What will you leave behind when you sell your car, hand it to a dealer or give it back to a leasing or rental company? As well as that pound coin which fell into the seat, it could be a nice amount of personal data. Some people compare the modern car to a laptop on wheels. The data gathering centre is the infotainment screen which you will be tapping and swiping or talking to. Here’s a list of the potential harvest: - location data – where you are - navigation history – where you’ve been and frequently visit - synced phone contacts - call logs, and sometimes text messages - paired device IDs, user profiles, e-mail addresses, usernames, subscription identifiers - payment information Under new safety rules for new cars, systems must track the driver’s head and eyes to monitor for micro-sleep, sleep, and unresponsiveness, and then warn the driver. These can capture biometric data. Several years ago, car manufacturers looked at the lucrative use companies such as Facebook were making of the data generated by our interactions and decided that they too could capitalise on the data that we were donating to their cars. Every year the not-for-profit Mozilla Foundation and parent of the Mozilla Corporation (web browsing and safeguards) produces Privacy Not Included (PNI) reports that analyse how much data is extracted from consumers who buy different kinds of products, including cars, and rates them. It’s perhaps better known in the USA than here in the UK. All 25 major car brands reviewed in Mozilla’s 2023 edition of PNI received fail marks for consumer privacy. According to Mozilla’s researchers (who combed through the privacy agreements, apps and asked questions), global brands — including BMW, Ford, Toyota, Tesla, Kia and Subaru could collect deeply personal data such as sexual