Summary: The automobile industry is rapidly changing customer experience with autonomous features like built-in navigation systems, sync-in with mobile devices, cars storing contacts, etc. This transformational change worries the regulatory bodies about customer data safety. This blog will explore how big data is revolutionizing the auto industry, threats of data leakage, the impact of emerging data protection laws like CCPA and GDPR on the auto industry, and the necessary steps to safeguard this data and ensure compliance.
The automotive sector is one of the most data-intensive industries in the world. We all know how important is data privacy. We’re constantly inundated with stories about how our data is being misused. Most of us do not even think about data being compromised from ours vehicles and think that we are safe from prying eye. Right? However, the automobile industry is one of the most significant data users and is at a high threat of data leakage. With evolving smart technology, large volumes of vehicle data, increased network, and road traffic automation, incredibly dynamic amount of data generated. With multiple OEMs involved, data processing happens at multiple levels and places, significantly increasing the risks of a data breach. The legal, financial & reputational ramifications associated with data breaches combined with emerging data privacy regulations are prompting the automotive industry to adopt robust data destruction policies for safeguarding data and staying compliant with regulations.
How do Smart Vehicles Store and Process Data?
All of the car’s features that were mechanical or hydraulic in the past have been replaced by computers. With technological advancements, today’s autonomous vehicles are designed to operate without driver interaction and require even more sophisticated electrical systems. These smart vehicles constantly collect data about their surroundings and the driver’s behavior. This data includes driving information, daily start time, GPS navigation systems, Bluetooth pairing with mobile devices that enable car dialing & storing contacts, etc. Furthermore, it might include your location, musical preferences, voice commands, search history, previously taken routes in your driving history, the timing of driving, driving style, road conditions, traffic conditions, and so on. Similar data will also be gathered by third-party apps connected to the vehicle. This data is stored in the vehicle’s onboard computer or elsewhere and is used to improve the driving experience and help companies offer you better services.
When a smart vehicle is connected to the internet, this data can be shared with other connected devices and systems. The rise of connected and autonomous vehicles will only increase the data automakers collect. In addition, network technologies like 5G, with their high speed and wide range, will further hasten the spread of connected smart vehicles. With increased data being gathered, the need for compliance with data protection legislation keeps growing.
Data Privacy Concerns in the Automobile Sector
The modern car has dozens of sensors and computers that collect gigabytes of data daily. This data is used to improve customer experience w.r.t vehicle safety, performance, and efficiency. The data includes sensitive information like live location, most visited places, routes taken daily, call history, etc. With the advent of connected and autonomous vehicles, there is a greater risk of data breaches and hacking. This risk becomes even greater as this data also contains information about the driver, such as their location, speed, and destination. If this data falls into the wrong hands, it could be used to exploit drivers or commit crimes like identity theft. Even sophisticated countermeasures like encryption can be cracked, and anonymized data can be re-identified if someone has access to personal user information, like license plate numbers.
Architectures of today’s cars, and those being built for the future, are becoming more complicated and frequently outside the control of any one corporation. It involves hardware and software elements, where data is created and processed on many scales and locations, including inside a vehicle, between vehicles, and externally in connected infrastructure. As a result, the surface of attack for a car increases as it is exposed to the outside world via vehicle-to-vehicle communications, vehicle-to-infrastructure communications, over-the-air updates, Wi-Fi, Ethernet, 5G, and other technologies. Although some of that data is crucial to the vehicle’s performance and is strictly managed, surprisingly, even less-critical data can serve as potential attack vectors. To stop unlawful entry into the car, precautions must be taken, like, identifying hardware flaws that allow data to be compromised. Since you are interacting with your surroundings wirelessly, the main challenge is ensuring that all communications are genuine.
Interestingly, most drivers would be surprised to hear that automobiles have lengthy privacy rules, just like Google or Facebook. These rules detail all the information manufacturers gather about you and your car, how they gather it, with whom they share it, and how it is used.
Data Privacy Laws & the Auto Industry
As per National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), consumer acceptability is essential for the efficient and prompt deployment of innovative and automated safety solutions in the automotive industry. These technologies produce, use, and exchange a sizable amount of vehicle data that people may perceive as sensitive and private. Consumer resistance to new technologies due to worries about their data privacy could hinder their adoption and negate their potentially positive safety effects. In the context of connected vehicles, it is crucial for manufacturers and security vendors to be proactive in protecting data and addressing the risk of hackers trying to exploit connected vehicles’ vulnerabilities. A cyber-attack or data breach can impact the safety of the driver and passengers. Thus, automakers need to ensure that the data collected by their vehicles are secure and cannot be accessed by unauthorized persons. Furthermore, safeguarding this data is a compliance requirement under various state and federal data protection and privacy regulations.
Data privacy and protection regulations protect customer information from unauthorized access and use. These regulations typically require companies to ensure that customer information is kept confidential and secure and that only authorized personnel can access it. In addition, strict state laws like CCPA, VCDPA, etc., and international laws like European GDPR, Canadian PIPEDA, etc., govern how companies can use and store personal data. These laws require automakers to be transparent about using or storing customer data and get explicit consent before sharing it with third parties. Therefore, they must put data privacy protections in place to ensure customers feel comfortable sharing their information.
Data Destruction for the Automotive Industry
Automakers can improve data security in their vehicles in various ways. One way is to encrypt the data collected by the vehicle’s sensors and systems. Another way is to use blockchain technology to store and manage data. Blockchain is a distributed ledger system that allows for secure and transparent data sharing. In addition to improving data security, automakers must also focus on protecting consumer privacy which includes ensuring that consumers can control how their data is used and shared. For example, automakers should allow consumers to opt out of having their data collected or shared with third parties.
Finally, to ensure that a customer’s private information is not retained in the system after it has served its purpose, the automobile industry should include a provision for wiping storage devices with a data erasure software such as BitRaser at the end of ownership or at the end of a vehicle’s life cycle. Permanent data destruction helps protect smart vehicles by ensuring that the data cannot be recovered by anyone who should not have access to it. This data destruction helps keep your personal information safe and secure and prevents unauthorized access to your vehicle’s data.
