Giuseppe Tudisco

Giampaolo Bella, Pietro Biondi, Giuseppe Tudisco

Modern cars are evolving in many ways. Technologies such as infotainment systems and companion mobile applications collect a variety of personal data from drivers to enhance the user experience. This paper investigates the extent to which car drivers understand the implications for their privacy, including that car manufacturers must treat that data in compliance with the relevant regulations. It does so by distilling out drivers' concerns on privacy and relating them to their perceptions of trust on car cyber-security. A questionnaire is designed for such purposes to collect answers from a set of 1101 participants, so that the results are statistically relevant. In short, privacy concerns are modest, perhaps because there still is insufficient general awareness on the personal data that are involved, both for in-vehicle treatment and for transmission over the Internet. Trust perceptions on cyber-security are modest too (lower than those on car safety), a surprising contradiction to our research hypothesis that privacy concerns and trust perceptions on car cyber-security are opponent. We interpret this as a clear demand for information and awareness-building campaigns for car drivers, as well as for technical cyber-security and privacy measures that are truly considerate of the human factor.

Giampaolo Bella, Pietro Biondi, Marco De Vincenzi et al.

Modern cars technologies are evolving quickly. They collect a variety of personal data and treat it on behalf of the car manufacturer to improve the drivers' experience. The precise terms of such a treatment are stated within the privacy policies accepted by the user when buying a car or through the infotainment system when it is first started. This paper uses a double lens to assess people's privacy while they drive a car. The first approach is objective and studies the readability of privacy policies that comes with cars. We analyse the privacy policies of twelve car brands and apply well-known readability indices to evaluate the extent to which privacy policies are comprehensible by all drivers. The second approach targets drivers' opinions to extrapolate their privacy concerns and trust perceptions. We design a questionnaire to collect the opinions of 88 participants and draw essential statistics about them. Our combined findings indicate that privacy is insufficiently understood at present as an issue deriving from driving a car, hence future technologies should be tailored to make people more aware of the issue and to enable them to express their preferences.