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Comment by jmole | Hacker News Reader

I had a mystery tracker installed in a car I purchased as well: https://fccid.io/2AEB4AMV01/User-Manual/Users-Manual-3928375

The dealer even added a $250 fee to "remove" this device, but I found it was still installed, so I think I ended up footing the bill for the device itself.

The device is ostensibly to protect inventory from loss, but it seems like they are incentivizing dealers to leave these in cars to capture location data, for whatever reason.

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Is that legal? Its one thing to have a tracker installed and bury the notification in the terms and conditions, it's another entirely to charge someone to remove the tracker and then track them surreptitiously with it. At very least I feel like they owe you $250 for services not rendered.

It's not. It's fraud. If you pursue this in small claims court, make sure to include the paid equivalent of time off from work you needed to deal with the matter.

Who is "they"?

The Ciansa folk probably.

http://ciansa.com/

The car dealerships put these things on cars in the event that you finance through them. They are able to make you pay for the device they use to track down vehicles they want to repo. Since they splice into the harness and it takes time to get back in there its actually more problematic to remove than to just leave it. You're paying for it, one way or another.

Not spliced, they used a splitter with an OBD port on either side. I did finance through my own bank though, which might explain the "removal fee".

If these things connect to the OBD port, aren't they basically trivial to find and uninstall yourself?

They're normally wired in somewhere behind the glovebox or steering column, and can be pretty hard to find.

I had one on a car I bought, and it kept draining the car battery whenever I left it more than a few days. I wasted many hours buying new batteries, testing alternators, and tracking down leakage currents before finding it consuming nearly a watt continuously.

Do they split the OBD signal behind the glovebox or the steering column? If so, then I imagine they're much harder to find. But if they do it on the actual OBD2 port, then I imagine they would be rather easy to spot?

They only need a power source to stay powered to give up their location. Most of them don't splice in nicely using the OBD ports.

Did you mean 1 Watt or actually 1 Amp? 1 Watt would be rather modest and shouldn't drain you battery within a week, 1 Amp certainly is another story.

1 watt. So about 0.1 amps. But the car had a 30 amp-hour battery, so after 10 days the battery is fully drained. And lead acid batteries don't like being fully drained more than once or twice, so after a month or two, you have to buy a new battery. And the process repeats...

This happens even if you drive the car every day. Since a full charge of a lead acid battery is 12+ hours, if you only drive the car half an hour per day, then each day you are discharging more than you charge.

Depends on the place, most that I've ever dealt with were spliced into the harness. You got off lucky if they went the extra mile and used the less intrusive option. Those aren't as common.

Where did you find the tracker in the car?

Connected to the OBD port with an OBD splitter to make it look like there was nothing installed there. They didn’t secure it well though, so I saw it dangling by the brake pedal.

https://imgur.com/a/MSGmfRt

Is that necessarily to “make sure there was nothing installed there”? Or could it be that they needed to keep the OBD port open for normal service purposes?

Yes, for the marketed use case of "put these on the cars in your lot for theft prevention", you obviously want them to be invisible.

But Honda already has telematics in these cars in the infotainment system, and it would be trivial to add anti-theft to the existing system. It all just feels a bit.. fishy.

It actually says “Designed in California,” like it’s a shiney iThing.

iKnowWhereYouAre

You paid $250 to get that device removed? Did you try just unplugging it?!

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