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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: 2) by etherscythe on Wednesday January 17 2018, @07:32PM (1 child)

    by etherscythe (937) on Wednesday January 17 2018, @07:32PM (#623741) Journal

    Try THAT with your Tesla! One of the few, but very significant, criticisms I have of those products; I suspect the car's functionality is inextricably entwined with this capability, whether it is used by the manufacturer or not.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 18 2018, @01:39AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 18 2018, @01:39AM (#623956)

    Wired in right along with the essential operation of the EV .. is all the spy capability. How else would Tesla magically "grant" extra battery power to its users fleeing the hurricane last year? Over the air update to cars reporting from a specific zone. You can't pull the spybox or take out its fuse - the entire car stops.