Is Your Car Spying on You? How It May Be Selling Your Secrets

Most carmakers in the US gather and share driver data. Often, drivers agree to these data collection practices without even knowing it. Your data might impact your car insurance premiums and even the terms you are offered on an auto loan.

Is your car spying on you, and what can you do to protect your privacy?

What Data Is Your Car Collecting?

Most cars built in recent years are connected cars. Connection to the internet offers drivers all manner of functions for safety and convenience, but these features also enable data collection.

Your average connected car will collect approximately 25 GB of data per hour across more than 100 different data points.

The vast amount of information collected can include data on your driving behavior, where you go, and what you say when you are in the car. When you connect your phone to a vehicle, it can gather information about you from your device, too.

The nonprofit Mozilla investigated the data collection practices of 25 car brands and found that cars can collect information on race, income, immigration status, and more.

What Do Car Companies Do with That Data?

Automakers aren’t amassing this data for no reason. Many of them use this data to make inferences about you. Car companies share and sell this information and their assumptions about you based on that data to third parties.

Third parties interested in buying that data include data brokers, advertisers, lenders, and insurance companies. Data brokers, in turn, can sell your data. Advertisers can use your data to create more targeted ads.

Lenders and insurance companies may use drivers’ data to develop risk scores. These risk scores operate like credit scores, impacting car insurance premiums and loan terms.

What Can You Do to Protect Your Privacy?

Data privacy is a growing concern among consumers, and your car’s data collection practices raise many questions about how your data is stored, sold, and used. Safeguarding your data in the modern era of connected cars is difficult, but there are steps you can take.

You can contact the company that made your car and request to preserve your privacy. You can request to opt out of data collection, to limit the use and disclosure of sensitive personal information, and to delete your personal information.

You can typically make these requests online or by changing the privacy settings on your car’s mobile app.

The Bottom Line

The federal government and the states are increasingly working to protect consumer privacy in the auto industry. Meanwhile, connected cars are still collecting data.

You can examine your car’s privacy settings to better understand what data is being collected and to explore your options for limiting or opting out of that collection.