I bought a brand new car in 2021. My 18yo car was breaking down right when there was a chip shortage due to covid supply chain effects and there basically weren’t any used cars on the market. I knew my new car was privacy nightmare, but I didn’t realize the extent of it until I saw this Mozilla report: It’s Official: Cars Are the Worst Product Category We Have Ever Reviewed for Privacy.”The gist is: they 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.” And then, “most (84%) of the car brands we researched say they can share your personal data — with service providers, data brokers, and other businesses we know little or we know little or nothing about. Worse, nineteen (76%) say they can sell your personal data.”
“Subaru’s privacy policy says that even passengers of a car that uses connected services have “consented” to allow them to use – and maybe even sell -– their personal information just by being inside.” They also collect “everything from name, address, phone number, social security number, vehicle identification number (VIN), browsing and search history, geolocation data (meaning your physical location and movements), vehicle telemetry data like speed and tire pressure, to audio recordings of vehicle occupants (!!!), and even inferences they can draw about your characteristics, behaviors, and predispositions. You’re also consenting to allow Subaru to collect even more data about from places like data brokers (or data service companies as they call them), or possibly even “certain features of your mobile device, including its camera, location services (GPS), microphone and contacts, and collect Information from those features, such as photographs, videos, your precise location, audio recordings, and contact information.”
Being in my car felt icky after that, and luckily my 3-year StarLink subscription was coming up for renewal that had come with the car. I hurried to cancel it before the deadline.
When I went to drop my Starlink service, I discovered it was tied into two “safety” and “security” packages of features. I had to agree to give up the following functionality for my vehicle:
So yeah, I had to give all that up just to stop paying them to invade my privacy and sending/selling my information to hundreds of “partners.” Yes, I get that location services are technically necessary for a lot of these features to work, but car makers don’t have to abuse the resulting data exhaust like they do. They could just provide the services (that we are paying for!) without the gross overstep and oversharing. They do it because it is profitable and lawmakers are clueless about this stuff. Our data is THAT valuable, so valuable my car now has 19 less features than it used to because I want to opt out of the selling of my location/driving/genetic/medical/music/conversation privacy, not to mention whatever they mine out of my cell phone for data. And what sucks is that this isn’t just Subaru, it’s EVERY modern carmaker. You can’t get away from it. Yet another place in the U.S. where we desperately need some stronger consumer protections in place.
The very next day after I canceled StarLink the glowing green light next to the SOS button went dark and I breathed a sigh of relief. They’re probably still collecting information on me, but at least I’m not paying for the privilege anymore. I’ll be interested to order a data broker report after having StarLink disabled for awhile to compare what’s being shared now. Still feels good to have that light off.
I’m known to be a privacy curmudgeon and I have a lot of tech savvy friends who have just given up on pushing back on this kind of thing and shrug it off. Sorry, but I find this much invasive surveillance to be gross and disturbing, especially with our vehicles that we unknowingly opt into just by sitting in them. This shouldn’t be part of the cost of driving to work every day.
There is a sycamore tree on my campus that once left the earth. It orbited the moon in 1971 on the Apollo 14 mission as a seedling and was planted on campus after it returned. It is tall and sprawling and draped with moss and beautiful, but I worry about how close it is to an intersection that’s going to see some construction in the coming year.
