Why your smart car may know too much about you
Around 2010, a 32-inch LCD TV cost more than Rs 30,000 ($420 USD). Today, you can buy a 55-inch smart TV for that much. How did TVs become so cheap? A recent article in Business Insider explains smart TV makers don’t need to earn a profit at the time of sale. “Smart TVs can be sold at or near cost to customers…because (brand name) is able to monetise those TVs through data collection, advertising, and selling direct-to-consumer entertainment.”
It’s the business model of Google and Facebook carried over to consumer durables. Smart TVs, refrigerators, and speakers — not to forget your smartphone — harvest your data for sale. Even your car is probably snooping on you, reports the Washington Post. “Cars have become ths most sophisticated computers many of us own,” the article says. You might own one laptop, but your car has “multiple interconnected brains that can generate up to 25GB of data per hour.” At that rate, you can fill up a 1TB hard disk in just over a month of commuting.
Forget India, even the U.S. does not have any “federal laws regulating what (data) carmakers can collect or do with.”