Your car is spying on you, and 19 of 21 vehicles tested leaked data to third parties
Car is a smartphone on wheels. Here's who's listening
Northeastern University researchers, with Consumer Reports, tested 21 connected cars and 30 companion apps. They found 19 of 21 vehicles contacted third-party domains, including advertisers and trackers, and 7 of 30 apps sent sensitive data like VINs, emails, phone numbers, and precise location to ad tech companies. Pairing an app roughly doubled a vehicle's exposure to tracking. Manufacturers largely shifted blame to consumers, though Honda improved its practices.
The ongoing theme of all these responses was shifting the blame to the consumer.
- dang
Recent and related:
Automatic Transmission – a data-privacy study of connected vehicles - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49926628 - Oct 2026 (230 comments)
(Normally we'd merge the threads but after 2 days it would mess up the comment rankings.)
- randomhacker123
They only looked at the domains the car talks to over wifi, not to the content. For a Tesla Model 3 they also looked at the mobile traffic, because it was easy doable.
They played around with the infotainment of the car for 30 minutes, when it has for example a YouTube app, they opened it. When the car talked to YouTube over Wifi they counted it as one ATA (Advertising, Tracking, and Analytics).
When you have less apps in the car, or all data is tunneled trough the car manufacturer it results in less ATA and therefore a better score.
The paper says this:
> 2. Stationary Active: The vehicle was parked and powered on for 30 minutes while we interacted with as many sensors and features as possible. This included opening and closing doors and the trunk, pressing dashboard and seat controls, activating stalks (lights, wipers), and exploring all infotainment menus and apps.
https://automatictransmission.khoury.northeastern.edu/paper....
Their repository has the classification of vendors here:
https://github.com/nicolegerzon813/Automatic-Transmission-An...
It would be nice to have know which domains were accessed by which car. Even better would be to know which action in the car correlated with which connection.
- axegon_
This is part of the reason why I don't want a new car: I don't want to be involved in this directly. A guy from work got a brand new Hyundai(I think), and the first thing that popped on the navigation was "Create an account with Hyundai now". Nah. Nah. Forget it. I have 3 issues:
1. I should not have to authenticate or have connectivity to a manufacturer unless I want to once I've paid for a physical good(cars being physical goods).
2. I don't want my personal data to be sold off to anyone - I've been in the tech industry for long enough to know that "I don't want my data to be shared with third parties" is worth as much as the power used to light up the pixels on the screen.
3. I don't trust anyone to have done everything carefully and by the books to prevent any potential leaks.
- atmavatar
The unfortunate reality is we can expect more and more of our goods to spy on us over time, as there are both political and economic motivations to track and collect as much data as possible on everyone.
The best thing you can do is avoid products with trackers while they haven't taken over their entire market, learn to disable GPS, wireless, and cellular antennae once they do, and pray manufacturers take a while to insert dead-man switches as well.
- zenapollo
The world IS getting mass surveillance. The havens for privacy are shrinking. We are becoming the ants in the ant farm.
One thing i don’t understand is how pro-surveillance advocates don’t understand that the moment they are not behind the terminal, they are the target.
- rcpt
If this tech was being used for traffic enforcement then I'm all for it. Unfortunately it seems like people will still be able to browse their phone behind the wheel and run over kids on bikes despite the surveillance
- recursivedoubts
It has been demonstrated repeatedly that modern cars can be remotely hijacked and controlled as well. We really do live in a dystopia.
- hoppyhoppy2
Discussed 2 days ago at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49926628