IN AN INCREASINGLY INTERCONNECTED world, many people are becoming concerned that interested parties may be able to snoop on their driving habits.
As you would expect, uncovering the extent of snooping by authorities and insurance companies into the driving habits of ordinary people is almost impossible.
Vehicles manufactured since 1996 carry an onboard diagnostics data link. It can provide two kinds of information: generic diagnostic information and manufacturer-specific all-vehicle information. Data that can be easily harvested includes many powertrain parameters such as the speed of the vehicle or the rate of change to the speed (accelerating, taking off from a standstill, or coming to a sudden stop in a collision, for example), engine rpm, throttle position or the rate of change to the throttle position and brake pedal use (how heavily you accelerate or decelerate).
This data can be recorded and transmitted using a plug-in device to deliver an overview of how a vehicle is driven. A US company, Esurance, has a system called DriveSense that drivers can voluntarily install. It records a driver’s behaviour with the carrot of possibly reducing insurance premiums for gentle driving behaviour. The data gathered excludes a number of factors that are considered intrusive, such as vehicle location and route, following distance behind another vehicle, yaw rates (sharpness or severity of turning), seat belt usage, seat position, seat occupancy, and entertainment and communication choices. That’s not to say such information isn’t gathered – it falls under the manufacturer-specific and/or supplemental restraint system (in other words, the airbag) event data categories.
Any vehicle fitted with an onboard data unit can record a freeze frame of the data at the instant of an emissions failure that causes the dashboard engine warning light to illuminate. As you can imagine, this is valuable data for a technician who needs to validate, check and validate an incident, or even replicate it in order to assess how it came about. Some vehicles are more intelligent, with the ability to record a before-and-after moving snapshot of the incident.
More recently, vehicles have been fitted with technology to record and store crash data, taking input from dozens of sensors. This data is invaluable to manufacturers in making cars safer and, in some instances, protecting them from crippling lawsuits.
Without making any guarantees, it would seem the privacy of most drivers is safe for the time being. Obvious exceptions to this are if you are involved in a crash, or if you voluntarily agree to fit a telematics device to your car (so an insurance company can gather data about your driving style, for example). But the technology certainly exists to track almost anything you do in your car, from which radio stations you listen to, to which back roads you use to avoid peak hour congestion. And with data being an invaluable resource, it is almost inevitable that companies and governments will want to access it.