Modern automobiles are technological marvels offering many options for car buyers. Privacy is not one of them. New cars have become spies on wheels.
Automobiles today are giant rolling sensors, from the tires to the entertainment system, tracking not only your driving habits but recording personal information about you, completely unrelated to driving.
Experts call them a “privacy nightmare.”
New cars can collect more data about you than anything else you own, including your cell phone, and for good reason. Driver data has been valued at $400 billion.
“The saying in Silicon Valley is, ‘If you’re not paying for the product, you’re the product.’ But what’s strange with cars is that the average new car costs almost $50,000. You’re still the product,” says Andrea Amico, founder and CEO of Privacy4Cars, one of the nation’s top experts on auto data collection.
Amico says, “If you ask Americans how they feel about their car, they’ll tell you they’re an extension of their home. They feel it’s a very private place.”
In fact, your car is far from private. A study by Mozilla’s ‘Privacy Not Included‘ project found cars to be the worst product for privacy they’ve ever tested.
The fine print on Nissan’s privacy statement from 2023 says it may collect “Sensitive personal information, including…citizenship status, immigration status, race, national origin, religious or philosophical beliefs, sexual orientation, sexual activity…health diagnosis data, and genetic information.”
After an uproar, the company’s most recent privacy statement omits the collection of “sexual” and “genetic” information.
Security and privacy expert Thorin Klosowski at the Electronic Frontier Foundation says it’s not clear if it was just lawyerly fine print. “It’s kind of hard to say if they’re actually collecting anything or if they’ve just written it so that they could theoretically collect something,” Klosowski said.
Some new car owners have seen their premiums go up after their insurance company received their driving data.
Amico says when data is shared with insurance companies, “Some stuff is more obvious. Am I slamming on the brakes really hard? Running red lights? Some of them are a little bit less obvious, like which areas are you driving at? What time are you driving?”
The top automotive trade group in the U.S., the Alliance for Automotive Innovation, insists your car isn’t spying on you, it’s “keeping you safe.” It adds that its members, which include most car companies, have “..pledged to meet or exceed commitments contained in the Consumer Privacy Protection Principles for Vehicle Technologies…” which includes obtaining the owner’s permission before using their data.
Although Klosowski said that during a car purchase, privacy may be the last thing on a car buyer’s mind: “I bought a car recently and it even took me — who pays attention to this stuff all the time — a couple seconds before I realized that I was essentially agreeing to be sharing information with a third party. “
Used cars have another privacy problem. One YouTuber shared that after selling his Volvo, the next owner never reset the car’s security profile.
“So I can log in to my app and I can see every single place that the new owner has gone, from the school their kids go to, the church, to where they work, to where their house is, physical address, right in the driveway. I know everything about them,” he said.
Then there are ‘kill switches‘ that allow dealers or the government to shut off your car. Some used car dealers already use them when a buyer falls behind in their payments. A federal mandate for a kill switch in all vehicles sold after 2026 was embedded into the 2021 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act.
Some in Congress want it removed from the law.
At a Congressional hearing in February, Michael Hanson of the Governors Highway Safety Association, testified that “the technology is very near to being developed that would allow for a passive type of system that would detect when a driver has an alcohol concentration above a predetermined level and that would not allow the vehicle to be operated.”
Polling shows an overwhelming majority of car buyers want to control their own data. Klosowski says the first thing new or used cars buyers should do is shut off as much of the data collection as possible.
“I would open up the settings of the infotainment system. I would start there, see if there’s any privacy settings that you can change,” Klosowski said. “I would then do the same thing in the app.”
The old saying of “buyer beware” has never been more true than when buying a new car.
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