Big Brother in the Driver's Seat

IF YOU'VE SEARCHED online about buying a car, you know you're in for a wave of aggressive come-ons and sales pitches. But I found a way to make car sellers clam up: All you have to do is start asking questions about the increasingly intrusive "nanny" nature of automobiles.

- J.D. Tuccille

"This is more of an industry question," a Ford representative told me. "You may wish to follow up with the Alliance for Automotive Innovation on this topic." Like automakers, the Alliance, a trade group, ignored me. But I'm not alone in my concerns.

"Ah, the wind in your hair, the open road ahead, and not a care in the world...except all the trackers, cameras, microphones, and sensors capturing your every move," the Mozilla Foundation warned in a report published in September.

With today's computerized vehicles, "whenever you interact with your car you create a tiny record of what you just did," the report authors added. Because many are wirelessly connected to manufacturers, "usually all that information is collected and stored by the car company." That report prompted Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) to follow up with a letter urging that "cars should not-and cannot-become yet another venue where privacy takes a backseat." That's nice, but it ignores the government's own role in turning vehicles into tools of control.

The massive infrastructure bill that became law in 2021 contained a mandate for technology that can "passively and accurately detect whether the blood alcohol concentration of a driver" exceeds the legal limit.