Your Car is Watching You: How We Ethically Integrate AI Into Modern Vehicles

Have you read your car’s terms and conditions? It might sound like a silly question but modern smart cars are just like any other tech product or service. This translates to pages upon pages of data guidelines – and what carmakers can and do collect might surprise you. A vehicle privacy report revealed modern cars are saving personal information about drivers like their employment history and medical information, as well as biometrics like facial recognition and consumer data from synced phones. Don’t recall agreeing to this? Doesn’t matter – Subaru’s privacy policy maintains that passengers have consented to data collection just by being inside the car.

Today’s smart cars have become data collection vacuums on wheels. And, unfortunately, many carmakers don’t take their commitment to privacy and security seriously. Mozilla rates smart cars as the worst product category for consumer privacy, finding that dating apps and connected sex toys publish more detailed security information than modern vehicles. The foundation assessed the privacy policies and practices of 25 carmakers and all failed its consumer privacy tests. These are huge red flags, especially when modern cars come equipped with cameras and sensors, and are on the cusp of widespread integration of AI.

If carmakers already can’t be trusted with basic driver data, the deployment of even more sophisticated systems that learn from driver behavior, voice patterns, and emotional states requires careful consideration. So, let’s take a deeper dive into the smart car of today and what it can and should look like tomorrow, examining the ethical tension between improving driver assistance through behavioral data collection versus protecting privacy in the age of AI.

It’s hard to trust smart carmakers

Take a look around modern cars and you’ll quickly notice how much the dashboard and interior have changed from yesteryear. It’s hard to miss the expansive network of sensors, microphones, and cameras, and it’s also hard to say where the information goes. Mozilla’s deep dive into this sector shows that carmakers collect information ranging from biometric data to detailed psychological profiles, with 21 of 25 sharing customer information with service providers and data brokers. A further 19 admit they can sell personal data.

This is something we saw happen earlier this year. A federal lawsuit in April revealed that Toyota secretly collected and sold detailed driving data – including location, speed, and braking patterns – to Progressive Insurance. Drivers only discovered this surveillance when they applied for insurance and realized the company already had their driving records. Despite Toyota’s public commitments to customer privacy, the carmaker was quietly monetizing intimate behavioral data and commercially exploiting driver movements. Likewise, Tesla has gotten into trouble for sharing invasive customer recordings through internal chat rooms, including footage of crashes and private garage contents.

These kinds of breaches are just the tip of the iceberg. Nissan, for example, utilizes smart car data to develop in-depth profiles that describe driver preferences, characteristics, psychological trends, predispositions, behavior, attitudes, intelligence, abilities, and aptitudes. Yes, you read correctly, Nissan believes it can infer how smart you are and sell that assessment to third parties. Such data misuse is widespread and concerning – and this is before more intuitive systems are introduced with AI.

Smart car AI isn’t all bad

Adding AI will elevate smart cars to a new level of responsiveness and intuitiveness. We’re not far off from computer vision that analyzes facial expressions, eye movements, and emotional states to detect drowsiness and distraction. This technology type can also more closely review road conditions and help us to drive better (or not at all – mainstream autonomous cars aren’t far off and this technology could offer a final push).

Likewise, in-car conversational chatbots will be able to process natural language commands and speech patterns, informing everything from stress responses during different scenarios to personal conversation topics. Backed by various inputs and intelligent understanding, the sky’s the limit for what these systems can learn about us behind the wheel.

The problem is that carmakers haven’t shown themselves as trustworthy custodians of this coming evolution. AI surveillance systems without safeguards would exponentially amplify privacy risks. Where Toyota secretly sold basic driving patterns, AI-enhanced vehicles could commercialize real-time stress levels, health indicators, and intimate conversations, creating psychological profiles far more valuable and invasive than anything we’ve seen.

The key is introducing AI and ensuring trust

Clearly, striking the right balance between technological innovation and driver privacy is paramount in the next chapter of smart cars. Making sure this happens starts by processing all data within the vehicle. Edge AI, for example, processes sensitive biometric and behavioral data locally, thereby eliminating the need for cloud transmission and middleman servers. This approach enables safety benefits – like real-time drowsiness detection and collision avoidance – while preventing carmakers from accessing the raw personal data that powers these systems.

We can also build trust by lobbying for strict regulatory frameworks and data guardrails. If a car is going to carry AI capabilities, we need data minimization principles that collect only safety-essential information. Further, algorithmic auditing could help ensure systems aren’t creating exploitable psychological profiles.

Other foundational technologies should be considered to enhance safety. These include homomorphic encryption so that AI systems can process data while it remains mathematically protected even during analysis. Likewise, zero-knowledge protocols enable safety compliance verification without revealing underlying personal data, and peer-to-peer connectivity lets vehicles share critical safety directly without routing through other intermediaries. Again, these privacy-preserving technologies prove we can have intelligent vehicles without surrendering personal autonomy to corporate surveillance networks.

AI smart cars are coming but we must first nip these problems in the bud. There are impressive and important functionality, safety, and efficiency gains from integrating these next-level platforms but – and it’s a big but – the current state of data disregard won’t cut it. Consumers shouldn’t have to read their car’s terms and conditions to know that their privacy is respected.

Instead, carmakers need to up their game, and platform makers must build stronger data foundations where security is part and parcel of the solution.