Your car is selling your data

There is a persistent myth that our phones are the most intimate devices we carry. Hawkins' piece dismantles that assumption with a simple observation: your car knows where you sleep, where you work, where your children go to school, how fast you drive, and whether you brake hard at the same intersection every morning. Unlike a smartphone, which consumers increasingly understand as a tracking device, the car retains the cultural halo of a mechanical appliance. That misperception makes it the perfect surveillance instrument—one we pay tens of thousands of dollars to own. The economics here are worth unpacking. Automakers face razor-thin margins on vehicle sales, so they are pivoting to recurring revenue streams: subscriptions, telematics, and raw data brokering. The connected car is not a side effect of digital transformation; it is the business model. When regulators like the FTC begin probing these practices, as Hawkins notes in his reporting, the industry's response is predictable—vague privacy policies and consent forms written in the language of liability rather than transparency. The burden is placed squarely on the consumer to opt out of a system they were never meaningfully opted into. What makes this story particularly uncomfortable is the absence of choice. In most of the United States, car ownership is effectively mandatory. You cannot opt out of the data