Nissan's Data Collection and misleading its customers

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Nissan's electric vehicles collected vast amounts of telemetry information. The vehicle made the owners of vehicles consent to this collection, every ride, every startup. What was written in the agreement, turns out to be completely contradicting what was really collected upon consent.

Background

Since the launch of the Nissan LEAF, every vehicle has has a privacy consent screen of some kind. From 2012 until 2023, it was mandatory to make the choice on every startup, to accept the terms or decline.

The CARWINGS and NissanConnect systems for year models 2012-2020 have been discontinued since. After the research and reverse-engineering efforts from OpenCARWINGS, it was possible to see the true scale of information Nissan had been really collecting from their customers.

Location information collected at all times

One of the key points in the consent screen concerns location information. It specifically states: "This vehicle allows access to telematics services, that require collecting and transmitting data, for processing by Nissan Motor Co. Ltd, related to battery storage capacity, your driving efficiency and in limited cases, your vehicle location.".

Nissan LEAF privacy consent screen

The claim of vehicle location being transmitted in limited cases, is simply not true. OpenCARWINGS has vehicle location updated with every request the vehicle sends, from the very first one after setup process. The source code of OpenCARWINGS suggests, that location is both sent by the entertainment system and telematics unit (TCU).

In addition to vehicle's current position being sent with each transmission, among the telemetry, location history of the vehicle, trip log, charging log and other "driving efficiency" and "battery storage capacity" had unnecessarily been tagged with vehicle location. All this telemetry information includes way more location information, beyond the scope of "limited cases".

Microphone bug at the disposal of any phone caller

Upon replacing the SIM card of Nissan LEAF's Telematics Unit, one more discovery was made. By simply calling the telematics unit from any phone number, you get connected to the cabin microphone. Telematics unit has no whitelisted numbers for callers, it accepts everyone and everywhere. This is demonstrated on this YouTube video.

Consumer response

On YouTube, Polish OpenCARWINGS user had made a video explaining the data collection, its scope and his concerns on the matter of deceiving customers with the consent screen.