‘Washington Post’ hacked a Chevy Volt to see if it spies on you

“When I buy a car, I assume the data I produce is owned by me,” Washington Post technology editor Geoffrey A. Fowler wrote in a new piece detailing a private automotive privacy experiment. “Many automakers do not.”

This contrast of thought is at the center of a nebulous time and space full of unknowns in the car business sector, and in the general privacy sector overall. Now that every phone, every watch, every camera, every home appliance, every method of transportation is connected to the Internet, guidelines and boundaries that define personal information and privacy have become blurry and significantly harder to define. In attempts to learn exactly what’s going on behind the scenes, The Washington Post literally broke into an infotainment system and hacked the programming. 

The analysis included physically removing the infotainment module from the dashboard of a donated 2017 Chevrolet Volt. Once Mason obtained the infotainment system’s computer (there are multiple computers throughout the vehicle), he linked it to a circuit board and paired it with his own laptop. Only then was Mason able to copy the device’s data and view exactly what was on there.

The article goes on to further detail just how much is collected and what, if anything, can be done about it. Read the full piece on The Washington Post now.