[netsharc]

BMW offers a car-sharing service in some cities in Europe through a joint venture with Sixt, called DriveNow. Some assholes like to take these cars and go for joyrides/street races. One of these idiots ran over a bicyclist and killed them. The court/prosecution asked DriveNow to give them the "black box" data of GPS location/heading/speed, but the company doesn't monitor GPS during trips. The court asked BMW, and BMW could comply. A bit freaky...

(After reading more about it, the black box is only for cars used in this service, and apparently BMW and DriveNow have a "data protection firewall": BMW only tells DriveNow where the trip started and ended, and doesn't know who rented the car, and DriveNow knows who the renter is but doesn't know more other than the start/end of their trip)

[mynameisvlad]

It's in some cities in the US too. It's not freaky at all for a company to want to protect their assets (the DriveNow cars). Mercedes Benz does this with their Car2Go cars as well, and I'm sure ZipCar also does this too. They have custom software running to enable all the DriveNow/Car2Go functionality.