Somewhere in your car's infotainment system or a companion smartphone app, there is very likely a settings menu you have never opened that governs whether your driving habits, location history, and even your contact list are being shared with your automaker and its partners. Most owners never see this menu because it isn't presented at the moment of purchase the way, say, a warranty document is. It's buried, often opted into by default, and written in language that makes it easy to skim past. Understanding what's actually being collected, and where the levers are to dial it back, puts you back in control of a relationship most drivers didn't realize they'd entered.
What Gets Collected, and Why It's Valuable
Modern vehicles with built-in connectivity, whether through an embedded cellular modem or a paired smartphone, generate several distinct categories of data. Location history is the most obvious: where the car goes, how often, and at what times, which can be detailed enough to reconstruct someone's daily commute or travel patterns with real precision. Driving behavior data captures things like acceleration, braking force, cornering, and speed relative to posted limits, often summarized into a "driving score." Infotainment usage data logs which apps you open, what you search for in navigation, and sometimes voice command history. And when you pair your phone via Bluetooth or a manufacturer's app, the car can pull in contacts, call logs, and message metadata, depending on the permissions granted during setup.
The reasons manufacturers want this data are mostly straightforward business logic rather than anything sinister. Driving behavior data feeds usage-based insurance programs, where automakers or their partners offer to share your driving score with insurers in exchange for potential discounts, a system that only works if the data is being captured continuously in the background. Location and usage data help manufacturers understand which features people actually use, informing everything from where dealerships get built to which infotainment features get prioritized in the next software update. Diagnostic data, covering things like battery health, sensor readings, and fault codes, is transmitted so automakers can flag potential mechanical issues before they become breakdowns, and increasingly to support over-the-air software updates. And yes, some of this data pipeline feeds marketing efforts, whether that's the automaker itself or third parties it shares data with, informing targeted offers for service appointments, extended warranties, or your next vehicle purchase.
None of this makes the practice uniquely predatory compared to how much of the tech industry operates, but a car is a different category of object than a phone or a smart speaker. It travels with you into places you might not think of as trackable, and many owners simply never made an informed choice to share this information in the first place, having accepted a lengthy terms-of-service screen during setup at the dealership without reading it.
Checking Your Manufacturer's Privacy Portal
Nearly every major automaker with connected services now maintains some form of privacy portal, either as a section within their companion smartphone app or as a standalone web page tied to your vehicle identification number and owner account. This is the first place to look, and it's worth doing even if you've never consciously enrolled in anything, because certain data collection can be enabled by default as part of a broader connected services agreement you accepted during vehicle setup or a dealership onboarding process.
These portals typically let you view what categories of data are being collected, and in many cases provide toggles to disable specific streams, such as location-based services, driving behavior sharing for insurance programs, or personalized marketing communications. The interfaces vary widely in clarity, some genuinely straightforward, others requiring you to dig through several submenus to find the actual opt-out control. It's worth setting aside a real fifteen minutes rather than trying to do this while distracted, since these settings are not always intuitively labeled.
Opting Out Where It's Actually Offered
Where manufacturers provide a genuine opt-out, take it seriously rather than assuming the sharing is harmless or too minor to matter. Usage-based insurance data sharing is usually opt-in, meaning you had to actively enroll, but double-check this rather than assuming, since bundled connected-services packages sometimes include it as a pre-checked default. Marketing data sharing is more often opt-out, meaning it's on unless you turn it off, and it's typically the easiest category to disable without losing any functionality you actually rely on.
Location-based features present the trickiest tradeoff, because turning off location sharing entirely may also disable features you genuinely want, like remote start, stolen vehicle recovery, or roadside assistance dispatch. Read the specific description of what each toggle controls before switching it off wholesale, since many privacy portals let you disable marketing use of location data while keeping the safety and convenience features that depend on it intact.
Before You Sell or Trade In: Reset the Infotainment System
This is the step most owners skip entirely, and it's arguably more consequential than any setting you'd adjust while you still own the car. Modern infotainment systems retain a remarkable amount of personal data: paired phone contact lists, call and text history synced via Bluetooth, saved home and work addresses, garage door codes, saved Wi-Fi passwords, and app login credentials for services like streaming audio or navigation. If you trade in or sell your vehicle without wiping this, the next owner may have access to information you'd never intend to hand over to a stranger.
Every infotainment system has some form of factory reset or "restore to default settings" option buried in its settings menu, and it's worth doing a web search for your specific make, model, and infotainment system name to find the exact steps, since menu structures differ substantially across manufacturers and model years. Beyond the infotainment unit itself, you should also formally remove the vehicle from your manufacturer's connected app account. Simply deleting the app from your phone does not sever the vehicle's connection to your account or stop data transmission; you need to actively unlink the vehicle through the account settings, and ideally confirm the unlinking was successful before handing over the keys.
Disconnecting Paired Phones and Old Accounts
It's worth periodically auditing exactly which phones and accounts remain linked to your car, especially if you've had passengers, family members, or a previous owner's information still lingering in the system. Old paired devices can retain access to call and message syncing even if that person no longer regularly rides in the vehicle, and forgotten accounts on a shared family vehicle can mean location and driving data is being generated under someone else's profile without their current awareness. Going into the Bluetooth and connected-accounts menu every so often to remove devices you don't recognize or no longer use is a small habit that meaningfully tightens who has visibility into the car's data.
Understanding Subscriptions as a Data Channel, Not Just a Feature
Many connected car features arrive bundled as a subscription, often with a free trial period at purchase covering things like remote start, Wi-Fi hotspot access, or advanced navigation. It's worth recognizing that the data collection underpinning these features frequently continues even after you decline to pay for the subscription once the trial ends. The car may still be capable of transmitting diagnostic and location data to the manufacturer's servers as part of its baseline connectivity, regardless of whether you're an active paying subscriber to the premium feature set. If your goal is minimizing data transmission specifically, rather than just avoiding a subscription bill, check whether declining the paid tier actually stops the underlying data collection, or whether you need to separately disable connectivity features through the privacy portal to achieve that.
Taking control of this doesn't require treating your car as an adversary. It mostly requires the same modest diligence you'd apply to a new phone or laptop: look at what's enabled by default, decide deliberately what's worth keeping for the convenience it provides, and make a habit of clearing your data footprint before someone else takes possession of the vehicle.
Key Takeaways
- Connected cars routinely collect location history, driving behavior, infotainment usage, and paired-phone data, often enabled by default at purchase.
- This data primarily supports usage-based insurance, feature personalization, diagnostics, and marketing rather than any single dramatic purpose.
- Manufacturer privacy portals, found in companion apps or owner account websites, are the main place to view and limit data sharing.
- Always factory-reset the infotainment system and formally unlink the vehicle from your account before selling or trading it in.
- Periodically remove old paired phones and unused accounts, since forgotten connections can keep generating data under someone else's profile.
- Bottom line: check your privacy portal today, disable sharing you don't need, and make infotainment reset a non-negotiable step before your next trade-in.
