You Thought Your Phone Tracked You? Meet Your Car

It used to be that stepping into your vehicle felt like entering your own private bubble—a rolling sanctuary where you could sing off-key, vent your frustrations, or sit in silence with your thoughts. That illusion is dead. In its place, we have machines that may be tracking, storing, and selling everything from our location history to driver behavior or even personal contacts. 

Yes, your car might know more about you than your own spouse.

An investigation by Mozilla’s Privacy Not Included project named modern cars the worst category of consumer products when it comes to privacy. Let that sink in. Worse than your smartphone. Worse than your smart TV. Worse even than those always-listening home assistants sitting in your kitchen.

Cars now function like smartphones on wheels—only with more sensors, fewer user controls, and significantly less awareness by the people being tracked. The infotainment system records your calls and contacts. Cameras and microphones inside and out capture your behavior. GPS logs your movements. Tire sensors, braking patterns, acceleration habits—all fed into a voracious data engine.

The idea that you "own" your vehicle is a myth. You're renting mobility from a corporation that may be quietly monetizing your behavior.

Why is this happening? Because driver data is big business. According to McKinsey & Company, vehicle data could generate up to $400 billion annually by 2030. Carmakers have figured out that while hardware sales plateau, monetizing data creates a renewable revenue stream.

Andrea Amico of Privacy4Cars warns that people still view their vehicles as private spaces. “But they’re not,” he says. “They're data centers.”

And most drivers haven’t a clue.

A recent survey by the American Automobile Association found that more than 80% of consumers are unaware their vehicle collects and shares data at all. That ignorance has consequences. Some insurance companies now adjust premiums based on driving behavior extracted from your vehicle, often without transparent consent. Your insurer may know what time you drive, where you go, and how fast you get there—and price your policy accordingly.

What makes this worse is that you can’t simply "opt out." Many carmakers bury data-sharing permissions in long, dense user agreements signed under pressure at the dealership—if they're presented at all. Thorin Klosowski of the Electronic Frontier Foundation recalls realizing, moments after buying his car, that he had essentially agreed to hand his personal data to a third party. “And I do this for a living,” he said.

Even used cars pose privacy risks. One YouTuber recently revealed he could still track a Volvo he had sold, viewing every stop the new owner made—church, school, home. That isn’t just creepy; it’s dangerous.

And then there's the looming specter of federally mandated kill switches. Hidden in the 2021 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act is a requirement that all new vehicles by 2026 include technology capable of disabling the car remotely, potentially without the driver's consent. Ostensibly, this is about preventing drunk driving. In reality, it opens the door to a surveillance tool ripe for abuse—by governments, hackers, or corporations.

Already, some subprime lenders install kill switches to disable vehicles when payments are missed. Imagine what happens when that power expands.

The Silicon Valley mantra, “If you’re not paying for the product, you are the product,” doesn't hold up here. We're paying—often $50,000 or more—and still being treated like the product.

And we’re not just talking about telemetry or braking behavior. Nissan's 2023 privacy policy (before public backlash forced edits) included language about collecting sensitive personal data like “sexual orientation,” “health diagnoses,” and even “genetic information.” This isn’t just surveillance—it’s profiling.

The Alliance for Automotive Innovation insists this is all about safety. But that’s like calling a security camera in your shower a safety feature. “Safety” has become the fig leaf behind which a profitable, barely regulated surveillance industry hides.

So where’s the outrage? We’ve accepted smart speakers that eavesdrop, phones that track us, and TVs that log what we watch. But cars? This crosses a sacred line. For many Americans, the car is a last refuge of autonomy and control. Now it’s just another portal into your private life.

We urgently need legislation that reflects the scope and sensitivity of what carmakers are collecting. In Europe, the GDPR offers at least some guardrails. The U.S. has no equivalent federal data privacy law—and automakers are exploiting that void.

Until that changes, your best defense is vigilance. Read the fine print. Disable what you can. Ask your dealer for a copy of the data-sharing agreement before you sign. Reset your vehicle before you sell it.

The car used to symbolize freedom—open roads, spontaneous detours, long stretches of solitude. Now, it's just one more node in the vast web of surveillance that quietly monitors our lives. We’ve been told there's nowhere to hide from the watchful eyes of modern technology. Now, there’s nowhere left to drive. This is yet another example of how easily we trade our freedoms for convenience, surrendering privacy not with resistance, but with a signature and a smile—never realizing what we’ve lost until it's too late.