New cars are a ‘privacy nightmare’ for consumers, says Mozilla
Auto industry deemed the worst product category for protecting personal dataModern vehicles have been described as a “privacy nightmare” by the Mozilla Foundation in a new study that investigates the protection of private customer data by car-makers.
Vehicles are becoming increasingly advanced and automated, with an ever-increasing number of sensors, cameras and microphones all supposedly there for your convenience and protection, but they’re also capable of collecting intricate personal data about their occupants.
All 25 brands researched by the Mozilla Foundation were tagged with the organisation’s ‘*Privacy Not Included’ warning label, reflecting the kind and amount of data collected by new vehicles, as well as the level of security and protection applied to said data.
This was enough for Mozilla to deem the auto sector as the “worst product category… ever reviewed” and here’s why.
According to the foundation’s research, every single one of the 25 manufacturers it examined harvests “more personal data than necessary” and uses it for more than just operating the vehicle safely and managing customer relationships.
Personal data is extracted from various vehicle systems including sensors, phone connection, connected services, navigation and even apps used on the fly like Google Maps.
“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,” Mozilla said.
“They then use it to invent more data about you through ‘inferences’ about things like your intelligence, abilities, and interests.”
No less than 84 per cent of the auto brands studied were also found to share or sell a lot of this data, with minimal protection effort put in by the third parties it’s shared or sold to.
Furthermore, 92 per cent of car-makers in the study don’t give consumers control over or input into how their data is used or stored, with just two of the included brands giving drivers the option to have their data deleted periodically.
Adding to the scathing report was the fact Mozilla couldn’t ascertain from the various privacy policies if any of the brands met its Minimum Security Standards, which require any data harvested or stored by a vehicle to be encrypted – without which it’s open to hackers and other security threats.
Toyota was found to have the most privacy policies (12) and yet the world’s biggest and most trusted car-maker was at the centre of perhaps the highest-profile data breach in recent memory earlier this year, when it was discovered the personal information of millions of customers may have been publicly accessible for more than five years.
A full breakdown of the study – including ordered rankings from best to worst of the 25 researched brands, as well as nitty-gritty details and advice on how to address privacy concerns – can be viewed at the Mozilla Foundation website.
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