THERE is growing pressure to rein in rampant in-car data mining and sharing with third-party aggregators for marketing purposes.
Hyundai, Kia and Tesla have been seen as among the worst culprits with the tech-heavy connected cars increasing the data capture potential.
Industry sources have said the issue was under discussion at manufacturer, dealer (and presumably government) levels.
Some carmakers have been known to collect data without the knowledge of drivers who failed to read the fine print, including the assumption of consent from the act of occupying one of their vehicles.
MG Motor already disables some in-vehicle functions – including native satellite navigation software – unless the driver reads and agrees to a lengthy on-screen privacy policy.
MG’s privacy policy is “unclear about how extensively the driver data they collect is shared”.
The Apple App Store notes that MG’s iSmart iPhone app can collect location, contacts, user content, search history, identifiers, usage data and diagnostics information that may be linked to the owner of the device.
MG’s Chinese parent company SAIC is the developer of the iSmart app.
The second-biggest collector of owner-linked iPhone app data after MG is Mazda, which links location, contact, identifiers, usage data and diagnostic info to the device owner.
Toyota and Ford apps have similar capabilities but supplant linked location data for user content.
Kia’s app links location, contact information, user content and identifiers while Hyundai and Genesis link contact data and identifiers but collect anonymised location, user content and diagnostics data.
Tesla’s app appears to be least invasive, gathering only usage and diagnostic data linked to the device owner.
