This is the way. What legitimate interest could Subaru have in maintaining this much data about their customers?
location and g force and direction when the automated system shuts off and returns control to the driver, that sort of thing. I don't agree with it, but that would be my guess.
I own a Subaru that does this, so I'm not happy about it, but what can I do?
That's rhetorical.
That stuff is probably more valuable than many of us want to admit. There is the maybe more noble value: training data for maps, traffic analysis AI, engineering duty cycle data, things like that. Then there are the other uses, for example various surveys and studies are needed for new roads or signal changes, can this kind of data proxy for that? We would be talking about cutting millions of dollars out of some of these projects and months or even years off a timeline. Then the ad-tech, where do you put billboards and signage? Where do you build a shop? Probably other uses we aren’t even thinking about.
Cars have become a commodity, especially since China made their first vehicles that didn't get outright banned in Europe for being too unsafe to be roadworthy, and even some nominally "entry level" cars have more horsepower under the hood than a 1990s 7-series BMW (138 kW). Strict requirements on emissions, fuel consumption and crash safety have all but eliminated differences in optics (the amount of shapes is finite). So the only thing left to differentiate other than build quality (where China is rapidly catching up) is assistance systems... and there, AI is the hot craze, and AI only works when it has insane amounts of data to gobble up.