Modern-day vehicles built with connected car technology such as WiFi and GPS collect reams of data about its owners. And that data is not staying private, according to a new study conducted by researchers at Northeastern University.
That conclusion isn’t new — there have been numerous investigations and lawsuits exposing how driving data is collected and shared with third parties, including insurance companies. What the study reveals is just how vast the problem is and how hard it is for consumers to avoid, short of not using the vehicle or its convenient features like remote start and unlock.
Researchers in partnership with Consumer Reports tested 21 late-model vehicles from 17 automakers, including GM brands Cadillac and Chevrolet as well as Ford, Lucid, Rivian, Tesla, Toyota, and more. They also examined 30 companion mobile apps to “understand the privacy implications of the connected vehicle ecosystem.” The peer-reviewed study will be published this week.
The implications aren’t great for consumers, whose data is being shared with tech companies including Adobe, ContentSquare, Google, Microsoft, Meta, Snap, and Yahoo.
Nineteen of the 21 vehicles tested sent traffic to at least one third party and seven of the 30 apps gave sensitive data such as the vehicle identification number (VIN), emails, phone numbers, and precise location to third-party companies associated with tracking and advertising.
This often went a step further with multiple forms of information being sent to the same third party, a scheme that allows advertisers and data brokers to build in-depth profiles of consumers, according to the findings. These profiles can be particularly hard for consumers to shake because they’re sold to a variety of companies including insurers and banks.
When researchers paired the companion app to the vehicle it roughly doubled the exposure to advertising and tracking companies.
The findings were shared with the different manufacturers and all of them, with the exception of Honda, shifted blame elsewhere and often to consumers, the researchers said. (Honda did respond by improving its data collection practices after learning about the findings and ordered its vendor Amplitude to deleta all geolocation data it had received.)
Consumer Reports was told by several automakers that some links in their companion apps opened outside webpages, which might include cookies that collect customer data. Regardless of how this data was collected, drivers weren’t informed.
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