Your car spying on you again?
Try as you may to protect your privacy while driving, it's only going to get harder, with the technology available on vehicles these days.
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Western governments are about to mandate the installation of black-box accident recorders, a simpler version of those found on airliners — that remember all the critical details leading up to a crash, from your car's speed to whether you were wearing a seat belt. The devices are already built into 96 per cent of new cars.
Plus, automakers are on their way to developing "connected cars" that constantly send out information about themselves to make driving easier and collisions preventable.
At present, consumers' privacy is regulated when it comes to banking transactions, medical records, phone and Internet use. But data generated by cars, which these days are basically rolling computers, are not.
All too often, people don't know it's happening, but they should be able to decide whether they want it collected or not.
Privacy becomes an issue when data end up in the hands of outsiders whom motorists don't suspect have access to it, or when the data are repurposed for reasons beyond those for which they were originally intended.
Though the information is being collected with the best of intentions — safer cars or to provide drivers with more services and conveniences — there is always the danger it can end up in lawsuits, or in the hands of the government or with marketers looking to drum up business from passing motorists.
The law courts have started to grapple with the issues of whether — or when — data from black-box recorders are admissible as evidence, or whether drivers can be tracked from the signals their cars emit.
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Electronic control units keep track of everything from how fast you drive to how long your car idles and how suddenly you brake, the report says.
Your car’s GPS system, for example, also keeps track of your exact location, sending that information to the car’s manufacturer, or possibly a third-party call centre or an insurance agency.
Detailed information about where a person spends their time paints an intimate picture of their life and their habits, and can be dangerous in the wrong hands.
Such data can be used to embarrass or blackmail a person, to stalk individuals, to steal identities, to facilitate robberies, or to create a profile that can then be used by commercial entities in unexpected ways.
For example, companies must identify the purposes for which they are collecting information, rather than just gathering what they can. Individuals also have the right to access the information a company holds about them.
Consumers must equally provide informed consent to have their data collected – but this often isn’t the case.
For example, more commuters are nowadays being encouraged to obtain transponders for their cars that allow them to use toll roads or bridges without having to stop and pay. But sometimes, they can be used for other purposes.
Some insurance companies in Europe and the US also offer vehicle monitoring devices to their auto insurance policy holders, which plug into the dashboard to record data from the car's computers for information about hard-braking incidents and time of day that trips are taken.
In return, these drivers save an average 10-15 per cent on their premiums. To protect users' privacy, the insurers have no ability to track where cars drive and undertake to never sell any information to third parties.
Privacy issues will continue to proliferate as technology evolves. More than 60 per cent of new cars worldwide are expected to have connected capabilities by 2017, up from 11.4 per cent last year.
At the same time, these "connected cars" hold the potential of divulging speed and a variety of data that could be used by law enforcement or others.
What will be needed in this space for the future are industry-specific data protection regulations for the connected car industry – clear, specific and relevant limits on collection, retention, use and disclosure of personal customer data.
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