SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Submitted via IRC for SoyCow4408
Last December, Ashley Sehatti sold her 2015 Jetta back to a local Volkswagen dealership in California. So when the calendar turned over, she didn't understand why she was still getting sent monthly reports about the car's health. After another one came in April, she finally logged on to VW's online portal for Car-Net, the telematics system that runs in many of the company's modern cars.
To her surprise, Sehatti saw the location of her old Jetta on a map, up-to-date mileage, and the status of the car's locks and lights. It had been resold, and yet she still had access to some of the car's systems. "There was nothing in place to stop me from accessing the full UI," she says over email.
What Sehatti hadn't realized is that Volkswagen puts the burden of disabling access to Car-Net squarely on the customer in its terms of service agreement when they decide to sell or exchange a car — even if the car is going back to a VW dealer.
Source: https://www.theverge.com/2018/5/4/17303644/volkswagen-car-net-security-location-access
(Score: 4, Insightful) by SomeGuy on Monday May 07 2018, @07:27PM
To a lot of people many of these "services" are big vague confusing nebulous things. It is easy to imagine they might have thought the service would transfer to their new car (even without whatever system), or perhaps they even thought they didn't need a car for whatever this service is. They just know someone told them they needed this service and are afraid to find out what will happen if they cancel it. Right in the summary it indicates this person never even used the service when they had the car.
It isn't illegal for a company to keep taking your money if you give it to them. So of course the companies have no interest in automatically terminating services.