A Mozilla study examines 25 car brands and sheds light on their hunger for data. It’s not just about built-in cameras, microphones and other sensors.
For years, the Internet has also been making its way into motor vehicles: as “connected cars,” they collect data on mileage, the condition of the drives or the electronics. The functions of these telematics systems are controlled by software that is also updated via the Internet.
In addition, the cars use other sensors to collect information on driving style, i.e. on which occasions the user has his hand on the steering wheel, is wearing a seat belt, brakes or accelerates. This information provides clues as to what might have caused an accident. Many cars also have several cameras embedded in the body to record the surroundings. The fact that this is also possible when parking has already drawn the attention of data protection authorities.
Police investigators, however, are pleased with the function: In the case of serious crimes in public spaces, it is now standard practice to contact the manufacturers of cars with camera surveillance parked nearby and demand the release of recordings.
A new study by the Mozilla Foundation now reveals how companies are exploiting other personal data collected by vehicles. To this end, the foundation took a close look at 25 major manufacturers.
The researchers investigated what other information can be read from the sensors and cell phones linked to the vehicle. According to the study, companies such as Kia and Nissan are also interested in data categories such as weight, origin, immigration status and the sexual activity of car occupants. Nissan is also interested in “intelligence” or abilities of its customers. To Mozilla, six manufacturers have stated that they can also process “genetic information.”
The study leaves open how the sensitive data is collected by the car manufacturers. Presumably, this is less via the cameras, microphones and paired cell phones, but rather via Internet use or location data. Music preferences or the number of passengers, for whom it is recorded whether they have fastened their seat belts, could allow further conclusions to be drawn.
According to Mozilla, 84 percent of the manufacturers had also indicated that they would pass on the information collected. This concerns requests from law enforcement agencies, which in the case of Hyundai are even responded to in an “informal” way.
More profitable, however, is the sale of user data, which more than three quarters of the companies surveyed affirm. These are of great value, as evidenced by, for example, a study by consulting group McKinsey on the “monetization of vehicle data”. In this decade alone, carmakers could earn around 750 billion U.S. dollars in this way, it says.
It is questionable, however, whether the user data collected belongs to the companies at all, or whether it should not actually remain under the sovereignty of the drivers and other occupants of the vehicles. However, only two of the manufacturers investigated by Mozilla allow their customers to delete the data collected about them.
Published in German in „nd“.
Image: Tesla Model 3 Side Badge by jurvetson (CC BY 2.0).
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