PHOENIX (AZFamily) Ian Bednowitz, a security specialist from Lifelock, informs On Your Side that merely leasing a vehicle and connecting your smartphone to the car’s entertainment system can lead to potential risks regarding your personal data privacy.
Our study indicates that approximately 60% of individuals are unaware that data can remain within a rental car system.
Gary Harper from On Your Side subsequently questioned, "Is the information kept within that vehicle? Does this imply that whoever uses that rental car after you will have access to all of your details?" Ian responded affirmatively, stating, "Exactly. The data remains accessible to each individual who enters the car until someone chooses to remove it."
He continued, "Should you decide to check and connect new gadgets, you'll notice entries like Joe’s iPhone, Fred’s iPhone, Jerry’s iPhone, as well as Joe’s Android—all from former tenants—still logged in. This data accumulates within the car until storage capacity reaches its maximum."
If this data isn’t erased, the next person to rent the same vehicle might gain access to your text messages, contact list, GPS data, and more. "Once they possess your contacts and any voice recordings from you, they could create a deepfake of you to target your loved ones with a message saying, 'I'm in trouble. Please send help or funds my way.'"
What steps can you take for protection? You may want to avoid connecting your phone and instead use the car’s infotainment system and Bluetooth features.
However, if you appreciate the ease of use, ensure that before you return your rental car, you remove all of your stored information from the vehicle.
"You wish to execute a factory reset similarly to how you would perform one on a phone, which clears all data from the infotainment system and guarantees that your personal information is removed. This option is usually located within the System Settings menu," explained Ian.
If you encounter issues when attempting to remove your details from the rental car, just use the search function on your mobile device to look up instructions for clearing data from the particular brand and type of vehicle you've rented. This process should only take a couple of minutes.
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