Smart Cars are not only equipped with hundreds of sensors that could potentially collect personal data, but each sensor also exchanges the acquired data with their environment. Interests in access to and usage of the data are highly diverse varying from purely technical (e.g. information exchange with smart traffic lights) to location-based personal advertising and law enforcement purposes (e.g. in order to prove an insurance claim). Beside the challenges concerning the safety and security of Smart Cars, an important question is, how exactly the owners, drivers and/or passengers of Smart Cars should be enabled to control the data protection risks caused by the data processing.
At INNOVATION AND LAW, we conceptualise possible solutions for owners, drivers and/or passengers of Smart Cars to be able to control their data protection risks. In doing so, the data protection model, which was originally developed with particular respect to the area of Big Data practice, can serve as an important scale in order to measure specific data protection risks. Assessing these risks in the framework of a typical driving route, makes it possible to precisely adjust the necessary data protection instruments (e.g. an individual’s consent) at different moments during the whole life cycle of the collected data.