VW leaked your personal info
Your car is spying on you.
CarScoops report Massive VW Data Leak Exposed 800,000 EV Owners’ Movements, From Homes To Brothels:
Many people worry about hackers stealing their personal data, but sometimes, the worst breaches come not from shadowy cybercriminals but straight from the companies we trust.
This was presented at the annual CCC conference in December 2024.
Not only Volkswagen collected all that information, usually without informed consent1, but they can’t even keep it securely.
Among the treasure trove of exposed data were GPS coordinates, battery charge levels, and other key details about vehicle status, like whether it was switched on or off. That’s right, someone with the right know-how could casually snoop on your car’s whereabouts and habits.
Of course this can be done. This is why the data is collected in the first place: to sell it off through data brokers. This practice is not unique to car manufacturers either.
In 2023 the Mozilla Foundation had posted a report titled Privacy not included that concluded recent cars are a privacy nightmare, with fuzzy privacy policy and practices.
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The notion that consent was acquired because the customer signed a paper where this is buried into a ton of legalese for which they don’t even have the time to read is preposterous. Even more, consent from any passenger in the car wasn’t obtained. ↩︎