Your car and its mobile app are probably handing over all kinds of data to tech companies
Modern-day vehicles built with connected car technology such as WiFi and GPS collect reams of data about its owners. And that data is not staying private, according to a new study conducted by researchers at Northeastern University. That conclusion isn’t new — there have been numerous investigations and lawsuits exposing how driving data is collected and shared with third parties, including insurance companies.
- ▪Modern-day vehicles built with connected car technology such as WiFi and GPS collect reams of data about its owners.
- ▪And that data is not staying private, according to a new study conducted by researchers at Northeastern University.
- ▪That conclusion isn’t new — there have been numerous investigations and lawsuits exposing how driving data is collected and shared with third parties, including insurance companies.
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Story provenance
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Record
| Original publisher | TechCrunch |
| Canonical URL | https://techcrunch.com/2026/09/29/your-car-and-its-mobile-app-are-probably-handing-over-all-kinds-of-data-to-tech-companies/ |
| Publication time | Tue, 29 Sep 2026 22:18:35 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-09-29T22:22:33.641Z |
| Last seen | 2026-09-29T22:22:33.641Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | Ucr2X42ngu6- · 1 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
Modern-day vehicles built with connected car technology such as WiFi and GPS collect reams of data about its owners. And that data is not staying private, according to a new study conducted by researchers at Northeastern University. That conclusion isn’t new — there have been numerous investigations and lawsuits exposing how driving data is collected and shared with third parties, including insurance companies. What the study reveals is just how vast the problem is and how hard it is for consumers to avoid, short of not using the vehicle or its convenient features like remote start and unlock. Researchers in partnership with Consumer Reports tested 21 late-model vehicles from 17 automakers, including GM brands Cadillac and Chevrolet as well as Ford, Lucid, Rivian, Tesla, Toyota, and more.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at TechCrunch.
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