Cars (and Drivers): 2024 in Review

If you’ve purchased a car made in the last decade or so, it’s likely jam-packed with enough technology to make your brand new phone jealous. Modern cars have sensors, cameras, GPS for location tracking, and more, all collecting data—and it turns out in many cases, sharing it.

Cars Sure Are Sharing a Lot of Information

While we’ve been keeping an eye on the evolving state of car privacy for years, everything really took off after a New York Times report this past March found that the car maker G.M. was sharing information about driver’s habits with insurance companies without consent.

It turned out a number of other car companies were doing the same by using deceptive design so people didn’t always realize they were opting into the program. We walked through how to see for yourself what data your car collects and shares. That said, cars, infotainment systems, and car maker’s apps are so unstandardized it’s often very difficult for drivers to research, let alone opt out of data sharing.

Which is why we were happy to see Senators Ron Wyden and Edward Markey send a letter to the Federal Trade Commision urging it to investigate these practices. The fact is: car makers should not sell our driving and location history to data brokers or insurance companies, and they shouldn’t make it as hard as they do to figure out what data gets shared and with whom.

Advocating for Better Bills to Protect Abuse Survivors

The amount of data modern cars collect is a serious privacy concern for all of us. But for people in an abusive relationship, tracking can be aThis article has been indexed from Deeplinks