Albert Fox Cahn, Esq.
Albert Fox Cahn, Esq. executive director of the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project, New York City, and a visiting fellow at Yale Law School’s Information Society Project.
StopSpying.org
Your car knows a lot about you—everything from where the car goes and when to performance figures such as how fast it is driven. Add to that the information transferred from any smartphone synched with the car’s infotainment system, including the phones’ call logs, contact lists and text messages. What to do…
Deactivate the vehicle’s connected services. If you own a connected car, review the vehicle’s owner’s manual to determine how to do this. Even better: Drive a nonconnected vehicle—any car made this century likely tracks some information, but the privacy risks are significantly lower in cars that don’t connect to the Internet.
Don’t enroll in auto insurance programs that promise savings in exchange for allowing the insurer to track your driving, and decline connected automotive-assistance programs such as OnStar.
Avoid synching your smartphone with rental cars and fleet vehicles. If you do sync your phone to a car, clear the data from that car’s infotainment system before returning it. You can find directions for clearing this data and/or resetting the infotainment system in the vehicle’s manual.
