Your car may be spying on you.

By Gary Biller:

I have long considered my car a sanctuary. Even when faced with oblivious drivers anchored in the left lane or with snarled traffic—usually cause and effect—I feel secure while in command from the cockpit of my Nissan Murano.

But that is a false sense of security. My Murano, and roughly 85 percent of all other vehicles on the road today are equipped with event data recorders (EDRs) that continually monitor driving habits. And, thanks to new federal rules, EDRs will be required equipment in all new cars and light duty trucks beginning in 2014.

If your airbags deploy, several seconds of information before and after the safety incident are stored on the EDR. How fast your car was going at the time of the collision and when and how hard you applied the brakes are among the data collected. These and several other bits of driver performance data are stored in the memory of the cigarette pack-sized device that is hardwired into a vehicle’s electronic control center.

Vehicle EDRs have evolved as a less-sophisticated version of aviation black boxes and have a common goal: to aid accident reconstructionists and safety experts by capturing data that could lead to improved technology, and to reduce the number and severity of accidents.

But therein lies the rub: The EDR contents are also sought by insurance investigators, lawyers, and other parties looking to assign financial responsibility for accidents. That silent electronic sentinel that you bought as standard equipment on your vehicle can be used to incriminate you.

And while some policymakers have acknowledged the privacy threats posed by EDRs, they have done little, if anything, to address them. Some have proposed novel solutions such as providing vehicle owners with a mechanism that locks the vehicle data port through which EDR information is accessed. Supporters believe this will give the owner a meaningful measure of control over who has access to the data.

Though well intentioned, this solution is only a stopgap measure. Design experts already point to the ease with which the data port can be bypassed by tapping into exposed wires on the backside of the EDR or by cabling directly into the airbag control module where the EDR is located.

There is only one true solution. The vehicle owner should have the option to disable the EDR without affecting the functionality of the vehicle itself. Responsible adults are capable of making responsible decisions for themselves and for their families. If one owner decides that there are benefits to having an active EDR in full information-gathering mode and another doesn’t want the data collected, both should be within their rights.

While the current EDR design standard does not include the capability for wireless transmission of data, it likely will in the future. Some insurance companies already remotely upload vehicle performance data with the permission of their policyholders. That can provide industrious third parties with a means to capture EDR contents without the vehicle owner’s permission.

Ownership of tens of thousands of cars is transferred daily. With each used car transaction, the EDR and its contents become the property of a new owner. What is to stop an insurance company that unsuccessfully tried to get the EDR contents from the prior owner from paying the current vehicle owner for that same information?

Of course, if the EDR has stored information, it can be obtained via a court order. That means going through legal channels, but nonetheless the vehicle owner remains at risk of having to disclose the information against his will.

So we are back to the one true solution to protect the privacy rights of the motorist: Give him the option of disabling the EDR in his own vehicle. Safety advocates and accident reconstructionists may object, but with over 200 million licensed drivers in the United States, you can be sure that at least several hundred thousand will voluntarily allow the monitoring of their driving habits.  This will provide more than enough data for experts to improve car and truck safety design.

The legal aspects of EDR ownership are far from established—only 13 states have laws that even address this issue which makes it more imperative that vehicle owners have full control over the use, or nonuse, of their own property.

Gary Biller is the president of the National Motorist Association.