Many of these features are required by law in the US for cars that have ADAS (advanced driver assistance systems). The car has to monitor what’s happening and what it’s doing and record some of that in case there’s an accident. It also has to monitor your attentiveness so you don’t “accidentally” drift off to sleep while it’s in control.
Imagine if his son were driving and got into a crash with ADAS enabled and there weren’t any record of whose fault it was, the driver or the car. Ford would be like, “We’ll, I guess we’ll never know. Good luck with medical bills and a lifetime of suffering.”
Sounds like the speed limiter is a setting that can be disabled. As for the other stuff, sharing phone data, that’s pretty disgusting. I would guess what they’re actually after is whether you’re watching the road or playing with your device. Still not okay without explicit consent before you buy the car.
I keep literally all private data in Google. When I opened, refinanced, paid off my mortgage with Chase, I was inundated with calls and mail because my bank sold my data, account balances and contact info. Somewhere within Google is all of my private email and AFAICT, they haven’t ever sold any data from it.
Google does some bad stuff. They sell access to you, not your data.
Even small companies have to deal with, “supply chain”, attacks, criminals putting code into open source repositories to steal data and get access to servers. App stores are major targets too.
There have been weather apps that need your location to show you weather and oops we also send your location history to our data center in China and sell that data.
There have been, “document scanner”, apps that help you take pictures of things like credit card statements and did we not mention we send those images to Russian servers?
Do use a major brand phone like Samsung, keep your OS up to date, and don’t expose private info to these apps or give them special privileges, especially, “accessibility”, or, “screen reader”, and you should be okay.
Uhh umm… You are the product! Aaand… Shill for greedy corporations!
I remember when Google said quite openly that they’d give us email addresses with more storage than we’d ever dreamed for life and in return, they’d scan the first few sentences of all messages and use them to target ads at us and we were all like, “Sounds fair.”
Thanks! I work for a car company, so I thought I’d share what I know. I was sad to see the negative votes. Your comment made my day. Thank you for taking the time to write it.