Vero and Privacy4Cars Launch Data Privacy Solution for Connected Cars

Vero and Privacy4Cars have partnered to provide privacy tools and identity protection services for owners of connected cars.

The new Identi-FI solution covers the deletion of data from connected cars and the recovery from identity theft, the companies said in a Tuesday (March 12) press release.

“Partnering with Vero to launch Identi-FI marks an important evolution in our industry where now a single, value-driven identity theft and connected car deletion service exists to protect dealers and their customers, alike,” Andrea Amico, founder of Privacy4Cars, said in the release.

The new, combined solution includes two tools from Privacy4Cars: AutoCleared, a process that car dealers can use to remove personal information from used vehicles, and Vehicle Privacy Report, which displays badges to vehicle listings on the car dealer’s website, showing that personal data has been erased from each vehicle, according to the release.

Together with these, Identi-FI also includes Vero’s 3-Generation Fully Management Recovery (FMR), a service that helps restore the identity of victims of identity theft. This service provides remediation and recovery for all forms of identity theft or fraud, regardless of how or when they occurred, the release said. Dealers can offer this service to consumers as an add-on during the sales process.

The new Identi-FI offering is designed to provide a full-circle solution that limits the liability of car dealers and protects consumers from identity theft, no matter where it occurs, per the release.

“Until now, consumers and dealerships had to piecemeal privacy and identity theft tools separately, with limited resources in the auto space despite cars being one of the largest targets for identity theft that most Americans own, from connected car data to personal items left in the car,” Joe Annoreno, CEO at Vero, said in the release.

When it comes to the data collected and stored in connected cars, most dealerships agree that deleting the data of previous customers is a good thing to do, Amico told PYMNTS in an interview posted in July 2022.

“If a vehicle has GPS, it is extremely common that it contains medical data, in the meaning of hospitals,” Amico said, adding that it may include geolocation data that shows that the driver parked at a building that houses a medical provider.