honda
Demand that car companies respect your privacy
How to escape Honda’s privacy hell:
With sensors, microphones, and cameras, cars collect way more data than needed to operate the vehicle. They also share and sell that information to third parties, something many Americans don’t realize they’re opting into when they buy these cars. Companies are quick to flaunt their privacy policies, but those amount to pages upon pages of legalese that leave even professionals stumped about what exactly car companies collect and where that information might go.
So what can they collect?
“Pretty much everything,” said Misha Rykov, a research associate at the Mozilla Foundation, who worked on the car-privacy report. “Sex-life data, biometric data, demographic, race, sexual orientation, gender — everything.”
That’s despicable. Shame on you, Honda. Mozilla’s privacy report says their competitors are all pretty bad, too.
If you live in a state with a privacy law, you can and should write to your car’s manufacturer and demand that they show you all the information they collect about you, that they delete it all, that they not share it with anyone else, and that they limit how they use your data only to provide the services you’ve requested from them. These are your legal rights and manufacturers are legally obligated to respect them, even if it’s inconvenient and expensive for them. In fact, I think it’s our duty as citizens to make it cost companies more to process millions of our opt-out requests than they make selling our personal information.