Your car harvests your data and sells you out.

Look at the centre console of any car launched this decade. The glass, the ambient glow, the over-the-air promises — the cabin is presented as a gift to the driver. It is also, quietly, the most prolific data-collection device most people will ever own. In September 2023 the Mozilla Foundation reviewed 25 car brands and concluded that cars are the worst product category it has ever studied for privacy. Every single brand earned a warning label. Around 84 percent reserve the right to share or sell what they gather, and roughly three-quarters say they can sell it outright. The interesting part for designers is not the legal language. It is that the data hose was engineered, styled, and shipped — and almost none of it had to be.

The regulators have now put numbers on the abstract. In January 2026 the U.S. Federal Trade Commission finalised an order against General Motors and its OnStar arm over precise geolocation and driving-behaviour data pulled from millions of vehicles — in some cases as often as every three seconds — and sold onward to consumer-reporting agencies. Those agencies, principally LexisNexis Risk Solutions and Verisk Analytics, fed insurers who quietly raised premiums or denied coverage. The order bans GM from handing that data to reporting agencies for five years and requires affirmative consent for two decades. California extracted a separate settlement; California's privacy regulator fined American Honda over its consent flows. The throughline is consistent: the consent was technically present and practically invisible, buried where no human reads, defaulted to on.

This is a design failure before it is a legal one. Consent that nobody can find is a dark pattern, and dark patterns are authored — someone laid out the toggle three menus deep, someone wrote "improve your experience" instead of "we sell your location," someone chose the default state. Every one of those was a decision made at a desk, usually late, usually under pressure to ship a feature roadmap that treated data collection as free upside. The cabin became a surveillance instrument not through conspiracy but through a thousand small choices nobody stress-tested against the question a driver would actually ask: who sees this, and what do they do with it?

That question is exactly the kind a parallel design team should be forcing in the concept phase, long before a single line of consent copy gets written. Design Intelligence is the practice of using the intelligence of AI to interrogate decisions while they are still cheap to change — and data architecture is a design decision as surely as a fascia radius or a seam line. What does a trust-honest cabin look like? It minimises by default: it collects what the car needs to drive and to serve you, and nothing speculative "for future products." It surfaces consent as a first-class interface element, legible in seconds, reversible in one tap, never pre-checked. It treats the absence of a data broker in the value chain as a feature worth styling around, the way a brand once styled around a visible seatbelt or a crumple zone it was proud of. None of this is a constraint on good design. It is the brief.

The brands that get this right will not market it as compliance. They will market it as respect — the same instinct that makes a well-made interior feel like it was built for a person rather than extracted from one. The ones that get it wrong are discovering the cost in courtrooms and settlements, and worse, in the slow erosion of the one thing a premium badge is supposed to buy: trust. A buyer who learns their car sold their commute to an insurer does not file that under "connected services." They file it under betrayal, and betrayal is sticky.

The connected cabin is not going away, and it should not. The intelligence in the car can be genuinely good — safer, more responsive, more personal. But intelligence pointed at the driver's benefit and intelligence pointed at a data broker's invoice look almost identical on a spec sheet and completely different in a customer's gut. The difference is decided in the concept phase, by people willing to ask the uncomfortable question early. The cars already harvest everything. The only open design decision left is whether they sell you out — and that one is still yours to make, while it is still cheap to make it.

Sources

• ●FTC Finalizes Order Settling Allegations that GM and OnStar Collected and Sold Geolocation Data Without Consumers' Informed Consent (FTC, Jan 16 2026)
• ●It's Official: Cars Are the Worst Product Category We Have Ever Reviewed for Privacy (Mozilla Foundation, Sep 6 2023)
• ●US regulator tells GM to hit the brakes on customer tracking (The Register, Jan 15 2026)
• ●GM agrees to $12.75M California settlement over sale of drivers' data (BleepingComputer, May 2026)
• ●High Car Insurance? Your Car Maker May Be Selling Your Driving Data (Insurify)