Your car spies on you – and no law stops it!

YOUR car knows where you live, work, visit the doctor and even whether you skipped the gym, according to a law expert.

Sean McElligott, partner and head of the Technology Group at Dublin law firm Philip Lee, warned that cars hold more personal data than you think.

He said: ‘Modern cars are jam-packed full of features to make our lives easier and safer, such as lane control, adaptive cruise control, navigation and infotainment systems.

‘All of this convenience has been shown to result in the generation of enormous amounts of data (which some estimates put at 25Gb of data per hour – the equivalent of 125,000 Word documents or 100 hours of video).’

He added: ‘Depending on the nature of the technology used in your modern car, this sensitive information could be accessible by or made available to a number of interested parties including the car manufacturer, mobile network operators, in-car system providers and the cloud service providers who store the data.’

However, there is no specific legal framework at an Irish or European level to regulate the protection of this data.

It is subject to GDPR, which means the data can be passed on with the permission of the data owner – which may have been given on buying the car if the owner consented to its owning and storing data.

According to Mr McElligott, cars may also know where your children go to school, your religion, whether the speed limit is obeyed, phone contacts, and even details of phone calls, texts and messages.