Car Privacy Concerns

Modern cars come with a wide range of sensors and capture a whole lot of data. Apart from data entered directly into a car’s infotainment system, many cars can collect data in the background via cameras, microphones, sensors, and connected phones and apps.

These data include:

• speed
• steering, brake, and accelerator pedal use
• seat belt use
• phone contacts
• navigation destinations
• voice data, etc.

If you have cameras attached to your car, footage of you inside/outside the car may also be collected and sent to the car manufacturer’s data servers. It is well known that between 2019 and 2022, Tesla employees internally circulated intimate footage collected from people’s private cars.

A lot of this data is used for legitimate purposes such as making driving more enjoyable and safer for the driver, passengers, and pedestrians. But there is nothing preventing the car makers from sharing your sensitive data with third-party data collectors for marketing purposes.

We all are kind of used to Google and FaceBook spying on us and springing ads randomly on social media based on our offline conversations. Now, they will probably start collecting the relevant data from our car manufacturers also.

Should we be concerned? Yes!

What can we do about it now? Not much. We will need stricter data laws and regulatory checks to safeguard citizen privacy, across the world.

#Cars #Technology #Privacy #Security