Personal Vehicle Spyware Risk

A reader asked us the following question:

“I heard that next year all American cars must be built with cameras that spy on the driver. What do you think about this?”

This is an interesting question that actually has quite a few different angles to explore.

Starting with the claim.

This claim is actually misleading, we have reviewed some of the commentary around this online and much of it is misleading or inaccurate.

The claim that is made online is specifically that all American vehicles produced after 2027 will be federally mandated to have DMS (driver monitoring systems) installed. These systems are supposed to be able to automatically detect if the driver is intoxicated, distracted, or incapacitated. 

Upon detection, the system will either:

a) Prevent the car from turning on.

b) Forcibly slow the vehicle.

c) Force the driver to pull over.

This system is supposed to also be capable of ‘phoning home’ to government, generally police agencies, in the interest of protecting the public from hazardous drivers. The claim has been summarized as a government controlled ‘kill switch’ for the personal consumer vehicle.

DMS cameras have been mandated and implemented in Europe. This system is referred to as DDAW (Driver Drowsiness and Attention Warning).

In July 2022, Europe mandated DDAW for all new vehicle types.

In July 2024, Europe mandated DDAW for all new vehicles, even if they had been approved before 2022.

In the United States, the requirement for something to address the public safety concern of distract driving has been passed into law, but there is still disagreement on how that should be implemented.

While the law exists, it has not yet been decided how it will be put into practice. The February 2026 Report to Congress (USA) on this issue reaffirmed the importance of addressing this risk, but concluded that nothing had yet been identified that would work as a reasonable solution for Americans.

An important note, this report issues with:

1. Technology readiness for the monitoring equipment itself.

2. Consumer Acceptance.

3. Cybersecurity.

4. Privacy.

The American government is of the position currently that, while the risk of distracted and intoxicated driving causing death has bipartisan support, there is not as of yet a sufficiently good solution.

As of right now, the claim that this will be implemented in 2027-2028 in America is misleading and false.

This doesn’t mean that this will never happen though, and there is still the conversation around monitoring technology in consumer vehicles to explore. With that in mind, let’s change the perspective a bit.

Spyware in Cars (Context)

The most widely cited piece on this is a September 2023 piece put out by the Mozilla Foundation titled: 

‘Privacy Nightmare on Wheels’: Every Car Brand Reviewed BY Mozilla – Including Ford, Volkswagen and Toyota – Flunks Privacy Test.

In addition, there have been some academic sources and others which have broached the topic. From these sources it is fairly clear that the general claim that vehicle manufacturers are collecting significant data on their customers is credible.

Going further, publicly obtainable documents exist that contain recommendations for vehicle manufacturers on how best to monetize the data. This also includes how to get consumers to agree to monitoring data’s inclusion in the event it becomes a reputational risk.

One such document which helps contextualize how long this has been going on (published in 2016 by McKinsey) is:

Monetizing car data: New service business opportunities to create new customer benefits

For ease of reading, here is a table breaking down the types of data these companies collect and examples (agreed upon from multiple sources):

Category	Examples
Identity	Name, address, phone number, email
Location	GPS history, destinations, home/work locations
Driving behavior	Speed, acceleration, braking, steering, seatbelt use
Vehicle telemetry	Diagnostic trouble codes, battery status, tire pressure, maintenance history
Infotainment	Contacts, messages, calendars, music, voice commands
Smartphone	Connected apps, Bluetooth identifiers, device IDs
Biometrics	Facial recognition, driver monitoring, voice characteristics (on some vehicles)
Camera & sensors	Cabin camera images, ADAS camera data, occupancy information
Derived information	Driver profiles, preferences, behavioral inferences

The Mozilla Foundation in particular has singled out vehicle manufacturers as the single worst offending large industry for privacy risk in the market.

One example in particular that is given is that a passenger is considered to have fully consented to data collection simply by being present in the vehicle.

