Vehicle Data Collection: A Privacy Policy Analysis and Comparison

In recent years, data can be considered the new fuel for road vehicle functionalities like driver-assistance systems or customized services. Therefore, the carmakers with their phone apps, synced with the infotainment system, can collect information from the drivers and vehicles to be processed inside or outside the car. In this context, we analyze different carmakers’ privacy policies to define their readability and compliance with the EU General Data Protection Regulation, and provide analysis of carmakers’ data collection. Besides, for the first time, we compare the most significant privacy regulations in automotive. Finally, we create an interactive dashboard to compare the different carmakers’ policies and provide users with an efficient instrument to understand some relevant privacy aspects like which data the carmakers declare to collect. We find that carmakers could collect a large number of users and vehicle data, but, in some cases, the privacy policies seem to be quite challenging to read and do not provide some information like how collected data are protected or stored.