The car knows how you like your coffee. Or at least, where you like to get it from. Data collected while you’re behind the wheel is a hot area for companies looking to make money off of the choices people make every day while driving. In fact, management consulting firm McKinsey estimates car data monetization could be a $450 billion to $750 billion business by 2030.
Navigation app, Waze, lets people select their favorite brands so they can find them faster when looking for those destinations on the road. Dunkin' Donuts in March of last year announced a partnership with Waze that – beyond helping visitors locate the nearest branch (a 2012 innovation), and add the brand as a favorite (a 2016 innovation) – now also allows Waze users to submit orders through the app for quicker pickup.
And marketing news source Adweek points out that while you’re on your way, Waze is measuring away, tracking click-throughs and collecting information not only on current navigation but also places people save to visit later.
Driverless cars stand to pose additional challenges in this arena, both in terms of what data is being collected, who owns it, and how it could be used, say experts. “These vehicles will know where you like to frequent, which businesses, and may very well build a profile of you,” British newspaper the Guardian quoted Des Butler, of the Queensland University of Technology, as saying. “People will go into these things not realising just how much data the vehicle will be generating about them and not knowing the extent to which the data can be used.”