It appears to be the case that this area happens to be a regulatory gap that has not yet been addressed. From these companies’ position, they are not technically doing anything wrong as this is believed to all be legal.

Data Collection Risk

Here is a way to think about data collection risk. First break it down into its components:

• What is the scope of the data being collected?

• Who is at risk of being harmed by this data?

• How would they come to harm, and what is the worst-case scenario (harm range/variance)?

• How is the data most likely to be used and what are the consequences of this use-case (high probability risk)?

• What is the relationship between the worst-case scenario(s) and the likely use-cases.

In both the current private sector data collection and the potential future government data collection, the scope of the data being collected will fall somewhere close to the table above. This data point is fairly well known.

As for who is at greatest risk of being harmed, there are three groups that come to mind initially: individual consumers, the company themselves, governments.

For individual consumers, this risk manifests through consequences like identity theft, general privacy invasion, and undesired targeted marketing. For an absolute worst-case, there is the potential for this information to be used by a hostile government to target an individual with disastrous consequences, but that is extreme.

The company primarily incurs reputational and regulatory risk. The data itself potentially acts as both a resource and a sort of landmine. By having the data at all there is always a risk that the consumer or a government may find this intolerable. An absolute worst case for this would be a government jailing all the executives of a company for violating their national security or some adjacent risk.

A government will interpret this differently depending on the data and how critical they determine it to be. An identification dataset containing a large amount of information on a country’s citizens could be consider a national security risk. A country may not wish to have the potential for this to be sold to a foreign actor and may consider this a big issue. A different country might consider this an effective non-issue or an assumed risk that cannot be realistically controlled. It just depends.

The above had a bigger focus on the specific groups and their worst-case scenarios, instead let us shift the focus to the more likely use of the data.

For companies collecting data:

In general, there are three reasons a company will decide to do something:

1. It is a net profit earner.

2. It addresses/controls a risk or threat to the company.

3. It helps fulfill the company’s vision or purpose directly.

When looking at why a company would want to collect the data in the first place, this perspective is important to consider.

Collecting data has costs, including:

• Developing the technology for data collection.

• Manufacturing and installing the equipment.

• Maintaining the infrastructure to collect the data.

• Creating and maintaining the infrastructure to store the data.

• Analysts and technology to interpret and/or work with the data to make it more useful.

Even if these things are not done in-house, the costs would still be incurred through licencing agreements, supply chain expenses, outsourcing, etc.

Also. these are the immediate direct costs, there are also other indirect costs associated with the risks of data storage like potential legal fees, etc.

This is the downside, now for a look at the upside.

The company might:

• Sell the data to a third party (financial incentive).

• Use the data to contest a legal dispute from a customer (risk control).

• Use the data to improve current or future products/services (vision/purpose).

If any one of these things (or a combination) has sufficient value that exceeds the cost of the data collection program, it will be in the company’s interest to collect the data. If not, the opposite would be true.

For governments collecting data:

This is largely the same as the private company. The main difference between the two is reputational risk.

A government selling private citizens’ data to generate revenue is likely to face greater pushback than a private company. 

There is some expectation that the government is supposed to store and secure private data, this is necessary for government to function. This is generally accepted by the population (to a point), with the trust and understanding that the government ought to act in the interest of its citizenry.

In relation to DMS cameras, there is no issue in principle. The government has a responsibility in a public safety context to keep the public as safe as possible while reducing as few freedoms as possible.

This directly relates to the difficult decisions on the spectrum of safety to freedom. Usually things that increase safety will decrease freedom and vice-versa. When something is a benefit to both, it is usually just implemented or already has been.

The government needs to collect data to fulfill its core functions, the question is if this specific data is necessary. 

• Necessary is determined by if the safety versus freedom trade off is worth it. 

• How its worth is determined depends on the country and the political system. 

Most people in western societies would agree with the general sentiment that the public should determine its worth (voting, lobbying, referenda, other political mechanism, etc.).

