Wyden Presses FTC To Crack Down On Rampant Auto Industry Privacy Abuses

Last year Mozilla released a report showcasing how the auto industry has some of the worst privacy practices of any tech industry in America (no small feat). Massive amounts of driver behavior is collected by your car, and even more is hoovered up from your smartphone every time you connect. This data isn’t secured, often isn’t encrypted, and is sold to a long list of dodgy, unregulated middlemen.

Last March the New York Times revealed that automakers like GM routinely sell access to driver behavior data to insurance companies, which then use that data to justify jacking up your rates. The practice isn’t clearly disclosed to consumers, and has resulted in 11 federal lawsuits in less than a month.

Now Ron Wyden’s office is back with the results of their preliminary investigation into the auto industry, finding that it routinely provides customer data to law enforcement without a warrant without informing consumers. The auto industry, unsurprisingly, couldn’t even be bothered to adhere to a performative, voluntary pledge the whole sector made in 2014 to not do precisely this sort of thing:

“Automakers have not only kept consumers in the dark regarding their actual practices, but multiple companies misled consumers for over a decade by failing to honor the industry’s own voluntary privacy principles. To that end, we urge the FTC to investigate these auto manufacturers’ deceptive claims as well as their harmful data retention practices.”

The auto industry can get away with this because the U.S. remains too corrupt to pass even a baseline privacy law for the internet era. The FTC, which has been left under-staffed, under-funded, and boxed in by decades of relentless lobbying and mindless deregulation, lacks the resources to pursue these kinds of violations at any consistent scale; precisely as corporations like it.

Maybe the FTC will act, maybe it won’t. If it does, it will take two years to get the case together, the financial penalties will be a tiny pittance in relation to the total amount of revenues gleaned from privacy abuses, and the final ruling will be bogged down in another five years of legal wrangling.

This wholesale violation of user privacy has dire, real-world consequences. Wyden’s office has also been taking aim at data brokers who sell abortion clinic visitor location data to right wing activists, who then have turned around to target vulnerable women with health care disinformation. Wireless carrier location data has also been abused by everyone from stalkers to people pretending to be law enforcement.

The cavalier treatment of your auto data poses those same risks, Wyden’s office notes:

“Vehicle location data can reveal intimate details of a person’s life, including for those who seek care across state lines, attend protests, visit mental or behavioral health professionals or seek treatment for substance use disorder.”

Keep in mind this is the same auto industry currently trying to scuttle right to repair reforms under the pretense that they’re just trying to protect consumer privacy (spoiler: they aren’t).

This same story is playing out across a litany of industries. Again, it’s just a matter of time until there’s a privacy scandal so massive and ugly that even our corrupt Congress is shaken from its corrupt apathy, though you’d hate to think what it will have to look like.