Your Car Is Telling on You: What Your Connected Vehicle Records About Your Journeys

2 October 202611 min read

Introduction: the vehicle has become a sensor on wheels

You bought a car. You did not buy a subscription to a surveillance service — at least, that is not what the brochure said. And yet, between the moment you open the door in the morning and the moment you park in the evening, your vehicle has generated several hundred thousand values: GPS position at regular intervals, instantaneous speed, engine revs, steering angle, tyre pressure, seatbelt use, seat occupancy, outside temperature, charge level, and on many recent models, the entire contact list of the smartphone you paired just once back in 2023.

Some of this data stays in the vehicle's onboard computer. Another portion travels, via the built-in SIM card that almost every new model carries since the rollout of eCall in Europe, to the manufacturer's servers. A third portion may be passed on to third parties: insurer, rental company, fleet manager, app developer, and in certain cases judicial authorities.

Man in profile against a grey background with a red laser sight on his face, evoking facial recognition

France's data protection authority, the CNIL, has been looking into this subject for a long time: its "connected vehicles and personal data" compliance pack, published in 2017 and later supplemented by the European Data Protection Board (EDPB) 2021 guidelines on connected vehicles and mobility-related applications, sets out a simple and often overlooked principle: a vehicle's geolocation data is personal data, because it makes it possible to infer where you live, where you work, your habits, and whether you attend a place of worship or a healthcare facility.

This guide is not urging anyone to go back to cycling. It explains which data actually leaves your car, through which channel, what you are entitled to refuse, and which concrete steps genuinely reduce your exposure.

Part 1 — Mapping the collection: five distinct sources

The classic mistake is to talk about "the car" as if it were a single actor. In reality, five systems collect data in parallel, each with a different data controller.

Source 1 — The manufacturer, via the embedded SIM

Since April 2018, every new vehicle type-approved in the European Union must carry the eCall system, which automatically triggers an emergency call in the event of an accident. EU Regulation 2015/758 governs this device strictly: data must only be transmitted when the system is triggered, and the system must not be continuously traceable.

The problem is that the same SIM card often serves a second set of services, this time commercial ones: map updates, remote diagnostics, a "my car" mobile app, charging stations, predictive maintenance. These fall under consent, not legal obligation. In practice, they are frequently switched on by default when the vehicle is handed over, in a menu nobody reads.

Source 2 — The event data recorder (EDR)

New vehicles sold in Europe since July 2022 carry an Event Data Recorder, mandated by EU Regulation 2019/2144 on general vehicle safety. Over a window of a few seconds before and after an impact, it stores speed, accelerator pedal position, braking, seatbelt status and airbag deployment.

The legislation provides that this data must not be directly identifying and is only accessible within a specific framework — anonymised accident research, or legal proceedings. In practice, an expert appointed by a court or an insurer can read this unit after a crash, and its contents weigh heavily when liability is being established.

Source 3 — The paired smartphone

This is the biggest and most underestimated leak. When you connect a phone over Bluetooth or via a screen projection system, the vehicle very often requests access to your contacts, text messages and call log — and many systems copy this data locally so they can display contacts offline. It stays stored in the vehicle after you disconnect, including after resale.

That is exactly what turns a rental car returned on a Friday evening into an archive of the previous renter's contacts and destinations.

Source 4 — The insurer and the telematics box

So-called "pay how you drive" offers rely on a box, an OBD plug or an app that measures acceleration, braking, speed, driving times and sometimes phone use at the wheel. The CNIL has repeatedly pointed out that these devices must rest on freely given consent, that declining to sign up must not be so penalising that the choice becomes theoretical, and that raw position collection should be avoided in favour of aggregated indicators.

Source 5 — The equipment you add yourself

Motorway toll transponders, anti-theft trackers, navigation apps, and above all dashcams. This last point deserves attention: an onboard camera films public roads, and therefore number plates and faces. As long as use remains strictly private, the CNIL regards publication as the real tipping point — posting a video that identifies a third party on social media leaves you exposed. If you install one, go for a dashcam with a high-endurance microSD card and keep the files offline, with no automatic cloud sync.

Part 2 — Who benefits, and who can be harmed

Recipient	What they obtain	Legal basis invoked
Manufacturer	Position, mileage, diagnostics, feature usage	Consent or legitimate interest (contested)
Dealer / network	Service history, mileage, alerts	Maintenance contract
Insurer	Driving style, journeys, time of day	Consent (telematics offer)
Rental / car-sharing company	Real-time position, late returns, zone breaches	Performance of the contract
Employer (company car)	Journeys, times, sometimes speed	Legitimate interest, strictly regulated
Courts / police	EDR, position history upon formal request	Criminal proceedings

Two cases deserve closer attention.

The company car. The CNIL sets precise limits on the geolocation of employees: it cannot be used for permanent monitoring, must be switchable off outside working hours, cannot be used to detect traffic offences, and requires prior individual and collective notification. An employee who discovers an undeclared tracker in their company vehicle has solid grounds for a complaint.

