Step off a curb in Germany in front of a new BMW, and if the driver brakes hard, up to two minutes of video from the car’s exterior cameras can travel to BMW’s servers with your face still in it. The owner agreed to that in the car’s Privacy menu; you were never asked, and BMW says it can find and erase you only if you supply the date, time and place.
The same cameras will guide BMWs through German intersections and roundabouts from 2027, with the driver still responsible.
In late October, General Motors agreed to pay 36 states $220 million to settle claims that it sold records of its customers’ hard braking, driving over 80 mph and late-night trips through brokers to insurers, which used them to set premiums. On November 2, Ford published a privacy promise saying it does not sell how customers drive to insurers or data brokers.
Key Takeaways
- BMW’s navigation-guided city functions handle turns, urban lane changes, right-of-way situations and roundabouts. They are SAE Level 2, arrive in Germany in 2027 by over-the-air update, and need no new hardware on the iX3, iX4, 3 Series, 7 Series and X5.
- BMW collects exterior camera clips of up to 120 seconds after emergency braking, near-misses and similar events, with owner consent, in Germany since April 1, 2026 and now other European countries.
- Since September 2026 those clips travel unblurred; BMW obscures faces and license plates before a developer opens one, and says pedestrians’ erasure requests are unlikely to be feasible without a date, time and place.
- Ford’s privacy promise says it does not sell how customers drive to insurers or data brokers, and its notice requires a warrant before police get precise location.
- Ford’s BlueCruise driver camera sends no images automatically; a single image may be stored in the car after a crash or near-crash.
- Ford paid California $375,703 in a settlement announced March 5, 2026, over opt-out requests it slowed down and sales it made after customers opted out.
- GM’s $220 million settlement with 36 states resolves claims that OnStar Smart Driver data on hard braking, speeds over 80 mph and late-night driving was sold through brokers to insurers from 2016 to 2024.
- Police have sought unaltered robotaxi video: two burglary warrants among the nine Bloomberg counted for Waymo footage by mid-2023 noted Waymo’s “fogging” and asked for a “true and accurate depiction” of the recordings.
- Car apps share VINs, email addresses and location with analytics firms and a data broker, a Northeastern University and Consumer Reports study of 21 vehicles from 19 brands found.
BMW’s 2027 City Functions Are SAE Level 2
The new functions extend BMW’s Motorway Assistant and City Assistant, and City Assistant stops and pulls away at traffic lights in Germany today. Route guidance from BMW Maps lets the car anticipate the next maneuver, so it can prepare for a turn at an intersection, a lane change in town or the exit from a roundabout.
The status of each maneuver shows in BMW Panoramic Vision, the display band across the base of the windshield, and a new BMW Maps with Driver Assistance view puts the route, the surrounding traffic and the assistance status in one 3D picture on the center screen.
BMW checks attention through steering behavior and gaze direction, and the functions run only while the system judges the driver attentive. Under Symbiotic Drive, the driver can steer, brake or accelerate without switching the assistance off, and the car adapts to those inputs.
BMW fits the required equipment as standard on the new iX3 and iX4 and across the 3 Series, 7 Series and X5 lineups, and owners who bought before the rollout can activate the functions over the air.
Type approval for the city functions will come under the second series of UN Regulation 171, the European rule for driver-assistance systems that extends system-initiated maneuvers to city streets. BMW says an independent technical service has already completed the real-world traffic tests, and approval awaits official confirmation in early 2027.
Other countries follow Germany as their rules allow. BMW has not announced the city functions for the U.S.
Tesla‘s equivalent is also Level 2, and in Europe it now carries a new name: Tesla renamed Full Self-Driving “Tesla Assisted Driving” in October after Germany’s transport ministry called the old name somewhat misleading.
BMW Collects Exterior Camera Clips With Owner Consent
Since April 1, 2026, BMW has collected event-triggered recordings from the exterior cameras of iX3, i3, 7 Series and X5 models running BMW Operating System X, starting in Germany and since extended to other countries in the European Economic Area.
BMW lists the triggers as Emergency Brake Assist warnings, emergency braking, near-misses and detected obstacles such as lost cargo or wild animals. Each clip runs up to 120 seconds and travels with other sensor data, including location.
