Your new car he doesn’t know exactly where you’re going, but he sure does where have you been. And it shares all his sensibilities data with car manufacturers such as Ford, Toyota, and Chevrolet – as well as in some cases by shady third parties Wired. Modern cars have rivaled smartphones in terms of data collection, and are said to generate up to 25 gigabytes of data per hour.
The data includes things like drivers’ full names, addresses, phone numbers, email addresses and license numbers, which is more or less logical. It seems that every purchase now comes with a polite request for an email or phone number, which is annoying but has now mostly become accepted practice.
However, modern cars also record detailed driving data, including date and time of use, vehicle speed, acceleration and braking, as well as details of that trip, such as location, weather, and the route taken. Some of the latest models track “refueling activity”, battery level, images from on-board cameras and even biometric data such as facial recognition and fingerprint data.
This driver data is handled differently by car manufacturers, setting their own policies during data collection and subsequently having varying degrees of invasiveness. Toyota’s vehicle data collection differs from Chevrolet’s, for example Wired notes:
In addition to your personal information, Toyota may collect “driving behavior.” This includes information such as “acceleration and speed, steering and braking function, and direction of travel”. You can also collect your in-vehicle preferences, favorite places saved in your systems and images collected by external cameras or sensors.
Some Toyota models can also scan your face for facial recognition when you enter one of their vehicles. According to Corey Proffitt, Toyota’s senior manager of connected communications, this allows verification of the driver’s identity and the profile stored on the vehicle. “This data is not human-readable, and facial features are only stored by the vehicle and not transmitted to Toyota,” says Proffitt.
The report adds that Toyota vehicles, including the Tacoma, Camry, Rav4, and Highlander, give owners the option to opt-out before any information is sent to Toyota, and that owners can “turn off all data transmission on their vehicle” with customer service.
On the other hand, Chevrolet’s data collection on the popular Chevy Silverado goes a little further than that. Wired:
To begin with, GM collects people’s identifiers, such as names, postal addresses and email addresses. Chevrolet the documents say collect information about your vehicle such as battery, ignition and window, transmission status and diagnostic information. It can also collect your location, route history, speed, and “braking and swerving/turning events,” among other things.
The documents also say that “from camera images and sensor data, voice commands, stability control or anti-lock events, security/theft alerts, and the infotainment system (including radio and rear seat infotainment system) and Wi -Data from Fi data usage” must be collected. The company may also receive “information about your home energy use,” which relates to charging and discharging electric vehicles.
The Chevy truck’s main rival, the Ford F-150, has similar information, but the F-150 takes an even closer look at driver habits using data collected from its built-in microphones:
[…] This includes vehicle data such as tire pressure, component performance information, and vehicle charging data if a vehicle is electric.
The company may also collect driving data and characteristics such as speed, pedal pressure and seat belt data. It can collect information about the direction of travel, exact location, speed and local weather from the vehicle.
Some of your vehicles’ voice recognition systems can collect information when they listen. “Media analysis” includes recording information about what you listen to in your carincluding “radio presets, volume, channels, media sources, title, artist and genre.
It must be bad enough to know that all this sensitive information is being shared with manufacturers, but Wired says that information may end up in the hands of data brokers and other third parties.
Automakers sometimes share or sell data with insurance companies, the government, and data brokers. It’s unclear what the pace of gigabytes of data collected by new cars is, or exactly how much money automakers make from selling this information. Whatever it is, until the drivers see a return, it’s probably too much.
