The Mozilla Foundation, the nonprofit organization best known for its Firefox web browser, has conducted a privacy assessment of modern cars and reports that the results are disheartening.
They consider modern cars to be an absolute nightmare when it comes to protecting the user’s privacy. They say that, from a privacy perspective, it’s the worst category of products they have ever examined.
In their assessment, Mozilla writes, among other things, that out of the 25 car brands they examined, they believe all of them collect too much information about the car’s owner. 84 percent of the car brands also asserted the right to sell the information they collected about the car owner, and 92 percent provided the car owner with little to no control over the data collected about them. Mozilla discusses their assessment as follows:
We spent over 600 hours researching the car brands’ privacy practices. That’s three times as much time per product than we normally do. Even still, we were left with so many questions. None of the privacy policies promise a full picture of how your data is used and shared. If three privacy researchers can barely get to the bottom of what’s going on with cars, how does the average time-pressed person stand a chance?
It should be mentioned that Mozilla’s assessment has taken place in the American market. In Europe, there is somewhat greater protection against this type of privacy-invasive data collection, thanks to the GDPR law. You can find Mozilla’s full privacy assessment of modern cars at the link below. There is also a table that lists specific findings for each of the 25 examined car brands.
