Tesla and Other Car Manufacturers Prove US Needs National Privacy Law
Tesla employees were passing around videos taken from parked Tesla vehicles, including those in people’s private homes:
Such footage offered Tesla employees a glimpse inside “people’s garages and their private properties,” one ex-employee told Reuters. Footage of “distinctive” findings on customer property would then be posted across the company.
This reminded be about an article I read a couple months back, before I went into the hospital. While the actions at Tesla are uniquely obnoxious, care manufacturers are almost universally destroying our privacy. The Mozilla foundation tested the privacy of cars, and found that car manufacturers routinely do the following with your data:
All 25 tested capture more data than is necessary for running the car and use that data to do things other than, well, run the car.
84% sell or share your data with third-parties. And, of course, you aren’t given a list of those third-parties or a clean, easy way to prevent such selling/sharing.
Half will give your private data to governments with just a “request”
They don’t provide enough information to determine if their apps are secure or not.
The article has a lot more, but it only exists because of the California Consumer Privacy Act. The Act is not perfect, but it does require that companies that want to operate in California disclose what they do with personal data. And, of course, car companies want to sell cars in California. In fact, of the 25 car manufacturers, only two even approach clear rules for letting you opt out of the data sharing and collection. Those two are owned by the same parent company, are only available in Europe, and thus must adhere to the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation. The GDPR is no joke — we spend a lot of time in certain aspects of my job making sure we don’t violate it. The penalties can be huge, and none of us want to be the idiot that got our company fined. And we are a company that actually cares about privacy and protecting data all the way to the top, in my experience.
That, of course, is the point. Strong privacy laws make sure that even companies generally good on these issues are always thinking about them. Weak privacy laws, like we have in the United States, allow, obviously, too much leeway. It is not even that the Tesla people who passed around videos of people’s homes should be in jail. It is that there is so much that companies do with our data that has nothing to do with running the company or serving customers. Without strong privacy laws, we are literally exposed to anyone who wants to buy our data and everyone who wants to profit off those sales.
Strong privacy laws will not be easy to come by. The GOP has never met a business regulation it liked, and a lot of Dems are either beholden to Silicon Valley money or genuinely believe, wrongly, that allowing businesses to “innovate” is good for everyone. And that doesn’t even touch on the fact that law enforcement likes being able to buy personal data. They get their panopticon without the interference of that pesky Constitution or judges who enforce it.
No one should be allowed to innovate with my personal data, or yours. While privacy laws are a bit of a long shot, they are worth agitating for. These companies need to be smacked in the nose in order to ensure that we can leave peaceful, private lives.
Because your car dealer shouldn’t be able to sell your trips to the pharmacy or the phycologists to people unknown.