Jusletter IT

Over the years cars have become safer, more powerful and much more intelligent. In a few years partly or fully autonomous driven cars will dominate the road. Communication from these cars are essential to optimize road use as is the case in intelligent transport systems (ITS). But rather than a future phenomenon already today cars are frequently equipped with SIM-cards that make it for example possible to automatically send emergency calls, a European, legal obligation as of March 2018 (eCall). The advantage of eCall is that in case of emergencies response time can be reduced and lives can be saved. At the same time, personal data from the car like location, number of passengers and driving behaviour of the user can be derived from the collected data by the car manufacturer. This may be a threat to privacy of the car users. In the study reported here we checked the awareness of users of vehicles equipped with such devices. This study shows that the majority of connected car users is not informed properly about the collection of high privacy sensitive data by manufacturers