Recording needs the owner’s prior consent, given in the car’s Privacy menu or the My BMW app.
A BMW USA spokesperson said in April that consent “is fully up to the driver and can be revoked at any time,” and did not directly say whether the program will come to the U.S.
From April to September 2026, the car blurred faces and license plates, as far as technically possible, before sending a clip.
Since September, clips go to BMW’s back end unaltered, automated software analyzes them in a shielded environment BMW calls a “Blackbox,” and faces and plates are blurred before any developer opens one.
BMW deletes the vehicle identification number from its back end shortly after a clip arrives and says its systems sort objects into classes such as “person,” “passenger car” and “motorbike” without identifying anyone.
BMW sets no fixed retention period, and data kept for legal or homologation reasons may stay until the car’s life ends.
Pedestrians in BMW’s Clips Must Supply a Date, Time and Place
BMW asks the owner for consent and not the people its cameras record. It processes those passersby under the “legitimate interests” basis of the EU’s GDPR, Article 6(1)(f).
BMW’s notice grants passersby the full set of GDPR rights, including access and erasure, and says the company cannot find a person in its data without the date, time, location and situation, and that erasure, while possible in principle, is practically unlikely without those details.
Requests go to BMW AG’s data protection officer in Munich, and the notice also lists a privacy contact at Qualcomm.
In the Netherlands, the Dutch data protection authority found that Tesla’s Sentry Mode cameras filmed everything around a parked car and saved the footage for an hour. Tesla switched the cameras off by default during the investigation, and the authority, which announced its findings in February 2023, issued no fine because it held the owners, not Tesla, legally responsible for what their cars record.
In Oakland, the San Francisco Chronicle reported in August 2024 that police sought court orders at least three times that summer to tow parked Teslas they believed had recorded crimes nearby, citing Sentry Mode, and towed at least one.
Police make the same requests of robotaxi companies. Bloomberg counted nine search warrants for Waymo footage in San Francisco and Maricopa County, Arizona, by mid-2023, tied to cases including a murder, hit-and-runs and burglaries. Two of the burglary warrants noted the “fogging” Waymo applies to faces and license plates and asked for “a true and accurate depiction of the vehicle’s recordings,” the unaltered form in which BMW now transmits its clips.
Nine former Tesla employees told Reuters in 2023 that, between 2019 and 2022, groups of workers passed around customer car camera recordings on an internal messaging system, among them a video of a naked man walking toward a car, crash clips and road-rage incidents.
Ford Says It Doesn’t Sell Driving Data to Insurers or Brokers
Ford’s promise came with a website that explains what it collects, why, and how to change the settings. The controls existed before; Ford wants them understood ahead of more connected launches, including vehicles on its coming Universal EV platform.
“We also do not share information about how our customers are driving their vehicles to data brokers,” Kristin Jones, Ford’s chief privacy officer, told TechCrunch. “I just want to kind of reiterate that we’re not in it to try and monetize data in some way.”
Ford’s connected vehicle notice, effective July 1, 2026, sorts what a car can send into five categories: vehicle data, driving data, vehicle location, audio and visual data, and media analytics. The audio and visual category includes images from forward- and rear-facing cameras and voice commands.
Vehicle location may be collected “in limited situations” regardless of the location setting. Police need a warrant for precise location under the notice, with exceptions for emergencies such as preventing imminent harm.
On BlueCruise vehicles, a driver-facing camera tracks eye gaze and head position, and runs only while BlueCruise or Lane Centering Assist is engaged.
Ford says “no images, photos or videos are off-boarded from your vehicle to Ford during regular use,” though “a single image may be stored and physically retrieved from the vehicle” after a crash or near-crash, such as one that fires the airbags.
Turning off connected services also disables real-time navigation and built-in roadside assistance.
Deleting the Ford app does not stop a car from sharing; that takes a master reset or removing the VIN from the owner’s Ford or Lincoln account.
Ford’s California Disclosures List Sales
In its California section, the same notice says Ford has sold information about factory-installed features and options, tied to the VIN, to auction companies, insurers, dealers, lenders and guidebook providers so they can value a vehicle.
