS receiver somehow.
I'm so fed up with people having this misconception that GPS somehow on its own exfiltrates one's position. It doesn't. You're literally just using a pre-defined arrangement of satellites that broadcast their IDs to establish location. It's entirely local because GPS signal is only received by people.
So no, just by having GPS, you can't be found by anyone. Not even governments or the CIA.
Now, if that GPS receiver feeds into a smart system that is exposed to the internet... that is a different topic as there's tons of ways to have apps preinstalled and pre-approved that can read the GPS receiver data and send it off to a third party. It can even be built into the OS.
However, permanently internet connected cars aren't that widespread even today - most actually tend to rely on the driver's phone and runs a very thin layer of smart stuff that simply enables the phone to use the car dashboard as a terminal.
Depends on the attacker. The GPS is better if you have access to the car, but getting that is hard. Any idiot with a radio can read the TPMS sensors of every car going by - there is nothing that even slows them down.
That idiot would be better off just using a camera and capture the license plates...hell, they can even do that from even further away. Using the ID of TPMS for tracking is probably the least effective or usable way to track vehicles of the literal dozen of much better ways.
Camera has to have LOS to the car's license plate, it's got a limited field of view, it's blocked or obscured by bad weather and other objects. You need to have some compute power with the camera to run the OCR to get the LP number from the image. People can easily (although not legally) switch their plates up.
Meanwhile, reading the radio signals can be done with rather small, innocuous looking hardware, it can capture many signals at once and even capture them through objects, without LOS to the TPMS, and in all kinds of weather.
Each method has it's advantages and disadvantages, and it would be foolish to ignore one simply because it does not have the same capabilities as the other.
I made sure my car doesn't come with a cellular modem. But I didn't knew about the pressure sensors.
Their is an onstar gps in them too.
But it can't transmit without a modem.
You can transmit without a modem.
Edit for the hater...
I've got two radios behind me that can transmit without a modem. I grew up with aerial TV antennas that received signals that were transmitted without a modem. You don't need a modem to transmit data. You need a modem to inject a digital signal onto an analog line or to get a digital signal out of an analog line. Modem literally stands for MODulator DEModulator.
How so? A sopranos episode they hire a dude to take it out of the car.
GPS units do not transmit, they only receive the signal from the satellites. I wouldn't take advice from TV fiction.
I would, from that show.
To be fair, that's not transmitting.
How so?
GPS works by measuring timestamps in incoming signals. that's it. it is oneway.
By definition of the word transmit.