I was considering buying a Chevy Bolt lately to use as my daily commuter but found out it collects a lot of data and phones it back. It’s hard to do research on what kind of EV I could buy that doesn’t collect your location data so I’m hoping someone here might have some good suggestions.
Can someone explain exactly how a car is a privacy nightmare? Like what data does it collect and how does it transmit it? Does it have GPS? Is it recording audio somehow? Is it transmitting over cellular data? Verizon, T-mobile? Who’s paying that data bill, Toyota?
I just don’t get it.
My RAV4 has Android Auto, but I don’t have a Toyota app on my phone or anything so how would toyota get stuff from my phone?
Here’s a useful link from Mozilla that details some of the carmakers doing some shady stuff with their models. In a nutshell, these cars have a GPS transceiver, microphones, and cameras to monitor your location, hear your conversations, and even see who’s in the cabin with you. Usually this info can be sold to third parties like insurance companies, cities, advertisers, and more. They can even give the data to law enforcement with few limitations if any. There could be a bunch of other ways this data could be exploited.
Usually these cars have some basic cellular modern to transmit the data but I wouldn’t know how much the carmakers pay for the service.
Mozilla Foundation did some investigating and put out a report, https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/blog/privacy-nightmare-on-wheels-every-car-brand-reviewed-by-mozilla-including-ford-volkswagen-and-toyota-flunks-privacy-test/