Most people know their phone collects data about them. Far fewer realize their car may be doing the same thing, often in greater detail. A modern vehicle is a computer network on wheels, frequently equipped with its own internet connection, dozens of sensors, cameras, microphones for voice commands, and software that phones home to the manufacturer.
This connectivity brings real benefits: live traffic, automatic emergency calling after a crash, remote locking from an app, and software updates that fix problems overnight. But the same plumbing that delivers those features also carries information about you: where you drive, how you drive, and sometimes much more.
This article explains what data connected cars typically collect, where it goes, why companies want it, and what practical steps you can take to stay in control.
What Makes a Car “Connected”
A connected car is any vehicle that can send and receive data over the internet, usually through a built-in cellular modem, the same basic technology inside a smartphone. Even if you never pair a phone, a car with an embedded modem can communicate with the manufacturer’s servers on its own.
The system behind this is often called telematics. It links the car’s internal computer network, which monitors everything from the brakes to the climate system, with the outside world. When you use a companion app to precondition the cabin, or when the manufacturer receives a diagnostic report from your car without you doing anything, that is telematics at work.
The Kinds of Data Cars Collect
Exactly what a car records varies by manufacturer, model, and the options you have enabled, but the broad categories are consistent across the industry.
- Location and trips: GPS position, routes taken, frequently visited places, and timestamps of journeys.
- Driving behavior: speed, acceleration, braking intensity, cornering, seat-belt use, and events like hard stops or stability-control activation.
- Vehicle health: battery or fuel levels, tire pressure, fault codes, temperatures, and component wear indicators.
- Infotainment activity: voice command audio, contact lists and call logs synced from a paired phone, media choices, and app usage on the car’s screen.
- Camera and sensor data: footage and readings from the cameras, radar, and other sensors that power driver-assistance features.
Not every car collects everything on this list, and some data stays inside the vehicle. But the capability exists in most recent vehicles, and privacy researchers reviewing automaker policies have generally found the scope of collection to be broad.
Where the Data Goes
Data leaving your car typically travels first to the manufacturer’s servers. Some stays with the automaker to power the app features you signed up for and to improve future vehicles. Some goes to service partners, such as the companies that operate emergency assistance lines or provide the maps and voice recognition behind the dashboard.
The more controversial paths involve third parties. Some automakers have shared driving-behavior data with analytics companies that serve the insurance industry, in some cases in ways drivers did not clearly understand they had agreed to. Data can also reach advertisers in aggregated or profiled forms, and law enforcement can request vehicle data through legal processes. Finally, if a company suffers a breach, any stored data is only as safe as its security practices.
None of this means your specific car is feeding an insurance file. It means the pipelines exist in the industry, disclosures live deep in privacy policies, and it is reasonable to want to know what your own vehicle’s policy says.
Why Companies Want This Data
The motivations are not uniformly sinister. Engineering teams genuinely use fleet data to find defects, improve reliability, and refine safety systems; real-world data from millions of vehicles reveals problems no test track could. Diagnostic data enables convenient service, and usage-based insurance programs, when chosen knowingly, let careful drivers prove it and potentially pay less.
At the same time, data has become a business in its own right. Cars generate detailed portraits of daily life, and portraits of daily life are valuable to marketers, insurers, and data brokers. The tension of the connected-car era is that helpful engineering data and monetizable personal data flow through the same pipe, and the paperwork separating them is dense.
The Rented and Used Car Problem
Connected features create a quieter privacy issue: previous and future users of the same car. Pair a phone with a rental car and it may store your contacts and call history in the dashboard until someone deletes them. When a car is sold, the previous owner’s app may retain remote access, including location tracking and door unlocking, until the connection is formally transferred or reset.
The habits that address this are simple. Delete your phone profile from any rental or borrowed car before returning it. When selling a car, factory reset the infotainment system and remove the vehicle from your app account. When buying a used connected car, ask the seller to complete the transfer and confirm with the manufacturer that no other accounts remain linked. These steps take minutes and close off the most personal exposure most drivers will ever face from a vehicle.
How to Take Control of Your Car’s Data
You have more leverage than the length of a privacy policy suggests. Start by reading the privacy summary for your vehicle brand; many manufacturers publish plainer-language versions, and independent privacy organizations review automaker practices. Then look for controls in two places: the car’s own settings menus and your account settings in the companion app.
Most automakers allow you to opt out of at least some categories of data sharing, particularly the ones tied to marketing and behavior analytics. Some regions also grant legal rights to request a copy of your data or ask for its deletion, and manufacturers typically provide request forms for this. Be aware that disabling connectivity entirely, where it is even possible, usually means losing features like remote app access, live traffic, and automatic crash notification, so most drivers land on a middle path: keep the safety and convenience features, and switch off the sharing categories that mainly serve someone else’s business model.
Frequently Asked Questions
Can my car track my location even when I do not use navigation?
In many vehicles, yes. Location comes from the car’s own GPS receiver and connectivity hardware, not from the navigation app on the screen. Whether that location is transmitted and stored depends on the manufacturer and your settings, which is exactly why it is worth checking the data-sharing options in both the vehicle menus and your companion app account.
Do insurance companies see how I drive?
Only through defined channels. If you enrolled in a usage-based insurance program, you agreed to share driving data and should expect it to affect your pricing. Outside such programs, driving data has in some cases reached insurance-adjacent analytics firms via automaker partnerships, which drew criticism precisely because drivers were unaware. Opting out of third-party sharing in your manufacturer account is the practical safeguard.
Is the microphone in my car always listening?
Voice systems generally listen locally for a wake word or button press before recording and transmitting anything, similar to smart speakers. Audio that is captured for voice commands may be processed on remote servers and retained according to the manufacturer’s policy. If this concerns you, most vehicles let you disable the voice assistant, and privacy policies describe retention practices for voice data.
What should I do before selling or returning a car?
Delete paired phone data, remove your profiles, perform a factory reset of the infotainment system, and unlink the vehicle from your manufacturer app account. For rentals, deleting the phone pairing from the dashboard before you return the keys is usually enough. These steps prevent the next driver from seeing your contacts and prevent you from retaining unwanted access to a car you no longer use.
Final Thoughts
Connected cars are both useful and data-hungry at once, and the balance you strike is genuinely yours to choose. The features enabled by connectivity, from crash notification to over-the-air fixes, are real improvements to safety and daily life; the costs are measured in information, and they are manageable once you know where to look. Spend twenty minutes with your car’s privacy settings and your app account, adopt the reset habit with rentals and resales, and you will have addressed most of what matters while keeping the parts of the connected car that serve you.