Friday, March 29, 2019

"Crashed Tesla vehicles, sold at junk yards and auctions, contain deeply personal and unencrypted data including info from drivers’ paired mobile devices, and video showing what happened just before the accident"

CNBC:
Many other cars download and store data from users, particularly information from paired cellphones, such as contact information. The practice is widespread enough that the US Federal Trade Commission has issued advisories to drivers warning them about pairing devices to rental cars, and urging them to learn how to wipe their cars’ systems clean before returning a rental or selling a car they owned.

But the researchers’ findings highlight how Tesla is full of contradictions on privacy and cybersecurity. On one hand, Tesla holds car-generated data closely, and has fought customers in court to refrain from giving up vehicle data. Owners must purchase $995 cables and download a software kit from Tesla to get limited information out of their cars via “event data recorders” there, should they need this for legal, insurance or other reasons.