It's bad enough that our phones and TVs are spying on us, it turns out that our vehicles have that capability, too. Or if they don't have it now, they soon will have.
Does that worry car owners? It should, but people seem to have gotten very complacent about all those devices watching and listening to us.
Anyway, for a rundown on what's in the pipeline, see What Your Car Knows About You. Alternate link. Excerpt:
Already, some car makers are gathering this data to provide feedback to help improve a car’s performance, refine features and alert them to any potential quality problems early on. They’re also using it to create new and more personalized services for drivers.
But many car makers have bigger plans, including using the data to craft targeted in-car advertisements or selling it to mapping firms looking to provide more accurate traffic information.
General Motors Co. , Ford Motor Co. and other major car makers are hoping these connected-car services will generate new revenue streams that can help them diversify beyond their core business of building and selling cars. While it is still early days, McKinsey & Co. estimates monetizing data from connected cars will be worth up to $750 billion by 2030 as more cars are shipped with pre-installed modems and other internet-connected devices. ...
Car companies stress that they get the owner’s consent first before gathering any data. In cases where it is collected and provided to third parties, the data is anonymized, meaning it is scrubbed of all personal information and batched together with data from other vehicles to provide a more generalized picture of a car’s operations or consumer driving habits.
You did click "Accept," didn't you?
Still, privacy experts say it is not always clear to consumers when they are giving consent. As with other electronic devices, the data disclosures are often buried in the terms and service agreement and described in ways that aren’t always easy for customers to understand.
“That’s not going to give consumers a full sense of how their data is being used and collected any more than it is online,” said Ryan Calo, a law professor at the University of Washington, who specializes in digital privacy.
This is all the more reason for drivers to hang on to those clunkers as long as possible.
The company rushing to get your data moving out of the vehicle is Otonomo of Israel.
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1:20 PM 8/19/2018
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