Its table of the past 12 months lists geolocation data as sold and shared with advertising and digital analytics companies, without saying whether that location came from a car or a website visit.
California’s Privacy Protection Agency fined Ford $375,703 in a decision adopted February 27, 2026, and announced March 5, after Ford added an email verification step to opt-out requests, processed opt-outs late and sold personal information after customers had opted out.
Montana’s attorney general sent Ford and Stellantis civil investigative demands in April 2026 over reports that they sold driver data, naming LexisNexis and Verisk Analytics as alleged buyers, and gave each company a month to answer; it has not announced a result. On October 16, Montana sued General Motors over its driving-data practices, seeking an injunction, fines and deletion of the data.
Car Apps Pass VINs and Location to Analytics Firms
Researchers at Northeastern University and Consumer Reports rerouted the traffic of 21 vehicles from 19 brands and their apps, and found the apps sending VINs, email addresses and location to outside companies, most often Adobe Analytics, the data broker Axiom and the analytics firm ContentSquare. Honda‘s app sent location and VINs to Amplitude, an advertising company; Honda asked Amplitude to delete the data and changed the app to stop transmitting geolocation.
Every maker in the study told app users it may share data with third parties, and none said which ones or why. Drivers who refuse that collection “mostly brick their cars,” said David Choffnes, a Northeastern professor and a lead author of the study, published September 29, 2026.
GM Paid $220 Million to 36 States Over Smart Driver
According to the states, GM collected hard acceleration, hard braking, driving over 80 mph and late-night driving through OnStar Smart Driver from 2016 to 2024, along with location, and sold it to data brokers who sold it to insurers that set premiums with it.
GM paid dealers incentives tied to enrollment, and some drivers were enrolled without consent. More than 370,000 drivers were told they were not enrolled when they were, according to North Carolina’s attorney general, whose office announced the settlement on October 30.
GM must now get express consent before collecting or disclosing driving and location data, limit what it collects, run a privacy program and train its dealers. The $220 million is paid to the states, and drivers receive no share. GM said the agreement addresses a product it ended in 2024.
In a separate California case, GM agreed in May 2026, subject to court approval, to a $12.75 million penalty over OnStar location and driving data sold to LexisNexis Risk Solutions and Verisk Analytics from 2020 through 2024, a five-year ban on selling driving data to consumer reporting agencies, and deletion of retained driving data within 180 days unless owners authorize keeping it.
BMW and Ford Data Practices Compared
| Question | BMW (Operating System X, Europe) | Ford (U.S. connected vehicle notice) |
|---|---|---|
| Driver-facing camera | Gaze and steering behavior used to confirm attention | Active only with BlueCruise or Lane Centering Assist; nothing sent automatically; one image may be stored after a crash |
| Exterior cameras | Event clips up to 120 seconds sent to BMW with owner consent | Forward- and rear-facing camera images listed as collectable data |
| Blurring of bystanders | Faces and plates obscured before developer access; unblurred in transit since September 2026 | Not addressed in the notice |
| Driving data to insurers or brokers | Not part of the camera program | Ford says it does not sell it |
| Police access to precise location | Not addressed in the camera notice | Warrant required, except emergencies |
| How to opt out | In-car Privacy menu or My BMW app | In-car settings, app Connectivity Settings, master reset or removing the VIN |
I compiled the table from BMW’s video data notice and Ford’s connected vehicle privacy notice, read November 3, 2026.
How to Limit What a BMW or Ford Shares
- BMW with Operating System X: open the in-car Privacy menu or the My BMW app and review the camera, microphone and location consents.
- Ford or Lincoln: adjust modem sharing in the in-vehicle Settings menu and app sharing in SYNC; use Connectivity Settings in the Ford or Lincoln app for connected devices.
- Selling or returning a Ford: do a master reset and remove the VIN from your account, since deleting the app leaves sharing on.
- Former OnStar Smart Driver users: GM’s California settlement, once a court approves it, requires deletion of retained driving data within 180 days unless you authorize keeping it.
