Honda Refuses to Track Stolen Accord Because Owner Didn't Pay for HondaLink
thedrive.com
thedrive.com
If Honda offers a service that lets you track your car and you choose not to pay for the service that lets you track your car, you should expect that Honda will not let you use that service for free. And we should all be especially glad that they didn't provide the information to law enforcement without a warrant. There is a provision in the legal system for law enforcement to infringe on your right to privacy, and it's called a warrant and has to be authorized by a judge. This is one of the core tenants of many Western justice systems.
This seems like a complete non-story. "Man didn't pay for service, company refused to provide said service for free". Kinda loses the punch there, doesn't it?
But is there any precedent for charging the police to collect extant evidence? (Assuming a warrant is actually presented.)
I honestly don't know.
Honda Canada spokesperson: "Without an active subscription, the police would have to present a warrant to activate the location services on the vehicle and no such warrant was provided. At no time was Honda or its HondaLink provider aware of the location of this vehicle."
Top level comment suggested a right to charge for costs incurred, irrespective of having a warrant.
Although I'm still curious as to any case law.
While requiring a warrant from law enforcement is likely correct, refusing to give the owner the information necessary to track a signal from their own property is wrong. The owner of property should have a right to the information necessary to access a signal emitted by their own property. A situation where an owner does not have that right is essentially claiming that the device is leased rather than owned.
(Of course Honda wouldn't want this because then they'd have to compete with other providers for connected car services. Instead they wish to maintain a monopoly over Honda owners who may only choose between their service and no service.)
Owning the device is not the same as having a service that enables the device. Especially when it is a device that relies on third-party networks. There's a cost in that. That's like saying that Apple needs to give me data to use my iPhone just because I own the iPhone and I pay them for it. Those are separate concepts.
Honda can totally deny the customer access to the data associated with this service. The way I see it there are two possibilities here:
1) He reports that his car was stolen to law-enforcement and they, within the scope of their duties, can go and ask Honda to release this information. That's fair.
2) He contacts Honda saying that his car was stolen and that he already reported this to the police. He asks for the location data because he wants to know where is the car now. He doesn't want to wait for the police to do their job. They deny it because he doesn't pay for this service. They will, however, honor the situation described in #1. That's also fair.
Edit: your comment got updated.
I agree Honda can deny access to the data, but they shouldn't be able to deny the information needed to interface with his car via a 3rd party system instead.
A more accurate comparison would be if a hosting service logged the process of one of their customers being hacked, but then refused to turn over evidence to the FBI unless the customer paid them for "special security service."
The legality of doing this kind of thing can be debated, but i would hope people can at least recognize wrong when they see it.
No one should ever be compelled to hand over data to a police officer without a warrant, especially with something as sensitive as tracking the location of your car.
He paid for a car, he didn't pay for the GPS tracking. Simple as that.
You own your car but you rent the GPS tracking service. This person chose not to rent that service and therefor is not entitled to the benefits of it.
Not likely, given they provide this service through another company. Lots of overhead involved here, not to mention the initial work to set up the system. They should be able to charge for this.
Honda do not have a service where if you pay them they will track your car. Honda track car owners, and if you pay them will give you a copy of the data.
It is very questionable if user data is owned by the company that do the tracking. How would it look if Facebook withhold evidence that a victim requested in regard to information they themselves uploaded? Personally I found find it rather poor behavior if they extorted the victim before returning the victims personal information.
"Man got unknowingly data mined, company refuse to return private information to the victim of an ongoing crime." sounds like a story to me.
The key part of the article is that company is now saying that they did not track the car. If Honda never had the information then the argument that "Man didn't pay for service, company did not provide said service" make more sense.
But it wasn't, so none of the rest matters.
On second thought don't bother answering that because again, this didn't happen in the EU so GDPR means absolutely nothing.
And since we are not talking about GDPR, who owns the personal data gathered by a company. The company or the person. Is there any argument in favor of the person having a right to access that data without paying?
