Your smart car is spying on you
Conn Carroll
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If you need another reason to lament that cars are fast becoming computers on wheels, consider this: Your smart car is spying on you every time you drive, and it is selling your data to the highest bidder.
According to the Mozilla Foundation, the nonprofit organization founded by the company that created Firefox, today’s cars are “the worst product category” it has ever reviewed for privacy. Even smart home devices (such as Amazon’s Echo), cellphones, and smartwatches that take your vital signs didn’t have a worse record on privacy than cars.
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Just think of all the sensors and data that smart cars need to do the things sold as a benefit to you, such as adjusting your seat and the temperature of your car and warning you about traffic around your vehicle. Some cars even brag about being able to drive for you.
All of those actions require sensors to collect data first. All the data are collected and then sent to the car companies that sell your data to third parties.
And that doesn’t even include all the apps your car uses, such as Sirius XM or Google Maps. Do you let your car sync with your cellphone? Boom! Now, your car has all the data on your cellphone, too.
And the car companies never inform drivers about any of this. Of the 25 car brands tested by Mozilla (including all the major brands you can think of), only Renault and Dacia said drivers have the right to have all their data deleted. The rest of these car companies are just using the generic language in their user agreements to harvest all your data and sell the data to the highest bidder.
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Worse, Mozilla could find no evidence that the data your car is transmitting back to the mother ship are protected. All of your personal data are being shared by your car over the internet, and no one is bothering to encrypt the data. Mozilla calls it a “privacy nightmare.”
So, if you don’t want to broadcast to the world all of your movements in real life and on the internet, don’t buy a car that connects to the internet, stick to internal combustion engines, and tell Congress to stop forcing consumers to buy electric vehicles, which are nothing more than spyware on wheels.