If another driver has used your car, this often means readjusting the seat and the mirrors, selecting your own favorite music, entering your own favorite locations into the navigation system, etc. – only then can you set off.
It is true that it is possible to save this information so that all settings fit automatically. But while some people like to use this feature, others are reluctant to do so due to privacy issues. Things become even more delicate if the vehicle also collects medical data, such as blood sugar levels or heart rate – in order to issue an appropriate warning to the driver or call for help, if necessary. After all, users currently find it hard to tell whether the data remains in the vehicle or is processed in a cloud
“A one-fits-all solution is therefore hardly a solution here”, says Arghavan Hosseinzadeh da Silva, software developer at Fraunhofer IESE. “In general, the more data you share, the more service you get. How much data you want to share in which case, however, differs greatly from person to person.”
Under the name “IND²UCE” (product name: MY DATA Control Technologies), the researchers are therefore developing a framework that makes it possible to restrict the use of all personal settings depending on the situation and personal preferences. You want to have your WhatsApp messages shown on the vehicle’s display – unless you are not alone in the car? Should the same contacts and playlists be shown in a rental car that are shown in your own vehicle, and should the seat, the steering wheel, and the mirrors be adjusted properly right away? Should the health data, such as measurements of the heart rate, stay in the car and not be sent to a cloud – unless urgent help is necessary, which then should be called automatically, for instance after an accident? In the future, users should be able to set such things themselves via an app, and these privacy specifications will then be transferred via smartphone to every vehicle currently used by the user, whether it is a business car, a rental car, or a private vehicle.
The framework components necessary for this are integrated into the vehicle. A query – for example, whether the data about the user’s heart rate may be sent to the cloud – is first run through the “Policy Decision Point PDP”. It checks whether it is permissible. If it is, the PDP sends a release to the “Enforcement” or gives it the information which data is to be deleted or anonymized prior to being sent.
In the long term, the SECREDAS consortium wants to establish a standard for data usage control in vehicles that should be adopted by all car manufacturers, if possible, in order to enable informational self-determination of the vehicle users.