Connected Car Privacy: Quebec Report Exposes Broken Consent Model

On April 2025, Quebec’s Commission de l’ethique en science et en technologie (CEST) released a 64-page report that reads like a mirror image of the FTC’s 2024 enforcement action against General Motors. The report, compiled over a year by a committee of outside experts and led by commission president Luc Begin, systematically dismantles the idea that the standard “I agree” click has any meaning inside a modern vehicle. While the investigation focuses on Canadian drivers, its core findings directly apply to the U.S. market, where connected car data collection is already reshaping insurance, lending, and consumer privacy.

Consent Was Never Designed for a Moving Object

The report’s central argument is that the consent model borrowed from websites and mobile apps is fundamentally incompatible with cars. A privacy policy assumes the same person who clicked “accept” is the only person using the product for