We Drive, They Spy
YOUR CAR IS TALKING to your insurance company. You aren’t part of the conversation. Suddenly, though, your insurance premium shoots up 50%. Welcome to the brave new world where your car is spying on you.
In one instance, a Florida resident drove his Cadillac around a racetrack during a special event. His insurance subsequently skyrocketed—by $5,000 a year.
Has artificial intelligence taken over? No, but automobile companies have, and without our knowing it. Carmakers are spying on drivers and passengers, and peddling the findings to car insurance companies and other buyers. About half will share information with law enforcement agencies that request it.
The Mozilla Foundation, a nonprofit that works against mass surveillance, tested 25 car brands. All 25 failed the foundation’s minimum privacy standards. Modern cars were found to be snooping on us using onboard cameras, sensors and microphones. Some even monitored phone calls. Where the occupants were going and how fast they were driving were routinely disclosed.
Of all the carmakers, Nissan was deemed the worst privacy offender by Mozilla. The carmaker even collected data about the sexual activity, genetics and health diagnoses of its customers. No, Mozilla didn’t say how the car company obtained all that information. Clearly, though, Nissan went beyond in-car monitoring in its intelligence gathering.
The daily newsletter The Morning Brew reported the curious case of a wrecked Tesla that was sold to someone in Ukraine, who proceeded to use the former owner’s Spotify account. The old owner struggled to disconnect the new driver from his account.
A reporter for The New York Times wrote a lengthy article about being spied on by her Chevy Bolt. She and her husband discovered they’d agreed to something called “connected access.” Except they hadn’t. Their Chevy salesperson enrolled them in OnStar, claiming he does this automatically with all customers, even though a GM spokesperson told the reporter this isn’t permitted.
How could this have happened to a reporter who claims she is “on the lookout for creepy data collection”? The obscure permission, which sounded innocuous, got checked by the salesman amid a flurry of document signing during the sales process.
What could the reporter do to stop the spying? GM said to “disable all data collection” by calling OnStar’s customer service line.
What might we do to prevent things like this from happening to us? Morning Brew suggests drivers may want to be “more cautious about synching data from their phones onto their cars” because carmakers may be eavesdropping. The Mozilla Foundation concluded that consumers have so little control over carmakers’ monitoring that only new government regulation can stop the spying.
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