Car versus privacy: study gives consistently miserable marks

With sensors for the interior, the environment, interfaces to own and third-party apps, automatic updates, GPS and mobile communications, collecting and forwarding countless pieces of information in modern cars is no problem at all.

The Mozilla Foundation took a closer look at how manufacturers deal with this, how they receive, evaluate and utilize it. A total of 25 brands were examined, including all the major manufacturers on the European and US markets.

The foundation, which otherwise develops the Firefox browser and the Thunderbird e-mail program, repeatedly examines a wide variety of everyday products. Here too, the results are rarely flattering and, in the worst cases, reveal violations of the law and misuse of data.

This does not bode well for "cars", the worst product category to date according to Mozilla. But first things first: All car brands tested (never older than 3 years) collect significantly more data than would be necessary for safety and comfort - well, surprise surprise.

Thoughtless, commercialized handling of private data

In addition to information about the car's systems, it is above all the car's own apps that basically tap into everything. It starts with driving behavior and only ends with medical information and even more private data. This in turn can be used to create links in order to create personal profiles.

21 of the manufacturers require permission to share the data, no matter with whom. And 19 of these 21 still reserve the right to even sell the collected data. 14 companies go so far as to make the data available to governments - not by court order, but on "request", as the study puts it.

Only two manufacturers also grant the right to have the collected data deleted. Whether and in what way the security of the transmitted and stored information, which as already mentioned can contain highly private information, is guaranteed could not be determined even when asked.

There are still many, far too many question marks and the realization that the manufacturers are well aware of the millions of treasures that they are salvaging every day. They take the right to do so from the owner and take it from all other drivers and occupants.

After all, Renault and Dacia, actually just one company, only scored two minus points: a huge collecting frenzy and inadequate data security. Here you can also demand deletion. In last place, on the other hand, is once again Tesla, which even admits that the vehicle would not function safely without permanent data transmission.

Nissan, on the other hand, earns its penultimate place unerringly because the terms of use even allow "sexual activities" to be evaluated - however this is researched by the car.

At least the Mozilla Foundation offers some hope, albeit only a small one. Just raising awareness of the considerable shortcomings and the rampant collection, storage and evaluation of private information by your own car can bring about improvement.

Until then, all that remains is to read the individual reports with interest. There is a detailed list (links in the table) for each brand tested of all the problems found. Have fun reading!