Did You Know Your Vehicle Is Recording You?

For over a decade, almost every new vehicle has been equipped with an event data recorder which is similar to an airplane's flight recorder, or "black box."

The system that knows when to deploy the airbags, continuously tracks a multitude of facts, such as the vehicles acceleration rate, speed, various engine functions, seat belt use and more. These systems are not connected to the GPS and so do not know where the vehicle is located. The data is continuously overwritten, so just the few last seconds of data before an accident may be available. The idea is to give accident investigators a big boost in understanding why a vehicle crashed.

More involved are optional concierge services such as OnStar and Sync. These powerful data links do have GPS and do know where the vehicle is, and they accumulate a huge amount of speed, acceleration and engineering data. As of now these systems do not communicate with anyone outside the car unless you ask them to — by pushing buttons, for example. But when you do, all sorts of remote control is possible, from unlocking doors and reducing engine power to shutting the car off, as well as tracking the vehicle's position in real time