Car Companies and Your Data: "Privacy Not Included"

[engine]

Mozilla Foundation surveyed 25 car brands and concluded that privacy is not included with your ownership of the vehicles.

It seems to me that this is area is totally overlooked, and anyone seeing the data collection points would surely think, "hey, hold on a moment."

If you're acquiring a new vehicle it's worth investigating this so you won't be surprised when you're targeted by other organisations because of your ownership and use.
No doubt the regulators will eventually catch up

All 25 car brands we researched earned our *Privacy Not Included warning label -- making cars the official worst category of products for privacy that we have ever reviewed.

A failure to properly address cybersecurity might explain their frankly embarrassing security and privacy track records. We only looked at the last three years, but still found plenty to go on with 17 (68%) of the car brands earning the “bad track record” ding for leaks, hacks, and breaches that threatened their drivers’ privacy.

[foundation.mozilla.org...]

[tangor]

All comes back to "you" are the product!

[phranque]

that is to be expected when the product is free but not when the car payments are $10-20 per day at entry level.

[engine]

>expected when the product is free
Yes, I agree, that's fair enough.

It's very unreasonable to have such extensive data gathering, imho, with no apparent way out. Well, the Tesla way out is quite unreasonable.

Clearly, the regulators will be slow, as usual, to get onto this.

[tangor]

You ARE the product, free or paid. Just a fact of life. I suspect that quite a few of us are also tracking/collecting on our visitors any way we can. How else can you tabulate "success"?