Ford

The Ford Motor Company was founded in 1903 by Henry Ford in Detroit, Michigan. With the introduction of a moving assembly line, Ford drastically reduced the cost and time of automobile production, making cars affordable for the masses and transforming industrial production globally. It is one of the oldest and largest automobile manufacturers, one of the "Big Three" American automakers, alongside General Motors (GM) and Stellantis (formerly Chrysler).

Ford’s data collection practices and privacy policies have raised significant concerns:

• Extensive data collection: Ford collects a wide range of personal and vehicle data, including location, driving behavior (speed, braking), voice commands, media preferences, and even passenger information. This data is linked to the Vehicle Identification Number (VIN), which can be tied to individual users.^[1]
• Data collected includes purchase history, financial information, coarse and precise location data, contact information, identifiers (e.g., VIN, account ID), user-generated content (e.g., voice recordings from smart features), search and browsing history for advertising purposes, usage data, sensitive information (under "Inferences"), diagnostics, and more.^[1]
• Aggregates data from external sources as well, including users' social media posts.^[1]
• Privacy policy is designed to prevent quickly searching for important terms.^[1]
• Lack of transparency and control: Users are often unaware of the scope of data collection, and Ford’s policies allow sharing with affiliates, dealers, advertisers, and law enforcement. The company reserves the right to override location settings in certain circumstances (e.g., repossession, legal requests).^[1]
• Security vulnerabilities: Past incidents, such as cybersecurity flaws in the FordPass app and exposed customer records, highlight risks of data breaches. Ford has been criticized for dismissing external reports of vulnerabilities.^[2]
• According to Ford's Annual CCPA Metrics for 2024, the company received 137 requests to delete personal information and denied 7.^[1]

• Limited opt-out options: Ford’s default settings opt users into data collection, with no clear path to fully delete data. Passengers and secondary drivers must also be informed of data collection, placing the burden on the primary user.^[1]
• Opt-in by default: Connected features accessed via the FordPass app, such as remote start and tire pressure checks, send vehicle data to Ford by default. According to Mozilla's Privacy Not Included review, halting account-linked data sharing requires performing a master reset or removing the VIN from the account.^[2]

• Data monetization: Ford’s business model leverages user data for targeted advertising, joint marketing, and partnerships (e.g., Sirius XM). This aligns with broader industry trends where data is a revenue driver.
• AI and surveillance: Investments in AI (e.g., Baidu’s SYNC system in China) enable deeper user profiling, raising ethical questions about surveillance and consent.^[3]

• Dealership consolidation: Ownership groups that already hold multiple dealerships have acquired Ford-branded outlets, such as 1911265 Alberta Ltd.'s 2016 acquisition of Freedom Ford Sales Limited. Canada's Competition Bureau reviewed the Freedom Ford transaction and issued a No Action Letter on January 29, 2016, concluding that effective remaining competitors made a substantial lessening of competition unlikely.^[4]
• Dependence on connected services: By integrating AI and IoT (e.g., autonomous vehicles, CarStory analytics), Ford reinforces market dominance in connected car technology, potentially stifling smaller competitors.

• Patents regarding consumer data
  • Ford has secured a patent for a system that is unrelated to core driving functions and involves vehicle repossession, allowing access restrictions in cases of missed payments. Ford has clarified that holding the patent does not necessarily mean it will be implemented in future products. However, the existence of such a system could influence consumer perceptions of the company and affect their willingness to accept certain sales terms.^[5]
• Engineering practices
  • Ford suffered a significant hit to its reputation regarding the Pinto, a car the company sold through the entire 1970's decade and the company's first subcompact. A number of high-profile incidents happened involving the cars getting rear-ended and subsequently lighting on fire due to the fuel tank rupturing and spilling gas; in subsequent lawsuits and criminal cases, Ford was accused of knowing the cars had a defect and deciding not to fix it based on an internal cost-benefit analysis that supposedly found it far cheaper to settle the lawsuits than actually fix the defect.
  • Some engine designs use a rubber belt, rather than a metal chain, to drive the oil pump. This belt operates submerged in engine oil and may wear out prematurely, potentially leading to a sudden loss of oil pressure. Additionally, they have released transmission systems in certain Fiesta and Focus models that have experienced issues, including loss of power during acceleration, gear shifting, or at constant speeds, as well as unintended acceleration. It has been reported that a software update rendered a vehicle inoperable.^[6][7][8]
  • Ford has had the highest number of vehicle recalls in the U.S. in 2021, 2022, and 2023. While recall volume can be influenced by market share, larger automakers often have more recalls, it may also reflect differences in production quality compared to competitors.^[9]

In February 2023, Ford filed United States patent application number 20240289844, titled "In-Vehicle Advertisement Presentation Systems and Methods."^[10] The application describes a system that combines historical user data with audio signals from inside the vehicle to serve personalized advertisements through the human-machine interface, monitoring conversations between occupants to decide when, how many, and in what format to present ads.^[10][11] The patent overview states that "such systems and methods further provide the opposite force to a user's natural inclination to seek minimal or no ads."^[10] Vehicle location and navigation data would be used to infer the user's residence or workplace and to select ads tied to commercial locations along the driver's route; current traffic data could trigger increased ad delivery during longer trips spent in congestion.^[10] For the full incident article, see Ford ad patent.

Ford Global Technologies, LLC is the named applicant on patent application US 2026/0095520 A1, titled "Systems and methods for hands-free communication in convertible vehicles," published by the United States Patent and Trademark Office on April 2, 2026.^[12] The named inventors are Keith Weston, John Robert Van Wiemeersch, Matthew Flis, and Brendan Diamond. The application was filed October 1, 2024 as application number 18/903,253. A local archive of the patent application PDF is hosted on this wiki.

The application describes a vehicle that detects when it is in a convertible state (top retracted, panel removed, door removed, or sunroof open) and, if cabin noise exceeds a threshold, switches its in-vehicle communication system into an enhanced mode.^[12] The enhanced mode can enable a lip reading mode and a gesture and facial expression detection mode. The application states that "[t]he one or more cameras of the vehicle capture the movements of the user's lips" and that the captured video is processed using machine learning algorithms trained on datasets of lip movements.^[13] It also describes a method in which "the vehicle may emit inaudible sound waves and analyze the echoes that bounce back from the user's lip and mouth" to detect facial movements.^[13] Independent claim 16 recites storing in a database the association between each of a plurality of gestures and a corresponding verbal command. Dependent claim 17 adds the steps of detecting a gesture, looking up its corresponding command in the database, and executing that command.^[14]

The application describes storing gesture-to-command associations in a vehicle database^[14] and transmitting generated speech or text data to the other party in a conversation,^[13] but it does not specify whether raw lip-movement video is retained after processing, how long any captured data is kept, or whether any captured data flows to Ford's control servers or cloud infrastructure. As of the April 2, 2026 publication date, it is a published application and has not issued as a granted patent. For Ford's earlier in-vehicle data collection practices, see Jones v. Ford Motor Co..