Data privacy in the era of the connected car

At TomTom, we prefer the latter approach. For us, privacy has always been at the core of what we do. We have always understood that data privacy was – and is – important to our customers and have built our products around strict privacy standards.

By taking this approach, it means that we integrate privacy considerations into the design, engineering and infrastructure of TomTom’s connected services. Using data in an ethical manner starts from the product’s conception. By performing privacy impact assessments (PIA), we assess the privacy risks throughout the development of a product or service and use this to decide what data we truly need to gather to protect our users.

At TomTom, it is important that we not only meet the ever-changing data privacy regulations but also maintain consumer trust throughout the whole process. To achieve this, we first need to understand what is involved in the complex data ecosystems emerging around connected cars so we can always be transparent with our customers.

Let’s take a closer look at where connected vehicles generate huge amounts of data. We can identify four different data pillars:

Put together, this amounts to an impressive quantity of information that can tell someone where a driver goes and how they behave in the car. Harvard professor Shoshana Zuboff, who has researched the different dimensions of data collection, explains how these dimensions feed privacy intrusion through the increasing lack of individual control and transparency. This study can be applied to the ecosystem of connected cars.

There are multiple levels on which car data can be collected. These are:

Just as there are levels to achieve autonomy, there are also levels to achieve full connectivity in cars. The higher the connectivity level, the more complex privacy challenges become:

Use cases involving connected car data can have completely different outcomes when the three different aspects of data dimensions, pillars and user experience level blend together.

The complexities and dimensions of data collection from connected services highlight that it is becoming increasingly difficult for consumers to understand how companies are using their personal information. If data were to fall in the wrong hands, this could have a troubling impact on someone’s privacy.

To illustrate this further, let’s take a look at just some of the different ways companies use personal data in the specific use case of collecting information about someone’s braking and acceleration behavior. For the purpose of this exercise, let’s assume that the car’s privacy notice only referred to using the data for safety purposes and vehicle performance.

Imagine an insurance company going beyond this point by using this data to offer users who drive safely and take care of the environment different premiums via personalized connectivity. Or a tech company that could go even further and use this data to build profiles about someone’s mental state. Companies could even sell this “behavior surplus” to predict stressed drivers’ origins and destinations. This information could be sold to third parties for multiple data stack location-based advertising via multimodal live connectivity.

At TomTom, data privacy is extremely important to our overall vision of creating a safer and more efficient driving experience. Taking a privacy-by-design approach means not only complying with GDPR, but having the ultimate goal of being ethical.

One example is the fact that TomTom customers first need to give their informed consent for the collection of location data, which is then de-identified by disconnecting the link between the customer and their GPS trace.

TomTom products also collect limited categories of personal data so that our privacy statements are always easy to read. Through de-identifying data and always requiring informed and clear consent, we have built a culture that balances the need for data with maintaining customer privacy.

We do not need to know who you are, we only want to put data directly back into making our products and services safer and more efficient. We will never make customer data available to third parties for commercial uses. We are innovators, not advertisers.

With TomTom, you are safer – on the road and online.

We don’t sell your information. We don’t identify our users. We rely on de-identified location data to make better products that help get you where you’re going, safely and comfortably.