That's an interesting interpretation of GDPR. The car is not under the control of the owner, and so the location data isn't the owner's data.
I am also a bit curious of how the contract between the company and the device owner would transfer to the thief. The common way for companies to enable tracking is by having the user agree to it, but the thief clearly did not. Do a thief in EU have a GDPR case against a company if the owner track the stolen device through a service like this one?
Technically you can not track a person online. You can track an IP address, or a cookie, or an ID string in a database, but the server does not have eyes on the person behind the screen. Anyone can be behind the same IP address, people share accounts, browsers and devices. A operator can never be 100% sure if a data point identify you or anything about you.
But I don't think a judge would see that technical distinction. European courts already see mobile device location data as private data. So I ask you. What do you think a judge say about location data on peoples cars. Personal data just like mobile phones, or not?
This was the response Honda provided even without the GDPR applying.
The police could acquire a warrant to compel generation of the data, which Honda would comply with.
So, if your car has the potential of manufacturer tracking, you really need to make sure that any estranged partners cannot activate the feature. I wonder if shelters have some list of cars that can be tracked?
That said, it's easy enough to look up a police departments phone number and call back, should one want to verify they're actually taking to the police. It's not a problem of verifying identity.
This requires staff, training and monitoring to prevent abuse. When done, it introduces liability. It's reasonable to ask to be compensated for all that.
Especially if you're a multi-billion dollar conglomerate. They can't exactly claim ignorance like a start-up might.
If the police present a warrant, yes. Everything else is customer service.
Option 2: don't comply with LE+owner's request; deal with later warrant at higher cost (now you have compliance & legal involved); vehicle is not recovered, bad PR is obtained, and everyone loses.
Consequence 1b: you released tracking information to a stalker. They fooled your rep into thinking police were involved. Not only do you have a PR nightmare, you've also opened yourself up to legal liability.
I'm not arguing this is the right balance. Finding that balance depends on branding, legal and financial factors. But it's not an unreasonable position.
This is why you have policy for appropriate response and organizational escalation in place if necessary. Not hard to contact the department in question via another directory and verify the request.
There are a significant number of frauds committed by police (using official resources to stalk, bully, or sell information) and they are caught and prosecuted only when people don't help them bypass things the system can reasonably audit.
So why didn't he just get a warrant? The surveillance video provided clear evidence of a crime.
Thieves aren't dumb -- I mean, plenty of them are, but plenty of them are smart enough to also know there are tracking devices in common consumer vehicles. Give them enough time and they can find and remove or disable such trackers.
OTOH, turning on the tracker ASAP gets you a location now, and that's something the police can move on.
And for time critical issues like this, it shouldn't be.
Can you get a police response in time to move on that information? In the world of police response priorities, I can totally understand that a stolen vehicle (even with active tracking in progress) pretty low on the list. Active car jacking, send a unit to respond. Reporting a car theft from a shopping mall parking lot, send a unit when available.
> An employee at a call center operated (or contracted) by Honda reportedly confirmed that they had the vehicle's location, but declined to share it
But even if it’s just pings, the pings have to leverage some sort of network which can be used to establish a general location if not an exact one. That’s still too much for me.
We just put up a Ring doorbell on our house. I know that making the (surveillance!?!) video available to my phone requires something be stored somewhere and transmitted over some network. Storage and transmittal mean other people will have it at some point. Should I be surprised or offended about that at some point in the future? Or offended that after some trial period I may have to pay somebody for that service?
Perhaps a case of not reading the manual, clicking next, not reading the EULA... ?
Having to visit a dealership to enable the feature would cost them more in "meh, I can't be bothered" lost sales than the couple kilobytes of cellular data probably incurs.
Are they doing anything with those data?
Although Honda could save themselves some grief by not tracking at all if the owner doesn't have the service.
The proper way to compel them to spend their own resources to determine the location of a vehicle that may have been stolen would be to present a warrant for that information.