Vehicle security is just as important – if not more so – than its fuel economy, and new legislation has been proposed to put that information front-and-center on new cars.
After releasing a damning report on how automakers have dropped the ball on security and location tracking, Senator Ed Markey has joined forces with Senator Richard Blumenthal to propose legislation that would force automakers to fix the gaping holes in its software, establishing federal standards for car security, as well as boosting privacy standards.
The legislation would put NTHSA and the FTC in charge of setting the standards, with a focus on requiring both automakers and the companies that supply them to be able to detect, report, and react to real-time software breaches – something that only two automakers out of 16 surveyed are capable of, according to Markey's report. It would also require information and wireless access points to be properly secured and encrypted.
The legislation also tackles the murky privacy and location tracking services automakers employ which aren't always transparent and don't always give customers the option to opt-out. Markey's proposal would make information about data collection and transmission easier for consumers to understand, allowing them to deny data collection without disabling navigation functionality, and prohibit selling driving data for advertising and marketing.
And it would supposedly do all of that, plus give cars a score on security and privacy based on the proposed standards, and have it displayed on the window sticker of all new vehicles sold in the U.S.