By Steven Symes 
A new report out of Germany blows the top off a data breach for Volkswagen electric cars, exposing hundreds of thousands of customers’ personal information to hackers. People are shocked by this revelation, but we’ve been covering for some time how your private info is collected by automakers, sometimes shared to other companies and stolen by hackers.
Learn why New York police say car stickers are dangerous.
It used to be that back in the good ol’ days you didn’t have to worry about your car storing and sharing any of your personal information. However, with new connected vehicles, where you go, how you drive, even what music you like to listen to and at what volume can all be had by not only automakers but marketers, insurance companies, and unfortunately hackers.
German news site Spiegel dropped the bombshell report recently that about 800,000 Volkswagen Group customer’s personal information was stored in a virtually unsecured Amazon cloud storage server for months.
This allowed anyone who accessed the data to see vehicle locations and more, all associated with owner’s names and contact info. It’s all thanks to the actions of Cariad, a subsidiary of VW that’s supposed to create software for electric cars.
All that info was for customers in Europe, however the same thing could happen in the United States. Through the data, someone could learn about your personal habits, like where you usually go on a certain day of the week, using that against your in any number of ways.
Mozilla warned about this sort of thing in 2023, which we also covered, slamming data security used by automakers and warning the information not only could be shared with other companies but also government entities without your consent.
Almost half of the VW customers affected by the data breach own a Volkswagen ID.3 or ID.4. With the automaker struggling to keep up with others when it comes to electrification and software development, this is a black eye the company can ill afford.
It’s also a reminder that having connected technologies in your vehicle come with a cost.
According to Spiegel, when Cariad was informed about the data security issue, it asked for details, told the whistleblowers thank you, and fixed the problem. However, there’s no telling who got what information in the meantime and that’s where VW customers have legitimate concerns.
Image via Volkswagen
[…] like Dodge, Ram is pushing into the electrification game with its first all-electric model, the 1500 REV. However, some last minute shuffling means the […]