And apparently they're here.
From Car & Driver, Dec. 17:
Washington Post Hacked into a Chevy Volt to Show How Much Cars Are Spying on Their Owners
Your car is collecting and transmitting a lot more data than you think, as this investigation graphically depicts.
- The Washington Post published an investigative report today in which it gets a hacker to figure out just what kind of information OnStar and a randomly selected 2017 model car's internal computers are collecting.
- A lot, it turns out, including saving pictures of your contacts and logging where you go.
- There are ways to limit how much data your car collects, but they're not obvious, the paper concludes—and the tinfoil treatment humorously shown in the accompanying photo won't do the trick.
It's easy to count up the benefits to connected cars. From using your phone to warm up the cabin on a winter day to setting speed limits for the new teenage drivers in your household, telematics can make life a bit easier. But you're probably not surprised to hear that these upsides come with some potential downsides as well.This was proven in a big way by Washington Post tech columnist Geoffrey Fowler (pictured above), who dug into just how much information his test car, a 2017 Chevrolet Volt, is collecting. Perhaps more important, though, Fowler wanted to see just how much information GM is getting from its connected cars. It's one thing for your car to store your favorite Starbucks in the nav system. It's another if the car company collects that information. The reporter made it clear that this is not a Volt thing, or a Chevy thing; nearly all new cars now have connectivity, including onboard internet connections.For now, exactly what information goes where is a bit of an unknown by anyone other than the automakers themselves. As Fowler writes, "My Chevy's dashboard didn't say what the car was recording. It wasn't in the owner's manual. There was no way to download it."
To figure this out, Fowler had someone hack into the Volt. He discovered that the car was recording details about where the car was driven and parked, call logs, identification information for his phone and contact information from his phone, "right down to people's address, emails and even photos." In another example, Fowler bought a Chevy infotainment computer on eBay and was able to extract private information from it about whoever owned it before him, including pictures of the person the previous owner called "Sweetie."...
....MUCH MORE
You Have No Idea How Insanely Complex Modern Headlights Can Be I Mean Holy Crap They Have GPS
