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Looking to sell your car and get a new set of wheels?
More than 79% of drivers revealed they don’t take measures to remove data and return the car to its factory settings before selling it. The car insurance experts at Confused.com are warning drivers this could expose vast amounts of their personal data, including bank details, location history and social media accounts.
As part of their brand new Clever Cars study, they have revealed Audi, Tesla and BMW are the top three manufacturers which collect most information from you via their infotainment systems.
The advanced features in connected cars are powered by a complex background of artificial intelligence, which means they have the capability to collect copious amounts of personal information on us drivers, from our phone number and address to our location history and music taste.
For example, to use Audi’s connectivity features, drivers can download the myAudi App, allowing improved route guidance, read aloud function for Twitter messages, online news, emails and more.

However, data downloaded can include your contact list so that it can perform its voice dialing function. The car also needs each device’s unique identifiers including friendly name, MAC address and serial numbers in order to keep track of each device separately.

But luckily, erasing your data from your connected car is a super easy process. Following on from a recent report on connected cars, Alex Kindred, car insurance expert at Confused.com has shared his 7 tips on erasing your data and protecting yourself:

  1. Remove all Bluetooth pairings – Disconnect all your previous Bluetooth pairings from your car to ensure the safety of your devices. Although most paired devices will need to be in range to connect, it’s still important to remove them; particularly mobile phones that may have been connected for hands free calls and texts, which will have access to all your contacts, call and text history.

  2. Log out of all apps – Log out of all navigation, music and other apps you have an account for and make sure your user details and passwords do not automatically populate to log you back in. With tech companies like Apple offering CarPlay for example, giving drivers the ability to unlock and start their car from their iPhone, if drivers don’t log out of features, future drivers may be able to gain access to your music accounts, as well as personal calendars and other iPhone features.

  3. Delete contacts and call history – Manually go through your phone book and erase all your saved and synced contacts, calls and text history. In cases like this, it’s important to protect other people’s personal information too, like their phone numbers, to avoid future drivers being able to contact them unwantedly.

  4. Delete saved addresses – Similarly, it’s important to erase all addresses and saved locations from the car’s navigation system. If not wiped, then future drivers will have a pretty clear idea of the places you regularly travel to, such as your place of work, or family and friends’ homes. In that case, it’s also important to erase this information, not only to protect yourself but also protect other people – particularly if the saved location has been given a name such as “Mum’s house” for example.

  5. Remove all external storage – If your car has removable media storage, like a USB drive or SD card reader, make sure these are all removed from the car and the information hasn’t been stored anywhere – especially if the devices contain personal information stored on them.

  6. Refer to the car’s manual – While it’s wise to do the above steps manually to ensure all desired data is removed, you can also follow instructions in your car’s in-depth manual on how to restore your car to factory settings, which should wipe all stored settings and data.

  7. Reset your car at the dealership – You can also take your car to the dealership and ask them to restore the car to its factory settings if you don’t feel comfortable doing this yourself. They should be able to wipe all of your data in the process and ensure that all the information about driver habits, location, paired devices, etc. is removed from the vehicle because it’s been electronically updated.

It’s also important that you wipe the previous owners data when buying a new car if they haven’t already done so. Because it may mean they still have control over some elements of your vehicle, with some cars nowadays having external control from apps where you can stop and start the engine, turn on the air con and also track the vehicle’s location.

The report from Confused.com also reveals:

  • The cars that keep the most data on us

  • What does your car know about you

  • How cyber secure are our car brands

https://www.confused.com/car-insurance/clever-cars-what-they-know