BMW’s Cameras, Ford’s Promise and GM’s Settlement
BMW’s 2027 city functions will steer through German intersections and roundabouts on cameras that, since September 2026, send unblurred event clips of up to two minutes to BMW from owners who agree, and the pedestrians in them can ask for erasure only with a date, time and place. Ford’s November 2 promise rules out selling how customers drive to insurers or brokers and requires a warrant before police get precise location, yet its California disclosures still list geolocation data among categories sold for advertising, and California fined it $375,703 in a decision announced in March. The $220 million GM agreed to pay 36 states goes to the states, and the drivers whose braking and late-night trips the states say were sold receive none of it.
Frequently Asked Questions
When will BMW’s city driving assistance launch?
BMW plans to start in Germany in 2027, by over-the-air update, with other countries following as their regulations allow. The functions will be type-approved under the second series of UN Regulation 171, and BMW expects official confirmation of the approval in early 2027.
Is BMW’s city driving system self-driving?
It is SAE Level 2 partial automation. The driver must stay attentive, monitor traffic and be ready to take over, and BMW checks attention through gaze direction and steering behavior.
Which BMW models get the city functions?
BMW says the hardware is standard on the new iX3 and iX4 and across the 3 Series, 7 Series and X5 lineups. Owners who bought before the rollout can activate the functions over the air.
Is BMW’s city driving assistance coming to the U.S.?
BMW has not announced it for the U.S. The first market is Germany.
Does BMW record video from its cars’ cameras?
With the owner’s consent, BMWs running Operating System X in Germany and other European countries send exterior camera clips of up to 120 seconds after events such as emergency braking or near-misses. Since September 2026 the clips arrive unblurred, and BMW obscures faces and license plates before a developer views one.
Can a pedestrian get removed from BMW’s camera data?
BMW’s notice gives people captured on camera their GDPR rights, including erasure. It also says BMW cannot find someone without the date, time, location and situation, so erasure is practically unlikely without those details.
What is Ford’s privacy promise?
Ford’s privacy promise, published November 2, 2026, is a commitment to keep vehicle data safe and let owners control what they share, along with a website explaining what Ford collects and why. Ford says it does not sell data about how customers drive to insurance companies or data brokers.
Does Ford’s BlueCruise camera record the driver?
Ford says the driver-facing camera tracks eye gaze and head position only while BlueCruise or Lane Centering Assist is engaged, and sends no images automatically. A single image may be stored in the vehicle after a crash or near-crash.
Can police get my Ford’s location data?
Ford’s notice says a warrant is the only acceptable legal process for precise location data. It allows exceptions for emergencies such as preventing imminent harm.
Why did GM pay $220 million to 36 states?
The states said GM sold OnStar Smart Driver data on hard braking, acceleration, speeds over 80 mph and late-night driving, plus location, to data brokers who sold it to insurers from 2016 to 2024. The money goes to the states, and GM must get express consent before collecting or sharing driving and location data.
Do GM owners get money from the settlement?
The $220 million goes to the 36 participating states. Individual drivers do not receive payments from it.
Can police get video from a self-driving car?
Yes, with legal process. Bloomberg counted nine search warrants for Waymo footage in San Francisco and Maricopa County, Arizona, by mid-2023, and two of them noted Waymo’s blurring of faces and asked for a “true and accurate depiction” of the recordings.
Do car apps share my data with other companies?
A September 2026 Northeastern University and Consumer Reports study of 21 vehicles from 19 brands found apps sending VINs, email addresses and location to outside firms, most often Adobe Analytics, Axiom and ContentSquare. Every maker’s app policy said it may share with third parties without naming them.
Michael Kahn
Michael Kahn is the writer, photographer, and publisher behind The Weekly Driver. He cares about how cars drive and what they're like to own. He covers automobile industry news, car shows and events, and new car reviews. The reviews come from behind the wheel: day trips that favor back routes, treating a good meal as half the reason to go. He directs and produces the visual media, matching each car to a setting and mood that fit it. When he's not reviewing new cars, Michael races paddleboards, camels, and ostriches, along with the occasional exotic car on the racetrack, and has driven in every state and country visited.
https://theweeklydriver.com
