This is highway robbery. Car companies are taking our personal data and our money, and drivers don’t have much choice but to hand it all over.
A new car costs an average of $66,000, 47 per cent more than four years ago. That car companies are also looking to make a buck off the data their cars harvest feels especially slimy. For $66,000, privacy should come standard. Car makers can gather information through their websites, and through advanced in-car sensors and data recorders, microphones, cameras, GPS, connections to your phone and third-party apps like Google Maps and Spotify.
And this problem isn’t going away. The revenue connected cars generate – through in-car purchases and services, or by selling data to third parties, for example – is expected to grow from tens of millions to hundreds of millions of dollars by the end of the decade, according to several estimates. Connected cars aren’t all bad of course; far from it. They allow for over-the-air software updates that could prolong a vehicle’s life, and they have the potential to make roads safer.