[dogma1138]

Navigation/location data, and also likely time stamped car activity data which you don’t get from the MCU.

Call data and other data from devices tethered to it, and for connected infotainment systems also wifi and cellular data which can provide a secondary source of location data in case the location history has been purged.

It wouldn’t surprise me if there are some more rich logs there including CANBUS data from other car systems on some of the newer models.

Overall if you have a late model car especially towards the upper end of the spectrum I would assume the infotainment system has about as much information as a cellphone you carry because they are basically phones stuck to the console at this point.

[uoaei]

I assume there's certain functionality similar to the casual surveillance tools from Allstate and other insurance companies that you plug into your OBD2 port. You know, the ones that log eg GPS location, velocity/acceleration/jerk of the vehicle or its controls, VIN and associated PII metadata, etc.

I've heard tale of all sorts of data that are broadcast back to the manufacturers' servers from your car for later sale to data brokers for advertising, etc. information. Not exactly surprising to hear that that information is available if you connect to the car directly using LE tools.

[olyjohn]

The Lotus I had would datalog all kinds of data over time. It was very common for buyers to have someone do a data dump of the car's ECU to see how it was used / treated. The ECU was very much designed just to run the engine in this car (no infotainment, network upload, or any other integration), but kept some interesting long term data. That data can be very telling. It tells you percentage of time that the engine spent at each RPM, and percentage of time spent at certain speeds, percentage of time spent at various manifold pressures, maximum engine speeds at certain coolant temps, highest vehicle speeds attained, and number of full load standing starts.

This info would not be useful to LE, because they don't keep timestamps on the data. But it is a big tell to the dealership how hard you have been driving your car.