Security News > 2020 > July > TomTom bill bomb: Why am I being charged for infotainment? I sold my car last year, rages Reg reader

A UK man who woke up one morning to discover his bank account being charged for satnav services linked to a car he'd sold months previously has expressed his frustration at Mazda and TomTom over the strange affair.

His vehicle included a dashboard-mounted in-car entertainment suite powered by TomTom, which later proved to be the source of some strange goings-on that cost him money and made him fear that his personal data had been saved by the car and was now allowing someone else to bill him for the in-car satnav.

PR director Graeme Fudge told us in an emailed statement: "We do not hold any financial or identifiable data on our car systems. When a customer sells a car they delete their data from the car's system, this includes previous routes, favourites, contacts, telephone numbers and call history, this ensures subsequent customers cannot access any data from the previous owner."

When we asked Fudge if Mazda cared about the perception that one of its cars appeared to have retained onboard customer data despite a factory reset, Fudge replied: "The car holds no financial or identifiable data and if he deleted the data prior to selling the car all data stored on the car would have been deleted. The only data stored on the car system would have been previous routes, favourites, contacts, telephone numbers and call history."

Car infosec expert Ken Tindell, CTO of Canis Automotive Labs, opined that it would take some time before car makers got their heads around the personal data problems - and "Before that's fully fed through to cars on the road".

News URL

https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2020/07/10/mazda_tomtom_data_retention_billing/