(Originally published on LinkedIn in June 2024)
The privacy question has certainly been a mainstay in many jokes, memes, and sci-fi books (the one I loved recently was a German book called QualityLand). And yes, there is a big possibility that the data generated by those billions of connected cars could be misused. But there are some causes for relief.
Firstly, from a regulatory point of view, there are privacy guidelines in place for data storage and usage. European Union’s data privacy law (the (in)famous GDPR) for example. Such laws mean that organizations or companies can’t store or use data without the knowledge of the data owner (the car user in our case) and can do so only for the purpose agreed with the data-owner, e.g. vehicle safety or post-crash analysis. So, legally they can’t use the data for, say, tracking your driving or shopping habits. And if they do and someone finds out, they are in big trouble.
Sure, there is a possibility that a third-party hacker could steal the said data and sell it or use it for malignant acts. But that’s where the second cause for relief comes into play – anonymization. The collected data is stripped of all possible “identifying” marks whenever they are not directly needed for the safety testing or such. So, license plates are blurred from the camera images recorded by vehicles and road infrastructure and V2X data uses temporary “pseudo” IDs instead of real IDs of the vehicle. Despite all this anonymization, I have to say, based on my engineering knowledge, that if you are creative enough, you can find a way to draw “inferences” from this data and use it for your benefit. But just because you can do it, doesn’t mean it won’t be illegal and you won’t be caught!
Thirdly, most data floating around in the connected car sphere is short lived. It is sent, used for the immediate decision making in the vehicle and discarded almost immediately. This is not only driven by the policy (of the government or the car-maker) but also by the cost factor. Storing data requires extra electronic memory, computing power for processing it, and bandwidth in the wireless spectrum for sending it somewhere else. Car makers usually save every last cent they can. So, most of the data from connected cars is just momentary and can’t be misused.
Despite all the above reasons to be less worried about data privacy, there are always causes for concern among the general public. And rightly so because we live in a world where 1) companies want to sell us more stuff by using every trick in the book (if it has to be using Petabytes of connected car data, so be it), 2) data and information manipulation is the latest and the greatest tool for obtaining or maintaining political power and connected car data is part of that information ecosystem.