Vehicles on the road are becoming connected at an alarming rate, and the governments of the world are enabling its progression. While the intentions of interconnected vehicles are good, such as traffic data sharing and the ability to provide insight to active road conditions miles away from a driver, and as pointed out by Forbes, this also enables vehicle manufacturers to collect large amounts of data on the driver and his or her habits behind the wheel. But just what happens with that information once it's collected? A lot of people are willing to just give away personal data without blinking. Whether it be by navigating their way across town with Waze (which has historically shared non-identifiable data with local governments), or by simply using Facebook. As popular as it is, the latter social network, uses information that you and your friends provide (as well as information supplied by third party advertising partners), to curate ads and other targeted features towards you. Not only could a connected vehicle collect data regarding your location and driving habits, but automakers could easily provide these data to third-party agencies who use this information for advertising and statistical analysis purposes, or even to insurance companies which could go as far as using the information to determine how high your policy rates should be.

McKinsey Connectivity and Autonomous Driving Consumer Survey, 2015

Other possible scenarios are simply for the auto manufacturer to use its own data to up-sell products and services to owners. Utilizing information from a modern car's complex Controller Area Network (CAN Bus) system, it becomes possible to record active data from the vehicle's sensors, producing statistics regarding oil level, how hard an owner brakes or accelerates, tire pressure, fuel consumption, malfunction indicator lamp codes, and more. All of these data could be put to use in order to preemptively sell drivers services based on their driving habits, rather than a dealer sending a postcard in the mail to remind you about your car's upcoming 60,000-mile service. The consumer may also be offered in-car services that they could potentially purchase at the touch of a screen, much like another form of advertising in the vehicle. Though these data never technically need to leave the manufacturer, it can easily result in dealers offering what they see as value-added services that consumers may otherwise not buy into. Big data is a market all its own. Researchers and McKinsey & Co. predict that vehicle data monetization could become a $750 billion global market by 2030. Some companies who claim to not sell data still share data willingly using bartering and other tactics which don't technically monetize the information but still release it from the hands of the manufacturer. BMW, for example, has a marketplace called CarData, which it operates in Europe in collaboration with IBM. The service takes telemetry readings from cars which have not opted out of collection and aligns it for use in BMW's marketplace.

via BMW BMW's CarData simplified data access model