Threat of Privacy When Driving: Part II
It's worse than I thought
This will be my last post about cars spying on you, for a few months, but as more details emerge based on a report from Mozilla, I had to give one more shout out to how new cars, especially EVs, collect an unbridled amount of information about you, your driving habits, and even your sex life.
“Ah, the wind in your hair, the open road ahead, and not a care in the world… except all the trackers, cameras, microphones, and sensors capturing your every move.
Ugh. Modern cars are a privacy nightmare.” - Jen Caltrider
Here is a summary from “It’s Official: Cars Are the Worst Product Category We Have Ever Reviewed for Privacy” by the Mozilla Foundation, makers of Firefox web browser.
Privacy Violations
84% share or sell your data.
56% will share your data to law enforcement without a warrant.
92% give drivers little to no control over their personal data.
Highlights
AI: Tesla was the worst of all privacy violations, especially feeding their AI with everything you do.
Sex Life: Nissan’s privacy policy can monitor your sexual activity in the vehicle and Kia even says it can collect information about your sex life. Honest, how crazy is that!
Warrants: Hyundai will comply with formal and informal law enforcement requests.
All Bad
Mozilla spent over 600 hours pouring over the privacy polices of the automotive sector and deemed all of them were awarded the “Privacy Not Included” warning label and that consent was an illusion. Once you agree to their privacy policy, its not about how they are protecting your privacy but how they are sharing it. Subaru even says in their privacy policy that even passengers of a car that uses connected services have “consented” to allow them to use -- and maybe even sell -- their personal information just by being inside.
The Petition
If you are concerned about how car manufacturers are trampling on your privacy, please sign Mozilla’s petition .
In Closing
Privacy is a core tenant to freedom, especially where you go in your car/truck. Does the car manufacturers really need to know everything about what you do with a vehicle? Its bad enough the mobile phones are already polluted with privacy invasive data collection now everywhere I visit is the property of Big Auto?
The world going digital needs to be tempered with privacy but it’s eroding faster then new addictive services Big Tech can provide. It reinforces our mission in being a small part of helping people with our privacy mobile devices and continue call out privacy insanity when we see it.
Check out this video
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2gR6eBN0fm8
There are a few takeaways.
1. Data COULD be recorded onto a hard-drive in your car
2. Your car COULD transmit that data to the manufacture via a connected smart phone
3. Your car COULD transmit that data to the manufacture via a connected service (like GM’s on-via)
For #1, I’m checking with my car manufacturer to see if there is a way to do a “factory reset” of the data storage device. (I have no idea if my car has one but this is how I will word the question.) If there is, I will do such a reset regularly.
The good news is that the easiest way for car manufacturers to collect data on its victims, I mean customers, is to entice them to put an ap on their phones and use that as their conduit for data transmission. The bad news is that third parties can track you by other means. Your car aside, if you have your phone’s wi-fi and bluetooth turned on, your location is noted when it pings other devices as you travel.
McDonald’s was (and probably still is) recording license plate numbers at their drive-thrus.
https://retailwire.com/discussion/mcdonalds-drive-thru-ai-knows-what-you-want-before-you-order/
There is nothing to stop McD’s from matching your licence plate with your smart phone’s unique identifier from your wifi / bluetooth and sell this info to data aggregators.
It gets worse …
One such segment of the data aggregation industry is databases of license plate recognition (LPR). This has already trickled down from government use to private industry. “...the Arden Fair Mall in Sacramento, where security officers employ two LPR-equipped vehicles to patrol the 77-acre property, across the American River from downtown. Each vehicle has two cameras that capture license plates of parked cars and feed them into the database, while the system checks to see if any of those have been reported stolen...Then there’s the multiplying factor of LPR data, cellphone data, Facebook posts, tweets and other sources of information about an individual.“This information gets combined with other information and there’s quite a portrait painted of this person”
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/license-plate-data-not-just-cops-private-companies-are-tracking-flna6c10684677
The above article does not state if the ‘mall cops’ can off-set their cost by selling the data they collect. What if trucking companies were paid to put LPRs in their trucks to capture license plate numbers as they drive? What if governments get in on the game by doing this with roadside cameras?
What if auto insurance companies insist on this data as a condition of insuring your car? What if they sell this data?
The lynch pin in this is putting an ap for your car on your phone. Cars used to have a jack for an external input into their sound systems. However, with the proliferation of Bluetooth, this has disappeared in recent years. I connect my car's Bluetooth to an old phone with no sim card and a secure OS. Thus my car SHOULD have no access to the internet.