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Your car knows more about you than you think. It knows where you work, how hard you brake, how fast you take corners, and what time you leave the house each morning. Every second, it can record your location and send it to the car manufacturer. Most drivers never agree to this and don’t even know it’s happening.
Ford is now letting you opt out of data sharing, but doing so would also mean forfeiting the quality-of-life features you paid for, such as BlueCruise, roadside assistance, internet connectivity, and vehicle location data.[1]
Is this even a fair trade-off, and should you make it? Here’s more detail about Ford’s privacy promise and how to protect your privacy while driving an internet-connected car.
Ford, in an effort to gain and uphold user trust, has made a public privacy promise to protect the personal information of its drivers. Ford’s Chief Privacy Officer, Kristin Jones, posted a blog about the company’s new privacy promise, outlining its aim to provide clear, easy-to-understand information about how it uses your personal information.
The company wants users to better navigate their privacy choices by offering vehicle privacy settings that allow them to control what data they share with the automaker. Kristin also highlighted that Ford never sells data about how you drive your vehicle to data brokers or insurers.
“I personally think that it’s super important for us to be making it very clear to our customers what our data practices are, and not only that, but making a commitment to them about it,” Jones said in an interview with TechCrunch.
Ford’s data-sharing option comes with a major caveat. If you don’t share connected vehicle data with Ford, some features, such as BlueCruise, internet connectivity, and vehicle location data in the app, will not be usable.
Ford highlighted that it uses connected vehicle data, such as vehicle diagnostics, location, and driving characteristics, to provide connected services such as embedded navigation, roadside assistance, and traffic updates. The information is also used to diagnose vehicle issues, improve product performance and support, and aid research and development.
So, if you want to keep your data private and not share it with Ford, you won’t be able to use certain features that you’ve already paid for. For instance, if a customer has paid $495 for a year of BlueCruise but opts out of sharing their data, they will still be unable to use the feature.
This is a trade-off that customers didn’t sign up for. Jones described opting out as creating a “quasi-’80s mode car,” telling Automotive News that the goal is “to allow people to have that old-school experience.”
Ford ran a survey of 1,000 American consumers, and 91% of them said they value privacy. However, 56% said they might accept sharing some data in exchange for the benefits of modern technology.
With cars becoming more connected to the internet and increasingly spying on you, it’s now more important than ever to control what data is shared with your car manufacturer.
The Mozilla Foundation released a report covering 25 car brands, and each of them earned its “Privacy Not Included” warning label, making cars the worst product category for privacy reviewed by Mozilla.
The report says that manufacturers collect all kinds of personally identifiable information, such as names, addresses, email addresses, phone numbers, license numbers, IP addresses, behavioral and biological characteristics, facial geometry features, vehicle speed, driving habits, and much more.
Some 52% of the reviewed cars could also collect information about the world around you. Meanwhile, 84% of car brands said they could share your personal data, while 56% said they could share it with government and law enforcement based on just an informal request.
Plus, given that there’s little clarity over where this data goes, if the information is exposed in a data breach, malicious parties could use it to commit identity theft, launch phishing attacks, or carry out financial fraud.
GM and OnStar were sued in March 2024 for collecting, using, and selling drivers’ precise geolocation data, which was collected every three seconds and shared with data brokers LexisNexis and Verisk. The brokers then sold that data to insurance providers, which used it to personalize insurance pricing for various drivers.
Ford’s choice is simple: decide whether you want modern, internet-connected features or would prefer to keep your data private.
If you want to opt out of Ford’s data collection, you can visit your car’s infotainment screen to access the privacy options. This applies to Ford vehicles made in 2018 or later. Ford has also launched a new website educating its customers about how these controls work and how they can opt out of data sharing.
But should the only way to protect your privacy be to give up modern features? Until automakers separate these features from the data they collect, the price of privacy in a modern car will always be the car itself.
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