A connected car sends location, speed and the way you drive off the vehicle by default, and your driving can be scored for insurers. One car means several files: the maker, the dealer, the finance arm and the app each hold their own, and selling the car clears none of them.
A continuous driving and location record. Worth listing.
Connected-car and finance data is kept for years; "anonymised" telematics has no end date.
Purchase or finance requires identity and a credit check; the car itself collects the rest.
Industry profile reviewed 23 August 2026. Also machine-readable via the free API.
A connected car logs where you went and how you drove, and makers have left exactly that exposed on the open internet for months at a time. Where the file is finance instead, it is your income and your credit history.
One car, several companies, several files
The maker, the dealer, the finance arm and the app each hold their own file under their own policy, so a request to one does not reach the rest. If this company financed or leased the car, its file is a credit application: identity, affordability and the payment record, not a driving trail.
The car reports as you go
Connected features send location, speed and the way you drive off the vehicle by default, and opting out is written as losing the product rather than keeping your privacy. Cameras and microphones now point into the cabin, and voice requests leave the car too.
Your driving is scored for insurance
How you accelerate, brake and corner becomes a score aimed at insurers, and some makers run their own insurance arm. A US regulator ordered one maker to stop selling location and driver behaviour to the reporting firms insurers use, after it took them as often as every three seconds.
Selling the car does not clear it
Wiping the head unit and unlinking the account is left to you, and one maker warns a factory reset does not switch the connected service off. When a retention period ends, policies commonly keep the data by de-identifying it instead of deleting it.
Worked out from the industry, not from any one company. What you actually handed over is yours to record.
The list understates it for a connected car: the vehicle reports where you went and how you drove, by default and without asking each time.
Built only from what this kind of service actually collects. A dimension that the data does not support is not listed.
The car logs every journey you take.
In-cabin cameras and driver profiles capture your face.
Two kinds of hold. LAW SETS IT: a statute makes them keep it. THEY SET IT: a ground the company grants itself.
They treat it as no longer being about you, though such data can sometimes be re-identified.
Money-laundering rules require ID and transaction records after an account closes.
Financial regulators require advice, suitability, and transaction records.
Tax and company law makes them keep billing and payment records.
They can keep records to defend a live or possible legal claim.
Driving data is a market. A US regulator ordered one maker to stop selling precise location and driver behaviour to the reporting firms insurers use, taken as often as every three seconds. It leaks too: one group left terabytes from around 800,000 cars open on the internet for months, and another exposed the location data of about 2.15 million customers.
Telematics and location data has an active resale market.
Driving and sensor data trains autonomy and risk models.
Anonymised is their word. Connected-car journeys are mobility data, where four time-and-place points single out 95% of people (de Montjoye et al., 2013).
Fifteen demographic attributes re-identify 99.98% of Americans in a released dataset (Rocher, Hendrickx and de Montjoye, Nature Communications, 2019); date of birth, postcode, and sex alone did it for most people in the first study of the problem (Sweeney, 2000).
Four time-and-place points single out 95% of people in mobility data (de Montjoye et al., Scientific Reports, 2013).
Four card transactions identify 90% of people in payment data (de Montjoye et al., Science, 2015).
A face, voice, or fingerprint template identifies a person directly; there is nothing left to anonymise, and it cannot be reissued like a password.
Browser and device fingerprints were unique for 84% of visitors in the first large study (Eckersley, 2010), and sparse histories of what people viewed re-identified them against public reviews (Narayanan and Shmatikov, 2008).
THE STUDIES Estimating the success of re-identifications in incomplete datasets using generative models (Nature Communications 10, 3069, 2019)·Simple Demographics Often Identify People Uniquely (Carnegie Mellon University, Data Privacy Working Paper 3, 2000)·Unique in the Crowd: The privacy bounds of human mobility (Scientific Reports 3, 1376, 2013)·Unique in the shopping mall: On the reidentifiability of credit card metadata (Science 347 (6221), 2015)·How Unique Is Your Web Browser? (Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium (PETS 2010), 2010)·Robust De-anonymization of Large Sparse Datasets (IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy, 2008)
Worth asking here even with no account. A connected car and the maker's app already carry your details, and the driving file built from them can reach the reporting firms insurers use before you ever see it. Something priced against you is worth reading, and the request is how you find out whether a file exists at all.
Clauses that recur across this industry, and what each one actually permits.
“to provide and improve our services”
The catch-all purpose. Analytics, profiling, personalisation, and increasingly AI training can all ride under it. When they want to do something new with your data, this sentence usually already covers it.
THE MOVE An objection draws the line: use your data to run the service, not to improve, target, or train on it.
“we do not sell your personal information”
Often technically true, and still misleading. It usually means no cash changes hands. Data can still flow to ad networks, analytics firms, and partners: on their definition, sharing is not selling.
THE MOVE Flip the do-not-sell switch where one exists. The written objection on top of it goes on your record.
“service providers, partners, and affiliates”
How data leaves the building with no name attached. Recipients are listed by what they do, never who they are. You cannot send a request to a company you cannot name, which is the point.
THE MOVE An access request can ask for the recipients by name, not just the categories. UK and EU law put that choice with you. The reply, or the silence, goes on your record.
“aggregated or de-identified information”
Stripping the name does not strip the pattern, and the pattern often still points at you. Policies grant themselves free, indefinite use of this data because in their telling it is no longer about you.
THE MOVE If a deletion comes back as 'anonymised', keep the reply. It is their claim, not a fact you can check.
“retained as long as necessary, or as required by law”
They can keep it for: legal duties, tax rules, fraud prevention, possible lawsuits, their own business reasons. None of them carries a firm end date. Deletion becomes a negotiation, not an event.
THE MOVE Which reasons apply to you, and how long each runs, is a request of its own. Their reply goes on your record.
“you grant us a licence to use your content”
A contract term, not a data setting, so a privacy request cannot undo it. The careful version ends with your account. The broad version can be passed on, never expires, and survives deletion.
THE MOVE Whether the licence ends with the account is written in their terms, not yours. Closing the account goes on your record.
“we disclose your data to insurance companies, leasing companies, financial service providers, fleet companies, and data aggregators”
Driving and location data can move to insurers, to lenders and leasing firms, and to companies whose business is aggregating it, all named up front. The list is the set of routes the policy keeps open.
THE MOVE Which of those named recipients holds a copy of your data is theirs to answer. Their reply goes on your record.
“de-identified data is not personal information and may be used and disclosed for purposes not described in this notice”
Once data is labelled de-identified, the company treats it as outside these rules: free to use and pass on for anything, and outside the retention limits. Location trails re-identify easily, so the label is wording, not proof the trail is anonymous.
THE MOVE Whether any of your data now travels under that label is theirs to answer. Their reply goes on your record.
“some of these disclosures may qualify as "sales" under some state laws”
The data still goes to third parties. The policy concedes only that this might count as a sale, and only in certain places, keeping the plain word sale out of the operative promise.
THE MOVE Whether your data was sold under that definition is theirs to answer. Their reply goes on your record.
Their own policy is the one that binds them. Pin it down with a request, and keep the reply. Start your record →