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Now that automobile manufacturers are almost more about software than hardware, your car company may know more about you than your spouse based on all the sensors in your car. The incentive to collect driver and passenger data is great. Every piece of data is used to increase revenue, especially if sold onward to third-parties.
Dunn may consider his everyday driving habits mundane, but auto and privacy experts suspect that big automakers like Honda see them as anything but. By monitoring his everyday movements, an automaker can vacuum up a massive amount of personal information about someone like Dunn, everything from how fast he drives and how hard he brakes to how much fuel his car uses and the entertainment he prefers. The company can determine where he shops, the weather on his street, how often he wears his seat belt, what he was doing moments before a wreck — even where he likes to eat and how much he weighs.
Though drivers may not realize it, tens of millions of American cars are being monitored like Dunn's, experts say, and the number increases with nearly every new vehicle that is leased or sold.
The result is that carmakers have turned on a powerful spigot of precious personal data, often without owners' knowledge, transforming the automobile from a machine that helps us travel to a sophisticated computer on wheels that offers even more access to our personal habits and behaviors than smartphones do.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Wednesday January 17 2018, @03:35PM (4 children)
My car is a 2015 model and doesn't have this problem either. The key is to not buy a car with OnStar, or that has a built-in cellular modem to communicate with the automaker.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Justin Case on Wednesday January 17 2018, @03:44PM (3 children)
So what about when you take your car in for service, and they spend a half hour with a Windows XP laptop connected to the "diagnostic port" of your vehicle? How many GPS coordinates do you suppose they can fetch in a half hour?
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Wednesday January 17 2018, @05:43PM (1 child)
I don't take my car in for service. It's trivially simple to change the oil myself, in fact it's the easiest car I've ever changed oil on, thanks to the oil filter being located right next to the drain bolt and mounted with the opening pointed up so it doesn't spill all over the place when removed.
Taking your car to a dealership for service is generally a stupid thing to do. You can get everything done cheaper at an independent mechanic, and the independent mechanics are generally older and more experienced too.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 18 2018, @02:11AM
Sometimes it takes another set of eyes to find that GPS tracker on your car.
(Score: 2) by el_oscuro on Thursday January 18 2018, @04:20AM
And that Windows XP box gets pwned and every car that goes through there gets malware installed?
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