Ideally I'd like to keep my cake and eat it: keep navigation (preferably offline), spotify, etc. working but disable the telemetry, remote control, etc. From what I could gather, Teslas can use Wifi (your phone's hotspot) as a backup uplink. So depending on how they've implemented the cloud features, after disconnecting the antennae, you might be able to set up a tiny router and whitelist certain DNS queries, HTTPs connections, etc. But it might also be that they just use a big ol' VPN tunnel to the mothership and pipe all the cloud features through it.
Slightly less ambitious: does the navigation in Teslas work offline? Offline maps and route calculation have been around since the 00's in standalone GPS navigators, so it's not impossible.
Everything has cameras these days. On my street almost every house has a cloud connected camera. Every major road has cameras, every store and business. Now I’m not suggesting we give up the fight for privacy but avoiding gas stations does nothing
I suspect soon cameras in other cars will also be reporting our whereabouts.
Absolute privacy is almost impossible on public roads.
Most of these are cloud connected, how do you know they aren't storing license plate information, or face data, or audio data for extended periods of time in the cloud?
Because I am instead annoyed at all three.
Not necessarily my neighbours, but the companies selling this spyware.
You can store an ungodly amount of data if you convert everything to metadata, e.g store a face picture for a short period of time, create a hash to match against other faces in the database. Same with license plates.
Using the metadata alone could effectively completely track your whereabouts.
They can't brick cars with bad antennas. They have to allow for cars that drive into tunnels or that are used in areas with no cell service.
They could choose to throw up increasingly annoying messages if the car hasn't phoned home for some time. Tesla does this if you haven't updated your software in a while but the screens are pretty easy to close and ignore.
BTW I don’t own a Tesla. My car is like yours, a pre-2010 gas minivan with zero tracking.
Our phones and roadside Flock cameras still rat out both kinds of vehicles. I suspect soon cameras in other cars will also be reporting our whereabouts.
Absolute privacy is almost impossible on public roads.