Is Your EV Spying On You?
Today’s cars are far more sophisticated than their predecessors. Due to the highly competitive marketplace, manufacturers have been forced to push as much technology and features as possible to their latest crop of cars to stand out from the competition.
As such, our cars are loaded with an array of cameras, proximity sensors to help them steer, apply the brakes when they sense an impending collision as well as warn us of potential dangers. To do that, their “optics” track driver input, speed, street signs, speed limit signs and for vehicles with in-built GPS navigation, your location at any given time.
These are extremely helpful features that make modern cars safer to drive and maintain because their computers are constantly monitoring usage, and in the case of EVs, vehicle health and potentially schedule service appointments.
In addition to this, modern EVs offer OTA (over the air) updates, where periodic software upgrades and bug fixes are sent to them from the factory. It’s like how your Windows 11 PC receives inconveniencing updates from Microsoft. Completely hands-free upgrades with little human input.
This makes them incredibly smart, somewhat semi-autonomous, mobile GPS trackers, and in terms of maintenance, self-sufficient. Admittedly, these are also characteristics that could make EVs potential narks!
Since modern EVs collect so much data about our driving behavior, habits, places we visit and infractions that are committed in the process, could that be used against us? According to a Reuters report from last year, groups of Tesla employees privately shared videos and images captured by customer Tesla vehicles.
These included extreme footage of road rage incidents and accidents to other embarrassing moments. The article also states that a former Tesla employee admitted that the computer program used at work could show the locations of the recordings, despite the company’s customer privacy policy of keeping such recordings anonymous.
That said, this has more to do with irresponsible employees mishandling customer data versus actual companywide practices. If you were to review your EV’s user manual, it may state what data said EV manufacturer collects, but at the same time, they’d also state that the collected data will be used “responsibly”.
But that does open questions on whether car companies view and store data from our trips and if so, could it be used for purposes other than “quality improvement”? Could footage of you committing an offence or questionable driving etiquette be used against you?
