Vehicle Privacy Update
Motor Trend is running a story that summarizes a number of different sources that look at vehicle privacy, https://www.motortrend.com/news/connected-cars-data-privacy-issues-sex-speeding/ It isn't favorable to the car companies, which (historically) is a change of direction for Motor Trend--long ago accused of making back room deals over their long-running "Car of the Year" award and other industry-favorable coverage.
As well as stories covered here earlier from Mozilla and NY Times, they also link to this possibly interesting page,
Amico created Privacy4cars.com as a potential solution. "We built a tool called the Vehicle Privacy Report," https://vehicleprivacyreport.com/ he said. "It's free for consumers. You can punch in a VIN, and we'll tell you what data your car collects and where it's going." Privacy4Cars also created a smartphone app that allows consumers to delete data in a car, and its Assert Your Data Rights services allows Privacy4Cars to act as authorized agent to submit requests for access to personal information collected by a car, to delete the information, and request that personal information not be sold as defined by respective state laws.
I tried it on a 10 year old car and it pretty much matched what I expected -- no Wi-Fi, no linking to phones, but possible data collected if satellite radio was used (it's not).
Then there is this, provided for curiosity only, since sex and SN users are not typically intersecting sets (grin):
Of all the data that car companies can potentially capture, one of the most eye-opening from the Mozilla report was people having sex in vehicles. "One of the things that everybody latched onto was Nissan and Kia saying they could collect information on your sex life or your sexual activity," Caltrider said. "That really freaked people out." While the researchers couldn't determine exactly how the automakers would gather data on sexual activity in cars, the educated guess is it wouldn't be that hard for cameras and sensors to gather the information necessary.
After the Mozilla Foundation report was released, Kia Connect Services (a suite of services Kia extends to its vehicle owners) and Nissan USA removed wording about collecting information on sexual activity from their online privacy policies, Caltrider said. She sent us a PDF of the original wording on the Nissan site, and under Types of Personal Data collected, it read: "Sensitive personal information, including ... sexual orientation, sexual activity, precise geolocation, health diagnosis data, and genetic information." On Kia's broader corporate privacy page under Sensitive Personal Information as of press time, it still read, "This category may include ... sex life or sexual orientation information."
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