The Consumer Perspective

In general, many people will assume that the average individual is okay with:

• The government collecting data, but ensuring that it is protected (can’t sell).

• A private company selling data, but being restricted by the government to be disallowed from collecting anything sensitive (can’t collect).

For government recording:

The issue is not the principle, but the implementation. The monitoring is too intimate and constant for many to be comfortable. While some individuals are comfortable live-streaming their activities on the internet, this is not the cultural majority.

Many individuals find the idea of being constantly recorded to be unsettling. A person’s vehicle can feel like an extension of their home. It technically is not the home, vehicles are predominantly used in the public, but the sentiment is still there. 

This level of invasiveness can feel like a step towards the slippery slope of the government legislating cameras on people’s private property (the home). For certain demographics this is absolutely terrifying and a complete non-starter.

For private company recording:

This issue predominantly surrounds consumer protections. In many cases, the consumer will not have reasonable options to opt-out of being monitored. Due to:

• The lack of regulation 

• The significant percentage of the market where monitoring is commonplace 

• The general trend towards this technology only increasing within the market

As this stands, it may become entirely impractical to gain access to a modern vehicle that does not do this.

This is further complicated as increasing regulations from the government that mandate safety features, like mandatory rear-view cameras for reversing a vehicle, makes more sophisticated computers necessary in the vehicle.

To a point, once the government has required a certain level of technology in the vehicle for the product to be road-legal, the addition of recording features becomes a minimal relative expense and just helps recoup the cost of following the regulation.

Think about it this way (hypothetical situation, numbers are made up to illustrate the point):

• Government says “Add a $5,000 computer system to this $20,000 vehicle or it isn’t road legal”.

• Company sees $5,000 expense and notices that it can tack on an extra $300 to make $800 back in value. (This is a net +$500, bringing the total expense down to $4,500 net).

• Company has to spend the $5,000 anyways, it might as well try and recoup some of that cost.

A business is going to behave like a business. If the consumer doesn’t like it, they should have the government force them to do something different (regulations).

Having said all this, research has actually been done on what consumers think about this, on the private company side at least.

The general conclusion is that the consumer doesn’t care, they want convenient features and don’t particularly care what happens with their data.

The 2016 report mentioned above actually breaks this down. Well over 80% of people surveyed across multiple countries were well aware their information was being collected.

55% were okay with their carmaker tracking their location and reporting it anonymously.

21% were okay with it so long as it was not reported to a 3^rd party.

24% were not okay with it.

That effectively means that according to internal industry reporting, the assumption is that over half the customer base effectively does not care and is willing to hand over their data.

It is generally understood when looking at privacy risk that newer generations become increasingly less concerned with privacy.

The idea being that these generations grow up in increasingly monitored environments and become acclimated to it very early on.

Given this trend and that this report is 10 years old (2016), it is very likely that a greater majority of the public that is purchasing vehicles does not care about their data being collected. Further, it is unlikely they view privacy as a significant risk relative to their other priorities.

The Future

In general, the younger generation does not care.

There may be a time where increasing pressures from multiple different industries create a tipping point and there is a sort of ‘privacy revolution’ or renaissance where a future generation make this a significant priority. Until that point though, one can expect this issue to trend in the direction of further privacy reductions.

If one wishes to prevent said future keep in mind that at its most fundamental level:

• Business is going to behave like business.

• This issue is and will be framed as public safety/deaths due to distracted driving versus personal privacy/freedom.

• What little data we have suggests the majority of the population does not generally care about the personal privacy/freedom side on this issue.

If one is okay with or would like said future:

• Europe has already adopted this.

• If nothing substantially changes it is a matter of ‘when’ not ‘if’.

Learn more and watch the associated video here.

Vezina is the CEO of Prepared Canada Corp. and is the author of Continuity 101. He can be reached at info@prepared.ca.