Your car probably knows more about your daily life than your phone does, and almost no one talks about it. If you’ve bought a vehicle in the last few years, there’s a good chance it came with a built-in mobile connection – the same one that powers roadside assistance and the app that unlocks your doors. That connection doesn’t switch off when you’re not using those features. It quietly logs where you go and how you drive, and in many cases that record is sold on.
A 2023 study by the Mozilla Foundation examined the privacy policies of every major car brand and rated cars the worst product category for privacy it had ever reviewed. Every single manufacturer got a failing grade. Consumer Reports reached a similar conclusion: nearly every automaker selling cars in the US collects and shares driver data.
Part of what makes this so hard to fight is that the consent is real on paper. It’s usually buried in the setup screen for something that sounds helpful – a “safety score”, a rewards scheme, driving feedback. You tap agree because you want the app to work, and folded into that same agreement is permission to collect and share how you drive. The wording is deliberately broad, written to cover as many future uses as possible, and nobody reads forty screens of terms while finishing a purchase at the dealership.
The Chinese car question
The rise of Chinese electric cars adds another layer. These vehicles are packed with cameras, microphones and sensors, and are permanently connected – essentially smartphones on wheels. The worry isn’t just commercial data-selling but where the data ends up. Governments in the US, Germany, South Korea and elsewhere have raised concerns that connected Chinese cars could funnel sensitive information (locations, driving patterns, even camera footage) back to China. The US has opened a formal investigation, and some secure sites in Britain reportedly ban certain models from their car parks entirely.
The companies push back. BYD, the world’s largest EV maker, says European data stays on servers in Europe and never travels to China. But security researchers have found reasons for caution: one team pulled a used infotainment unit from a scrapped BYD and recovered a driver’s full contact list (including labelled family members) along with home and work addresses, and even music preferences. They also uncovered a flaw in the car’s software that left this data poorly protected.
The honest takeaway is that this isn’t really a Chinese problem or an American one. It’s a modern-car problem. Almost every connected vehicle on the road harvests a startling amount of personal information; the differences are in who ends up holding it and how carelessly it’s guarded.
What we can do
We have more room to push back than you’d think. Several US states now require automakers to disclose everything they’ve collected about you and to delete it on request. You can also pull your own file from the big driving-data brokers and opt out. In the car’s own settings and companion app, dig through the connected-services and “data sharing” options and turn off anything tied to driving behaviour, location history or marketing – you’ll usually keep the features you actually want. And next time you buy, treat the enrolment screens like a contract, not a formality, because that’s exactly what they are.
Source: https://www.theverge.com/