Your car could be spying on you and sharing what it knows with Big Tech
Your car might know a lot more about you than you realize after a study found that information from connected vehicles can end up being sent to some of the biggest tech companies in the world.
This comes after a team of privacy researchers from Northeastern University put 21 vehicles and 30 companion apps to the test at Consumer Reports’ testing facility in Connecticut to find out exactly what info was leaving the cars and where exactly it was going.
The aim was to gain better insight and ‘understand the privacy implications of the connected vehicle ecosystem’.
What information do our cars know about us?
The research is particularly significant because it didn’t simply look at the privacy policies attached to the cars. Researchers actually monitored the data being transmitted by the vehicles and their associated apps.
To achieve this, the experts tested vehicles from model years 2022 to 2025, including both mainstream and luxury models.
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Publishing the results on Automatic Transmission, it was revealed that both the vehicles and its companion apps contact ‘contact numerous third-party domains, including advertisers and trackers’, while 19 of the cars were found to have sent traffic to ‘at least one third party’, and seven of the 30 apps analyzed were transmitting ‘sensitive identifiers to third-party companies’.
The firms receiving data included some of the biggest names in technology, including Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft and others.
The researchers emphasized that their findings highlight the ‘need for continued measurement and scrutiny of the connected vehicle ecosystem’.
The report continues: “We found that vehicles, under a variety of real-world settings, contact not only a wide range of first parties (i.e., manufacturer domains) and car-specific support parties, but also third parties that are known to provide advertising and tracking services.
“Vehicles from the same manufacturer exhibit different network behaviors - this makes it very difficult and expensive to study these vehicles.
“When adding vehicle companion apps to the analysis, we found that vehicle owners are exposed to even more privacy-sensitive ATA communication—in some cases more than two dozen additional trackers.
“Our study revealed a large gap between what vehicle manufacturers publicly disclosed and how the connected vehicle ecosystem actually shares data over the Internet.”
How can drivers limit the info their car has access to?
There are steps you can take to tighten up the privacy of your vehicle, including many connected services that offer ‘opt-in, opt-out’ options.
However, this can be difficult to navigate as many features may stop working if a driver refuses the relevant data-sharing agreement.
This means that a driver might technically have agreed to data collection without necessarily understanding the number of companies that could ultimately receive information connected to their vehicle.
A connected vehicle can communicate with its manufacturer’s servers, while its smartphone app can communicate with third-party services, and those services can connect to the wider advertising and analytics ecosystem.
So, ultimately, that info generated by your car can potentially travel much further than the driver realizes.