Cars are collecting your data. But who really owns it?
Advocates push Ottawa to act to prevent firms from hoarding such data
When it comes to people being tracked and having data about their every movement harvested, it’s often thought a smartphone or a home entertainment system is doing it — but what about your car?
As we become more reliant on the internet connecting all of our devices — known as the internet of things — privacy experts and some in the auto-industry are warning that the data your car collects could be used to profit off of you.
Increasingly, vehicles collect in-depth information about their owners’ habits, said Jean-François Champagne, president of the Automotive Industries Association (AIA) of Canada.
People should have control over that data otherwise car manufacturers could monopolize the auto-servicing market, allowing for less overall competition and higher prices, he said.
The AIA, which advocates on behalf of the aftermarket service industry, is concerned that as cars increasingly collect data about those who drive them, the information will end up stored at the car’s manufacturing company and remain inaccessible.
If Ottawa doesn’t act to prevent this, it could limit competition in the auto-service market as local mechanics and small businesses are kept from accessing the data they may need to fix a problem.
“We need to realize that the vehicle is going through a paradigm shift,” said Champagne.
“What we want to do is make sure that we keep Canadians in the driver’s seat in relation to data in the car.”
The issue strikes at the heart of individual data ownership rights, which are being discussed by governments around the world, including Canada’s.
Who can access the data your car collects about you? Who has the right to know how hard you brake, where you go and what you listen to while you get there?
As experts estimate that most new vehicles on the road in the next few years will have some telecommunications and connection ability, questions about privacy are also being raised.
Brenda McPhail, director of privacy at the Canadian Civil Liberties Association, said that people should be given the opportunity to “meaningfully consent” to how their vehicle uses their information.
Cars can collect information about where we go, our driving habits and even use sensors to track eye movements — all information, McPhail points out, that insurance companies would like to have.
“A lot of us think of our cars very similarly to the way we think about our homes — they’re a private space where we behave as we like,” McPhail said.
“Any technology that allows an intrusion into those private spaces, that collects information about how we’re behaving and then seeks to use it for a purpose that we may or may not know, is intrusive.
“Different people will have different levels of concern about that intrusion.”
Last year, the federal government introduced Bill C11 which enacts the Consumer Privacy Protection Act. It’s still before Parliament and hasn’t become law, but it aims to modernize Canada’s privacy law in an age where companies around the world harvest massive amounts of data about people, and monetize it.
This modernization is laid out in the Liberal government’s Digital Charter and one of its principles is “data mobility.” How this principle would work in the real-world is still being worked out and is subject to specific government regulations being drawn up.
The idea, in a nutshell, is that individuals would have the right to have their information transferred from one company to another, like asking their bank to share their information with another financial institution, or, presumably, a car manufacturer with a mechanic in their hometown.
The AIA has launched a petition, nearing 10,000 signatures, and is calling on the government to draw up specific regulations around the auto service industry.
John Power, a spokesperson for Minister of Innovation, Science and Industry François-Philippe Champagne, didn’t address the specific concerns raised by the AIA when contacted by the Star.
“We are involved in ongoing engagement with stakeholders on policy proposals across a number of these areas,” he said in a statement.