Toyota Australia says the most sensitive information its connected cars gather stays encrypted on board and never leaves the vehicle, a claim it made as Australian regulators widen a privacy probe into the country’s connected fleet.
The automaker now has more than one million connected Toyotas on Australian roads, following the 2020 launch of Toyota Connected Services. Almost every current passenger and commercial model carries the feature, with the LandCruiser 70 Series, GR86 and Tundra the exceptions.
What Toyota promises
John Pappas, the company’s vice president of sales and franchise operations, said most data systems sit in Australian data centers, with some processing in Toyota-managed environments in North America and Singapore. He framed privacy as a safety question, telling CarExpert that any highly sensitive data is fully encrypted inside the car and never transmitted.
Pappas declined to assess rival brands’ defenses, saying he could speak only to Toyota’s own governance.
Why the questions are landing now
The remarks follow an ABC Four Corners investigation that examined data handling and hackability across connected vehicles, including BYD, Xpeng and Leapmotor models. That program drove earlier scrutiny of BYD’s Australian privacy policy and of an exposed access point on a Shark 6 ute.
A bigger pressure point is the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner. The regulator is investigating both Toyota and Hyundai over connected-vehicle privacy, having opened preliminary inquiries in February 2024 and only naming the brands this year. It has published no finding of wrongdoing.
Toyota revised its Connected Services privacy policy in March 2026. The current version says it does not share usage information outside set circumstances and does not use data collected through the service for direct marketing.
