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posted by Fnord666 on Wednesday January 17 2018, @01:39PM   Printer-friendly
from the new-1984-models dept.

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.


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  • (Score: 3, Informative) by DannyB on Wednesday January 17 2018, @05:27PM (2 children)

    by DannyB (5839) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday January 17 2018, @05:27PM (#623665) Journal

    Does your car share this information with Google, Alexa, Cortana, Siri, Roku, Samsung, your hospital, doctor, insurance company, employer, and others?

    Maybe there needs to be a new industry organization: Personal Information Gathering Association.

    Or just: PIGA

    Or maybe Personal Information Sharing Service.

    Sort of like the movie GATTACA except with personal information instead of genes.

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  • (Score: 1) by ewk on Thursday January 18 2018, @02:14PM (1 child)

    by ewk (5923) on Thursday January 18 2018, @02:14PM (#624132)

    LMFTFY: With personal information AND genes.

    You do shed skin cells don't you?
    Only a matter of time before that nifty new sensor upgrade package performs some on-the-fly dna-analysis.

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    • (Score: 2) by DannyB on Thursday January 18 2018, @02:33PM

      by DannyB (5839) Subscriber Badge on Thursday January 18 2018, @02:33PM (#624139) Journal

      That sounds really paranoid. Crazy actually.

      But then came Snowden. And I realized that my most fantastical paranoid ideas were already reality and had been for a long time.

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      People today are educated enough to repeat what they are taught but not to question what they are taught.