Your car is spying on you.
Back in the day when was a young buck in my early 20s (sounds so ancient now), my car had two sockets in the middle console. One was the ashtray, and the other was for the cigarette lighter. Being a smoker at the time, both were fully functional for me and reliable. Some 30 years later or so, Most consoles have something like 5 to 10 different sockets for every mobile gadget under the sun and, if you’re lucky, one of them is still an actual cigarette lighter socket. Why does any of this matter? Well, it has to do with your modern car’s computer.
See, in my early days we didn’t have the Internet, nor did we have mobile phones, smart phones, tablets or anything similar. That all came about later. And, one of the big things that changed in cars, along with sockets for charging mobile devices, was a plethora of vehicle computers. It started off with little chips to control singular functions, like fuel/air mixture. Then, things expanded from there. Now, onboard computers manage a whole host of gizmos, features and controls as well as gathering data. This is where the problem begins. Modern cars not only provide charging benefits for mobile devices, they also connect to them and draw down data, especially if the device is connected in such a way to be used with the vehicle, such as speaker phone and Internet display. See, data connections can be singular, binary or multi-channel. In the case of current designs, they are definitely binary at least. And that means, when a driver or passenger connects their smartphone, they are also opening a free tunnel into their device.
The above might be fine if the car is owned by the user, sort of. We’ll get into that in a minute. But the same risk is a serious problem if you’re using someone else’s car, such as a rental. The first thing car mechanics and fleet personnel do these days with a vehicle is hook it up to a diagnostics computer to pull down all the metrics and readings on status. That also gives access to everything the car has picked up in the form of data. And cars are collecting a lot of data. How do we know this is happening? Car mechanics are literally telling us so.
Cars are already designed to collect operational data on the natural. Almost 40 different companies have worked with automakers to develop channels of vehicle performance and metric capture just from how the car works. When a user then connects their phone to the console and master control system, particular the infotainment feature, they have opened the barn door into everything in their mobile device’s private storage. That includes contacts, texting messages saved, emails and everything else stored on the phone.
Now, how much of a problem is this? Well, it depends on how much people use their mobiles. At one IT security conference back in 2020 a well-known expert asked everyone in the room if you had to choose between your wallet and your phone in an emergency and run out of the room, which one would you take? Most of the room like her chose the phone. So, while it is the most valuable piece of tech a consumer has nowadays, people are also leaving it wide open for data capture with their car. It’s another one of those “can’t make this stuff up” realities.
Even owned cars can be an issue; remember, mechanics hook up cars to computers to determine diagnostics. That gives them full access to a car’s collected data. So, how well do you trust your mechanic and all the staff in the given garage?
What does a cigarette lighter have to do with all the above? Well, it just so happens the cigarette socket became the first charger feature in a car for mobile devices long before vehicles became Internet-ready. The same mundane socket still exists in most vehicles (not all now) and can be used with a socket charger to re-power phones and devices without the risk of transferring data. Wow, a $5 ancient gizmo saves the day. Almost sounds like a movie plot.
If you don’t have one of these cigarette socket chargers, and you plan to be using someone else’s car a lot, you better do yourself a favor and get one. It literally can be the difference between all your data ending up in someone else’s hands or not.
In the meantime, your government plans to help out. There is, some 5 years a bit late, the proposed Self Drive Act (HR 3388). The bill looks to impose a policy requirement on automakers about solving the data leak problem in cars. It also puts a burden on the makers to avoid cyber-attacks and unauthorized access, more than likely oriented on self-driven vehicles than regular cars. At the moment, that legislation is winding its way through the Congressional committee jungle, so it’s not going to have an effect anytime soon. Solution – go buy the $5 socket charger and have peace of mind your representative couldn’t solve in another six months at least.
