A modern car knows where it goes, how it is driven, who is in it, what is said near the microphone and which phone is paired to it. It has a permanent connection, an opaque update channel, and no meaningful setting to turn any of it off. What that implies, and the few points where a driver still has leverage.
The category error
People treat a phone as a computer and a car as an appliance. Twenty years of learned caution — checking permissions, noticing when something wants location, being wary of what an app can read — attached itself to the phone and stopped there.
A modern car is a computer with a permanent cellular connection that happens to have seats. None of the habits transferred, because the object does not look like the thing it has become.
What it can see
Stated as capability, not accusation. These are ordinary features of ordinary vehicles.
Precise location, continuously, which over time is a record of where you sleep, work, worship, drink and receive treatment. Speed, braking and acceleration, at a resolution that describes how you drive rather than merely where. Seatbelt and occupancy sensors, which know how many people are aboard. Cabin microphones, because voice commands require listening. Cameras facing out and, increasingly, in.
And whatever the paired phone hands over — commonly the contact list and message notifications, granted once at pairing and rarely revisited.
Why the incentives point one way
A car is sold once. The data recurs.
That difference reshapes who the customer is. Driving behaviour prices insurance risk. Location history is among the most valuable categories in advertising. Fleet and finance operators want to know where an asset is. And for the manufacturer, recurring revenue from services attached to a vehicle is worth considerably more than the one-off margin on the vehicle itself.
None of this requires anyone to behave badly. It only requires the ordinary pursuit of revenue by people who have found that the car keeps earning after it is sold.
Consent that is not consent
Agreement happens at purchase, in a document signed among a stack of documents, on a day organised around a different decision.
It is given on behalf of everyone who will ever sit in the vehicle. Passengers agreed to nothing. Children agreed to nothing. Whether a driver can consent for a passenger is a legal question rather than a technical one, and it is not settled by the fact that the software proceeds as though they can.
Cars are also resold, frequently, and what travels with the vehicle and what remains attached to the original account is often unclear to both parties.
What makes it harder than a phone
On a phone you can uninstall, revoke, audit and refuse. The car offers no equivalent. There are few meaningful settings, no catalogue of what is running, and no way to see what left the vehicle and when.
Updates arrive over the air and can change behaviour after purchase, which means the thing you evaluated is not necessarily the thing you own two years later.
And you cannot practically decline. For most people a car is not optional in the way a particular application is, which removes the leverage that makes refusal meaningful elsewhere.
The data is also unusually sensitive. Location over time is the most revealing category there is — it exposes health, belief, relationships and routine without a word being recorded.
Where a driver still has leverage
Modest, but real.
Do not pair the phone, or pair it and decline contact and message synchronisation. This is the single largest reduction available and it costs almost nothing.
Decline connected services that are genuinely optional, having first established which ones are — some are bundled with safety features and some merely sound as though they are.
Request your data under whatever access right applies where you live. What arrives, and what does not, is informative in both directions.
Treat a hire car as a device: unpair before returning it. Treat a car you are selling the same way, because the contact list and the location history are still in there.
Close
The question worth asking of any object that has recently gained a connection: what does it now know, and who is paying for it to know that.
For a car, the first answer is nearly everything, and the second is not you.