Your new car may be a ‘privacy nightmare on wheels’ – By Peter Weber (The Week) / Sept 9, 2023
New cars come with helpful bells and whistles, but also cameras, microphones and sensors that are reporting on everything you do
“Bad news: your car is a spy,” Gizmodo reported, citing new research from the nonprofit Mozilla Foundation that found new cars to be the worst category for privacy of any product it had ever reviewed since 2017. “If your vehicle was made in the last few years, you’re probably driving around in a data-harvesting machine that may collect personal information as sensitive as your race, weight and sexual activity.”
Mozilla’s *Privacy Not Included testers said they spent more than 600 hours researching the privacy practices at 25 of the top automakers in the U.S. and Europe. None of the automakers met the team’s minimum standards for data use and security, and most also got black marks on data control and privacy and security track records. “We can’t stress enough how bad and not normal this is for an entire product guide to earn warning labels,” Mozilla’s researchers wrote.
“Many people think of their car as a private space — somewhere to call your doctor, have a personal conversation with your kid on the way to school, cry your eyes out over a break-up, or drive places you might not want the world to know about,” said Jen Caltrider, director of Mozilla’s *Privacy Not Included project. “But that perception no longer matches reality. All new cars today are privacy nightmares on wheels that collect huge amounts of personal information.”
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