Marital separation. In this context, trackers and shared-vehicle location apps become a tool of control. A useful reminder: geolocating a person without their consent is a criminal offence in France, and the law of 24 December 2020 strengthened the framework against cyber-surveillance tools used within couples.

Profile of a man against a black background with a red glowing facial recognition frame over his face

Part 3 — What you can demand, law in hand

The GDPR applies in full. In concrete terms:

Right of access (Art. 15). You can ask the manufacturer for a copy of the data linked to your vehicle and your account. The reply must arrive within one month, extendable to three where the request is complex. Almost all manufacturers have a dedicated form, often buried in the privacy policy of the mobile app.
Right to object and withdrawal of consent (Arts. 7 and 21). Non-mandatory connected services must be switchable off without losing safety functions. eCall, on the other hand, cannot be deactivated: it is required by regulation, but must not track you continuously.
Right to erasure (Art. 17). Particularly relevant when you sell: you can request deletion of your account and of the data associated with the VIN for the period during which you were the owner.
Right to data portability (Art. 20). Useful for retrieving a service history before switching to a different garage network.
Complaint to the CNIL. Free, online, and remarkably effective when a manufacturer ignores an access request.

Worth noting: the European Data Act, applicable since September 2025, strengthens users' access to data generated by connected objects, vehicles included, and makes it easier to pass that data on to an independent repairer. It is a new lever against manufacturer networks.

Part 4 — Practical steps, situation by situation

When you take delivery of a new vehicle

Open the "privacy" or "data sharing" menu of the onboard system before you leave the dealership, and switch off everything that is not safety-related.
Decline automatic activation of the mobile app if you are not going to use it. An unused manufacturer account is still a database about you.
Ask in writing for the privacy policy and the retention period. The salesperson will not know the answer: the question then goes up the chain, which is exactly the intended effect.

When you pair your phone

Decline contact and message synchronisation. Navigation and hands-free calling work without it.
Favour occasional wired projection over permanent pairing, using a reinforced USB-C cable rather than a saved Bluetooth connection.
If you use a navigation app, set it to delete history automatically and turn off "frequent places".

When you rent or share a car

Before handing the vehicle back: remove your phone from the list of paired devices, delete the navigation history and saved addresses, and sign out of any streaming or voice assistant accounts.
Most systems have a "factory reset" function for the infotainment module. It takes two minutes and solves the problem in one go.
For sensitive journeys, the old method remains the best: a car phone mount and navigation on a device whose settings you control, rather than the rental company's screen.

When you sell your vehicle

Reset the infotainment system, remove the vehicle from your manufacturer account, and delete virtual keys and shared access.
Retrieve toll transponders and cancel the subscription linked to the number plate.
Don't forget the glovebox: a photocopied registration document, a parking ticket, a half-completed accident report form all say a great deal. A boot organiser with compartments helps avoid oversights on handover day.

When you simply want less signal

An insurer's OBD box can be unplugged when it is not contractually required — check your contract first.
Signal-blocking pouches for keyless car keys do not protect your privacy in the strict sense, but they do stop relay attacks, which is part of the same overall hygiene.
To get properly up to speed, a good book on personal data protection is worth more than an hour on forums: the legal mechanisms are more stable than manufacturers' menus.

Rusty red metal padlock closed on a grey metal door

Part 5 — The limits you have to accept

Let's be honest: there is no way to make a recent car go silent.

eCall cannot be switched off. It is a type-approval requirement, and its purpose — calling the emergency services when you are unconscious — amply justifies its existence.
The onboard computer records regardless. Engine parameters and the EDR are not optional extras.
Tolls, speed cameras and automated number plate recognition are public systems governed by specific legislation, not by your settings. How long number plate reading data is retained is, incidentally, one of the issues the CNIL examines regularly.
Your phone, sitting on the passenger seat, tracks you better than the car does. Working on your vehicle's settings without touching those on your mobile is like closing a window and leaving the door wide open.

The reasonable goal is not invisibility. It is to reduce the number of actors holding your movement history, and to ensure none of them keeps it longer than necessary.

Conclusion: driving without declaring everything

A car is no longer a mechanical object parked outside your home. It is a connected terminal to which you entrust, thirty or forty times a week, the most revealing information there is about a life: where you go, when, and how long you stay.

The good news is that most of this collection is optional, switchable off and contestable. A quarter of an hour in your vehicle's menus, a clear refusal of contact synchronisation, a systematic reset before every handover, and one access request sent to the manufacturer each year are enough to claw back a substantial share of control.

The rest comes down to a simple principle, valid well beyond the automotive world: every time a service offers to "get to know you better", ask yourself who, in reality, is learning something.

#Vie privée#Confidentialité#RGPD#CNIL#Sécurité#Anonymat