What if there was a way to determine if your car is collecting data and sending it to a third party? It’s not an unreasonable or paranoid question to ask in our era of software-defined vehicles and connected cars. That’s the goal of Privacy4Cars’ new free privacy reporting service that gives owners a look at what kind of data is being collected from their cars, how it’s being used and to whom it’s being sent. As Vice’s Motherboard reported, Privacy4Cars generates a kind of window sticker, like the one you get with your new car that describes its features, fuel economy, pricing and more, but for the use of data.
It’s not perfect, as the sticker generated is mostly based on publicly available data policy documents from your car manufacturer. We tested two different VINs, one for this author’s 1995 Mercedes-Benz van and one for MotorTrendthe 2023 Genesis G90 long-term test car.
You can probably guess which of these two cars, separated by decades, would generate a more foreboding data report, but confusingly, they were about the same. Again, this has more to do with general Mercedes-Benz and Genesis policies than how those policies might apply to the onboard equipment or computer capabilities of specific cars.
This author’s old Benz doesn’t even have an OBD port – it uses an analog on-board diagnostic system and is hardly “connected” in any modern sense of the term, although it did have a car phone at some point integrated. The Genesis, on the other hand, is fully connected, with an assistant smartphone app capable of remote start, lock, diagnostics and more. It would make more sense if the Privacy4Cars tool was searchable by make, instead of VIN, as the information provided is broader for the make, as we noted.
So what can you expect when you plug your VIN into Privacy4Cars? And how can it help you? Simple: the tool shows what types of data are collected and whether or not the car has telematics (a built-in data connection), biometrics, location tracking, personal data identifiers or phone sync. The tool also shows who your car manufacturer may share this information with (affiliates, service providers, insurers, data brokers or even the government).
While the tool told us that a 1995 Mercedes E320 includes biometrics, which is dubious since it doesn’t even have remote locking, and location sharing, it actually tells us that Mercedes generally have these capabilities today. And Privacy4Cars will even show you the evidence in the form of each company’s policy documents on the subject. So, are you curious about what data your car is hogging you and where it might be going? Go take a look for yourself and be sure to check out Privacy4Cars’ instructions on how to delete your data from a vehicle before you sell it and how to assert control over some of your data.
