Your car’s data privacy problems are worse than you think
Researchers from Northeastern University and Consumer Reports found that all 21 tested vehicles transmitted data to third-party domains. Over half of these vehicles specifically contacted advertising, tracking, or analytics companies. The study highlights significant privacy concerns regarding the scale of data collection and the lack of consumer control over this information.
- ▪Researchers analyzed 21 late-model vehicles from 19 brands and found that every single one transmitted data to at least one third-party domain over Wi-Fi.
- ▪More than half of the tested vehicles pinged domains specializing in advertising, tracking, or analytics, including companies like Adobe and Amplitude.
- ▪The Federal Trade Commission previously penalized General Motors for illegally collecting and selling precise location and driving behavior data without informed consent.
- ▪Researchers used a Raspberry Pi and a Faraday tent to intercept Wi-Fi and cellular traffic from the vehicles to monitor their data transmissions.
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| Original publisher | The Verge |
| Canonical URL | https://www.theverge.com/transportation/1001463/car-data-privacy-northeastern-study-honda-gm-ford |
| Publication time | 2026-09-29T06:00:00-04:00 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-09-29T10:05:11.011Z |
| Last seen | 2026-09-29T10:05:11.011Z |
| 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 | BH6ZFQ3areW8 · 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 |
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| 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
TransportationCloseTransportationPosts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.FollowFollowSee All TransportationNewsCloseNewsPosts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.FollowFollowSee All NewsTechCloseTechPosts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.FollowFollowSee All TechYour car’s data privacy problems are worse than you thinkA team of researchers tested 21 vehicles and found that all of them transmitted data to a third-party domain. And over half were pinging advertising companies.A team of researchers tested 21 vehicles and found that all of them transmitted data to a third-party domain. And over half were pinging advertising companies.by Andrew J.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at The Verge.
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