The way you drive is surprisingly unique. And in an era when automobiles have become data-harvesting, multi-ton mobile computers, the data collected by your car—or one you rent or borrow—can probably identify you based on that driving style after as little as a few minutes behind the wheel.
In a study they plan to present at the Privacy Enhancing Technology Symposium in Germany this July, a group of researchers from the University of Washington and the University of California at San Diego found that they could “fingerprint” drivers based only on data they collected from internal computer network of the vehicle their test subjects were driving, what’s known as a car’s CAN bus. In fact, they found that the data collected from a car’s brake pedal alone could let them correctly distinguish the correct driver out of 15 individuals about nine times out of ten, after just 15 minutes of driving. With 90 minutes driving data or monitoring more car components, they could pick out the correct driver fully 100 percent of the time.
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