The Dashboard We Trust
Modern cars are incredible machines. They parallel park themselves. They warn us before a collision. They remember our seat position, our favorite radio station, our climate preferences. They connect to our phones, stream our music, pull up directions before we even ask.
We paid $30,000, $50,000, maybe $70,000 for all of that. And somewhere in the process, we clicked “I agree” on a screen we couldn’t read while the salesperson waited. That click gave away more than we think.
The car we drive isn’t just a car anymore. It’s a surveillance device we make monthly payments on. And the convenience features we love — the GPS, the Bluetooth, the connected apps — are the same features that are quietly logging everything we do behind the wheel.
What Our Cars Are Actually Doing
90% of new cars sold in America collect data about their drivers. A connected car can process up to 25 gigabytes of data per hour — where we go, how fast we drive, how hard we brake, where we stop, how long we stay. Our cars know our daily routines better than our spouses do.
That data doesn’t stay in the car. It gets transmitted — often in real time — to the manufacturer. From there, it enters a marketplace most drivers have never heard of. Data brokers buy it in bulk. A 2024 Senate investigation found that automakers sell this data for pennies — Honda got twenty-six cents per car, Hyundai sixty-one cents. They’re selling our driving habits for less than a pack of gum.
In 2024, the FTC took action against General Motors for collecting and selling precise geolocation and driving behavior data from millions of vehicles — without meaningful consent. GM was sharing this data with companies like LexisNexis and Verisk, who packaged it and sold it to auto insurers. Drivers saw their premiums go up and had no idea their own car was the reason.
Toyota faces a class-action lawsuit over its connected vehicle data practices. The company’s privacy policy — the one nobody reads — reserves the right to collect and share driving data with third parties for “business purposes.” That language covers almost anything.
Our cars collect our location, speed, braking habits, and driving patterns. That data is sold to insurers, data brokers, and companies we’ve never heard of — often without our meaningful knowledge or consent.
Follow the Money
This isn’t a glitch in the system. It’s the business model.
Automakers discovered that selling a car once is less profitable than selling its data forever. A new revenue stream opened up: connected vehicle data services. GM, Ford, Toyota, Honda, Hyundai — they all have data monetization programs now. Some are public about it. Most aren’t.
Data brokers like LexisNexis and Verisk act as middlemen. They aggregate driving data from multiple manufacturers and sell packaged profiles to insurance companies. The insurers use those profiles to adjust our premiums — not based on our claims history, but based on what our car reported about last Tuesday’s commute.
A 2018 Frost & Sullivan report estimated the potential value of connected car data at nearly $100 per vehicle. The actual prices are even more insulting — pennies on the car. But across 280 million registered vehicles, it adds up to a multi-billion-dollar industry built entirely on data that drivers never knowingly agreed to share. The car companies get paid. The brokers get paid. The insurers adjust our rates. The only people who don’t get a cut — or a choice — are us.
I drive a used 2017 Toyota 4Runner. Gets about 20 miles per gallon on the highway. I’ve thought about trading it in every time gas prices spike, but I haven’t. Here’s the thing — I used to think Toyota wasn’t collecting data on a vehicle that old. Turns out, Toyota started installing Data Communication Modules in 2017 model year vehicles. My 4Runner almost certainly has one. It connects to a cell network and streams driving data back to Toyota, who reserves the right to share it with affiliates, vendors, and business partners. I didn’t agree to that. I bought a truck.
The technology itself isn’t the problem. I don’t want to go back to paper maps and carburetors. I want the technology without the surveillance. That should be an option. Right now, it isn’t.
Where This Is Heading
If the data collection we have now seems bad, look at what’s coming. These aren’t rumors. They’re patent applications filed by Ford — public documents, on the record.
- Listening to conversations to sell ads. Ford filed a patent for a system that monitors what people say inside the vehicle, parses it for keywords, and serves targeted ads. Their own language: “maximum opportunity for ad-based monetization.” The system was designed to increase ad frequency in traffic and on longer trips. Ford abandoned this patent in late 2025 after public backlash — but the filing tells us what they wanted to build.
- Scanning faces against criminal databases. A patent for a vehicle-mounted system using cameras, fingerprint scanners, and iris scanners to capture biometrics and cross-reference them against law enforcement databases — warrants, criminal records, missing persons. The person in the vehicle is not notified. Ford described it as useful for police. The patent language doesn’t restrict it to police vehicles.
- Reading lips. A patent for in-cabin cameras and machine learning that interpret lip movements and facial expressions. The stated purpose is voice commands in noisy vehicles. But the infrastructure — cameras trained on the driver’s face, connected to cloud servers — is the same infrastructure that enables everything else on this list.
Here’s what gets me. Every one of these technologies could actually help people. A camera that reads lips could help a deaf driver communicate with the car. A heart rate monitor could save someone having a cardiac event. But that’s not how they’re being designed. They’re being designed to collect data and send it somewhere else. The helpful version and the surveillance version use the exact same hardware. The difference is who controls it.
What Real Privacy Looks Like
We don’t have to choose between good technology and basic privacy. We just need rules that put the driver back in control.
An advance directive for the truck
Most people know what an advance directive is — a document that says what happens when we can’t make decisions for ourselves. Same idea for the vehicle. We set the rules in advance, and the car follows them:
- If I’m drowsy, alert me. If I don’t respond, pull over safely.
- If my heart rate crashes, call 911 and unlock the doors for paramedics.
- If I’m incoherent or unconscious, call my emergency contact.
- Don’t send any of this to the manufacturer. Don’t send it to my insurance company. Don’t send it to police. It stays in my vehicle.
That’s technology working for the person who bought the truck. The heart rate monitor, the cameras, the sensors — all of it can save lives. But only if the owner sets the rules, not the manufacturer. Opt in to what helps. The rest stays off.
The rules we need
- Data ownership legislation — our driving data belongs to us, not the manufacturer. No collection, no sharing, no selling without explicit opt-in. The default is off. Not buried in a 47-page terms-of-service document. I don’t want my car sharing my driving data with third parties. I don’t know anyone who does. The default is “no,” and “no” doesn’t disable the car.
- A true “data off” mode that actually works — right now, most “privacy settings” in connected cars are theater. The underlying telemetry keeps running. Manufacturers should be required to offer a genuine disconnect — a mode where no driving data leaves the vehicle, period. The car still drives. The GPS still works locally. But nothing phones home.
- Insurance fairness protections — ban insurers from using covertly collected driving data to set premiums. If we voluntarily enroll in a usage-based program, that’s our choice. But our rates shouldn’t change because a data broker sold our braking patterns without our knowledge.
None of this requires giving up the technology. It requires giving up the assumption that the price of a modern car includes unlimited access to our lives. We already paid for the car. We shouldn’t have to pay again with our privacy.