beginning in at least 2014 infotainment systems in the company’s vehicles began downloading and storing a copy of all text messages on smartphones when they were connected to the system. An Annapolis, Maryland-based company, Berla Corporation, provides the technology to some car manufacturers but does not offer it to the general public, the lawsuit said. Once messages are downloaded, Berla’s software makes it impossible for vehicle owners to access their communications and call logs but does provide law enforcement with access, the lawsuit said.
Yikes. Your car is probably keeping all your text messages and sending them to its manufacturer if you connect to your infotainment system.
The manufacturer does two things with this data:
- shares it with law enforcement
- sells it to advertisers for extra revenue
HOW WONDERFUL
and that's not all! mozilla recently did a study on All the data that cars collect on you. every single car they reviewed got their Worst privacy rating.
"[Cars of all brands] can collect super intimate information about you -- from your medical information, your genetic information, to your “sex life” (seriously), to how fast you drive, where you drive, and what songs you play in your car -- in huge quantities. They then use it to invent more data about you through “inferences” about things like your intelligence, abilities, and interests."
and how do they do that? through sensors in the car, data scraping from your phone, and creepily enough, "there’s the old-fashioned way. Just like (way too many) other products that connect to the internet do, car companies often collect extra information about you on their own from data brokers, car dealers (yes, they know all about you from those test drives), social media, the government, and more places."
please read the full reports, they lay out just how nasty the situation is in exhaustively researched detail and theyre written in a very layperson-friendly tone. the second link has a searchable table of the categories of information cars can collect about you.
cars are a privacy nightmare and this decision only legitimizes the practices auto makers have been using for years to scrape every bit of data they can.
