Drivers who travel at night or through certain neighborhoods get penalized by insurance algorithms, according to a new report from Quebec’s commission on ethics in science and technology. The 64-page study maps 12 privacy risks tied to connected vehicles and concludes that individual consent is fundamentally broken in the connected car ecosystem.
Insurers offer discounts in exchange for tracking, but they do not disclose how clients are scored, leaving drivers no way to dispute a bad rating. The commission says the programs are often unfair, particularly for low-income shift workers whose schedules trigger higher rates.
Most vehicle data lives on cloud servers run by outside providers. As proof of the stakes, the commission cites 2024, when a misconfigured Amazon Web Services database exposed the location history and personal records of about 800,000 Volkswagen electric vehicles for months. The commission warns that hackers could strike anywhere along that chain, and it says drivers are told almost nothing about how their data is protected.
Commission president Luc Begin called today’s cars computers on wheels. The report flags abusers who use vehicle location apps to stalk and control partners, and notes that cameras record bystanders who never consented. Only about 7% of consumers read terms and conditions, which the study describes as excessively long and difficult to understand.
The commission recommends stronger government oversight, better data systems and close monitoring of international developments. Begin acknowledged the trade-offs are nuanced: vehicle data helped convict a murderer in Upstate New York this month, yet the same location streams enable coercive control in the wrong hands.
