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Brendan O'Connor

Does technology mean that our cars are no longer private spaces?

31 May 2026

Transcription

Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.

Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?

0.537 - 14.343 Brendan O'Connor

Technology editor at the Irish Independent, Adrian Weckler. Good afternoon. Good afternoon, Brendan. Adrian, the main question we're going to deal with today is, is my car spying on me? But maybe paint a quick picture for me first of the kind of tech that's in cars now.

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Chapter 2: Is my car spying on me with built-in technology?

14.363 - 16.066 Brendan O'Connor

They're essentially computers now, are they?

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16.507 - 22.258 Adrian Weckler

Oh, yeah. We've gone from something that goes from A to B and that might entertain you with something on the radio to something with...

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22.238 - 47.537 Adrian Weckler

that's full of screens full of cameras sometimes cameras facing you full of sensors gps to uh to to record every single place you go and now ai as well a lot of new cars are putting in chat gpt into the system so that it can remember your previous conversations or stuff from other devices so it's becoming more like a personal assistant on wheels a little bit like a smartphone

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Chapter 3: What types of technology are integrated into modern cars?

47.517 - 72.58 Adrian Weckler

okay so is our car listening to us is our car building a profile of us what kind of stuff is it monitoring and harvesting from us well the it is listening to you in the sense that most cars now have uh assistants like uh at home like your amazon speaker your smart speaker so there are watch words now it's not listening to you in the sense that it's recording everything you say but it is

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72.56 - 89.742 Adrian Weckler

waiting for you to say something. The sensors that it has are like dozens and dozens of dozens of sensors and up to and including things like cameras that are looking at you all the time. If you take, for example, new Volvos, they have a couple of cameras

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89.722 - 114.7 Adrian Weckler

and those cameras are designed to look at your face to see whether you're yawning or whether you might be dropping off and and there's a safety purpose for that so that they can warn you for safety but all of this stuff is now building a profile on you very strictly within europe and gdpr but a profile nonetheless to which you can then consent later on for other types of services

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114.781 - 125.416 Brendan O'Connor

Okay, and like this sounds quite intrusive, but I presume everyone just consents to it in some way by turning on the screen for the first time and just to get into it, you press a yeah or whatever. Absolutely.

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125.636 - 136.632 Adrian Weckler

So there are lots of, there are screens and screens of terms and conditions and privacy policies and you have to tick the boxes. I have read the, you know, the privacy policy and all you want to do is get to the next service.

136.832 - 143.421 Brendan O'Connor

Yeah, yeah. And so is that information then held just within the car company or do they share it?

143.738 - 166.455 Adrian Weckler

No, it can be shared among a lot of third-party services. And this can be a problem for things like cars getting hacked or data breaches related to cars. I mean, there have been a couple of examples just in the last year. Stellantis, which we will know as Fiat and Hyundai and a few other car companies have all warned about this.

166.435 - 188.174 Adrian Weckler

data breaches involving third party companies that are involved with you in your car when you're driving your car. But that could be a vector through which someone might try to either hack you directly or probably more likely try to use your information for phishing attacks, those annoying text messages and calls and emails that you get.

188.675 - 194.94 Brendan O'Connor

OK, so come here. When someone gets into one of the new modern cars now, does the car know who's getting in?

Chapter 4: How does data collection in cars affect my privacy?

286.501 - 316.508 Adrian Weckler

Well, it's very difficult to not have a profile within your own new car because it's just screens, screens, screens the whole way. You have to interact with it digitally. What you can do is untick all of the boxes or make sure that it knows as little about you as possible. Ideally, that's avoiding using CarPlay with your iPhone or Android Auto with your Android phone.

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316.488 - 323.462 Adrian Weckler

It's one of these things where convenience usually trumps safety and privacy. I can't see many people doing that.

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323.502 - 333.703 Brendan O'Connor

Nobody's going to bother. You lost them straight away with unticking like, yeah. So listen, is the, he lives on here. Is a car no longer a private space?

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334.882 - 354.244 Adrian Weckler

Yeah, you would say that. And basically, it's just another part of your kind of computer journey. And by the way, most of us are kind of rushing headlong into that, sometimes voluntarily. Like one of the big fears about this is that your car will start selling your data to all these companies, particularly insurance companies.

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354.804 - 362.593 Adrian Weckler

In Europe and Ireland, it's very difficult for that to happen because of the privacy laws we have. But what we end up doing is doing that voluntarily. Like

362.573 - 389.712 Adrian Weckler

there are you take the likes of aig or aviva or a company like boximo they will actually put a black box into your car to record everything you're doing entire gps how you break how you accelerate how you corner whether you drive at night and the reason for that is because if you do it within certain bands you'll get cheaper insurance okay yeah but it can work the other way as well they say for example

389.692 - 396.905 Adrian Weckler

If you drive at over 160 kilometres per hour, which you should never do, by the way, they'll cancel your insurance.

398.187 - 409.287 Brendan O'Connor

Right. Well, just when you laid out there everything the car knows, sure knows everywhere we go, everything we do, all our habits, everything. OK, Adrian Weckler, thank you very much for that chilling warning from the future. We'll take a break.

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