This study looks at how and with whom connected cars share your data

What happened

And using a car’s companion app can multiply the problem, their testing found. Between the cars and their companion apps, you’re exposed to a lot of trackers.

In news that should surprise very few, connected cars remain a complete privacy nightmare. Testing 21 cars from 19 different brands revealed patterns of traffic to advertisers and trackers, as well as data shared with Big Tech firms like Microsoft and Adobe.

But that analysis was conducted by sitting down and reading all the various privacy policies of each brand; today’s study involved measuring traffic from actual cars under a number of scenarios, including idling and being driven. The researchers even parked 11 cars—just the electric ones—in a Faraday tent to see if the loss of a cellular signal would push that traffic to the car’s Wi-Fi connection instead.