By Richard Ward, Executive Director, American Vehicle Owners Alliance
Today’s cars generate enormous amounts of data — from engine diagnostics and safety alerts to performance metrics and location information. But while American consumers and businesses buy, insure, and maintain their vehicles, they often do not control the data they produce. Instead, car manufacturers are asserting ownership over that data, effectively locking out access for millions of Americans.
This raises a fundamental question about data privacy and ownership: if you own the car, should you own and control the data it generates, too?
This issue is particularly important for public fleets. Police cruisers, fire engines, snowplows, and buses are the operational backbone of communities across the country. State and local governments buy, maintain, and insure these vehicles on behalf of taxpayers and are accountable for how they are used. Without full ownership and control of the vehicle data, public agencies have very limited visibility into how that information is stored, shared, or protected, raising alarms about operational security and data privacy.
But this isn’t just about governments. Individual vehicle owners and private businesses face similar challenges. Without full access to diagnostic data, drivers can’t perform preventative maintenance checks, and independent repair shops may struggle to get the necessary information to properly service vehicles.
The result is a growing imbalance: vehicle owners bear the extra costs and responsibility of vehicle ownership but lack full control over their vehicle’s data.
This imbalance has already proven disastrous for data privacy. Over the past few years, car manufacturers have sold geolocation information without consumers’ consent and improperly secured this data, leading to huge data breaches. Car manufacturers, put simply, cannot be trusted with millions of Americans’ sensitive and personally identifiable data.
This is why AVOA supports two pieces of legislation currently under consideration: the Data Rights for Information and Vehicle Electronics in Real-time (DRIVER) Act and the Auto Data Privacy and Autonomy (ADPA) Act. Both bills would help ensure that vehicle owners can securely access and control their vehicle data while preserving strong privacy and cybersecurity safeguards.
These bills would codify a simple American principle: if you own the keys, you should own the data.