Summary
A recent report from the Mozilla Foundation examined the privacy practices of connected car brands. Unfortunately, every brand studied earned the “Privacy Not Included” label. Here’s the rundown on the data being collected and shared by your car.
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The Mozilla Foundation recently released a report on the privacy practices of car makers. And with all 25 brands studied earning the “privacy not included” label, the only positive comment to make is that they’re consistent. Here’s the bad news about the data collected from your car.
For Personal Tech Media, this is Two Minute Tech. I’m Jim Herman.
Mozilla listed four reasons why every brand failed its study. First, every service collected more data than was necessary for the operation of the vehicle. Second, 21 of the 25 brands said that they may share data, and 19 said that they could sell your data. Third, only two of the 25 brands allowed drivers to delete their data. And fourth, none of the 25 brands demonstrated that data protection met Mozilla’s minimum security standards.
Mozilla also noted that 22 of the brands had signed on to a list of consumer protection principles published by the Alliance for Automotive Innovation. However, none of those 22 brands actually follow the principles that they’ve agreed to.
In ranking the brand studied, the French automaker Renault scored the highest. On the other end of the rankings, Tesla became only the second product from any category to receive every privacy penalty in Mozilla’s study.
The study also calls out some strange categories of data listed in the privacy policies. Six companies mentioned that they collect genetic information or characteristics, and Nissan and Kia both say they collect data on your sexual activity. The privacy policies did not make clear exactly how they obtain data that falls in those categories.