Modern car tech can do all sorts of things, if you’re willing to give up your privacy
Are our cars becoming a bit too nosy? Editor Paul Barker shares his concerns
Amid all the tech-driven excitement of the 2025 Consumer Electronics Show, there was one thing that left me feeling uneasy.
These shows are always about cutting-edge innovations and how brilliant they are going to be, but I found myself leaving Las Vegas pondering how much drivers are going to welcome one development in particular.
As cars get smarter in terms of on-board gadgetry, their thirst for knowledge will only increase. And, as Honda admitted when pushed on the subject, it’s going to create a divide between people happy to share their lives with their car, and those concerned about what it knows about them and where the data goes. The implication is, if you don’t engage with the car’s desire to know you, you won’t be able to enjoy its capabilities.
After all, we’re now close to systems on cars that will actively converse rather than wait to be summoned, will make suggestions about routes based on where you’ve driven before, will select music or comfort settings based on your perceived mood, and will recognise and remember passengers by voice.
It’s a constantly evolving tech that we’re already well down the road with, but giving it a funky, matey name, attractive voice or a cutesy avatar, as some of the Chinese brands are wont to do, shouldn’t disguise the fact that you’re chatting to a bunch of code, rather than a friend. And when it recognises and addresses passengers individually, let alone starts alerting you to traffic problems based on the fact that you normally go to a certain place on a certain day, or playing Taylor Swift because it thinks you’ve split up with your partner… that’s a lot of valuable data your car is scraping from you every day.
The smartphone comparison is a valid one, because as a society we’ve traded privacy and data for the massive convenience that smartphones bring. But are we ready and willing to do the same with our cars?
The industry has got work to do to reassure drivers that data remains private, and that car manufacturers will resist the temptation to monetise information on where people go and when. Who knows what about us – and what they’re doing with it – could be among the most important questions of car ownership in the near future.
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