It turns out that your car is likely collecting more personal data about you than necessary, and you have little control over what happens to that information. It’s all according to the Mozilla Foundation, which surveyed more than two dozen car makers like Tesla, Ford, and Nissan.
“Every product in the category we reviewed earned our ‘privacy not included’ warning label, in large part because these car companies collect so much data from so many sources — your car’s sensors, the microphones, the cameras in them, the connected services you use through the cars, the apps that you use,” says Jen Caltrider, the lead researcher behind the study and program director at the Mozilla Foundation. “Then they take this data, and they see it as a gold mine.”
In parsing through each of these company’s privacy policies, Caltrider says the data raised researchers’ eyebrows. It included sexual activity, sexual orientation, genetic and health data, and immigration status.
It is unclear how these companies are collecting this data, Caltrider says, and many of the privacy policies appear legally vague. She does stipulate, however, that many modern cars come with sensors that can tell how fast a driver is going, how much they weigh, and how many people are in a vehicle.
“People can't really opt out of those. And couple that with connected services that are also sharing a lot of data. It's great that [an] app lets you remotely start your car if it's cold, but your apps are also collecting a lot of data,” Caltrider says. “This is the problem that consumers face. They don't have a lot of options, and they don't have a lot of answers.”
Another red flag: how the data can be shared with third parties such as law enforcement. Caltrider draws a comparison to the privacy concerns around reproductive apps: “They can collect way more information than a reproductive health app in a lot of ways, and things like if you're visiting a reproductive health clinic or driving across state lines.”
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She adds, “The language we found in these privacy policies for sharing with governments was shocking. It wasn't that a court order was required. Some of them said that they would share data with government or law enforcement based simply on something like a formal or informal request. And that gets really scary when you think that your car has cameras and microphones.”