How to prevent TT-use from tracking&tracing ?

[John_Doe]

Recently I have had a conflict with the police.
And -with a court order- my TT has been given to the TT-company,
which extracted a lot of info from my TT to support the police.

The info that was provided contained
a complete GPS-logfile of recent period
and a track-list of many routes I have taken.

The result is that they now know I did not any crime,
but the result is also that my wife knows I visited a sexclub :-(

So, it seems that the TT-device is logging more info
than presented in only the "Recent route" list.
This can also be a problem if a family member will be using your TT temporarily.
And it seems that there is no way to clear the logfile or recent routes.
So...
anybody experiences with TT-logfiles ?
any suggestions how to clear the logfile ?
any other suggestion to reduce tracking&tracing by other people when using a TT device?

 

[dhn]

The logfiles aren't accessible without a court order as you have found out. There are no tools as far as I'm aware that allows a normal user to read them. You don't say what model you have but I think a factory reset would probably eliminate all traces.

 

[canderson]

@dhn

We don't know what model Mr. Doe owns, but for older units, the recent 'track' data (the info sent to TomTom with which they build IQRoutes information) is "deleted" from the unit when it is plugged into Home and transmitted to TT to be aggregated with other similar data. Problem is, as we know, information truly deleted (not just put into a temporary 'trash can') from most devices usually just has its directory entry killed so that it can't be accessed by the file system and the space released for future use. Unless the space that it had used is overwritten, the data is often still resident in various unused sectors somewhere. Ask Ms. Clinton about that.

A factory reset will 'delete' certain files, but does not overwrite the areas they occupied in flash memory. So I don't think that even a factory reset will make it impossible for someone with the unit in hand and decent digital forensic skills to retrieve that information if it hasn't yet been overwritten.

The only safe method for a complete 'wipe' would be the FAT32 (and not 'quick') format and a zero fill (no patterns needed with flash unlike hard drives) before starting anew with the firmware installation. Then there will no longer be anything left for any LEO to extract from the device and present to TomTom for their analysis.

But as you say, only TomTom has the magic decoder ring for these logs, so family members wouldn't be able to do anything with them, even if they could capture them before they were deleted by the PC after transmission to TomTom.

 

[John_Doe]

Will there is even a button "Delete" in the 'recent destinations'-menu.
And I discovered that you can connect your TT to the PC and delete the file mapsettings.cfg
By the way, there is a POIeditor-tool available on the net that allows you to manually edit this configuration file. And so.... always tell the police that the TT-history-info is not correct because you manually edited it ;-) Will be hard for them to prove otherwise.

 

[canderson]

Those methods that you mention will delete recent history so that other users of the device will not see them, but will not solve your problem with a forensics expert if you get into a jam with the police again.
Understand that the 'track data' that can be found by that method and a court order for TomTom to decypher it isn't the same as a list of your recent destinations that you can 'delete' so that casual users can't see them ... it is a history of roads traveled and speeds.

 

[Arno]

And I discovered that you can connect your TT to the PC and delete the file mapsettings.cfg

That tells that your device is a NAV2 unit which connects to your PC via the HOME software from TomTom.

We usually give the advice to make a complete backup of the internal and external memory before installing a new map or operating system.

That way the mapsettings.cfg file can be copied back to start off with the previous Home position, Favourites and Recent destinations.