TomTom bill bomb: Why am I being charged for infotainment? I sold my car last year, rages Reg reader
- Reference: 1594376712
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/07/10/mazda_tomtom_data_retention_billing/
- Source link:
Ben Rose owned a Mazda CX-5 until late last year. His vehicle included a dashboard-mounted in-car entertainment (ICE) suite powered by TomTom, which later proved to be the source of some strange goings-on that cost him money (since refunded) and made him fear that his personal data had been saved by the car and was now allowing someone else to bill him for the in-car satnav.
In December 2019 Rose sold his Mazda. He told The Register : “After arriving at the car dealer I joked with my children that I was using the ‘self destruct’ button on the car as I dug out the option to wipe all personal data. This is intended to clear out stored phone numbers, recent destinations, home address details. Essentially a factory reset before passing on to the next owner.”
Rose was following the advice in Mazda’s CX-5 owners’ handbook on how to sanitise his data from the car before selling it on. He showed us the relevant page:
[1]
Click to enlarge
The car, he told us, sat on the dealer’s online listings page for months as the COVID-19 pandemic destroyed market demand for cars. Eventually Rose forgot about it – until earlier this month he noticed his debit card had been billed by TomTom.
Rose was stunned: “I got another email from TomTom about the ‘World’ services I had purchased. I hadn't. These services are for a sat nav device I don't have that's permanently fitted in a car I no longer own.”
Connected car data handover headache: There's no quick fix... and it's NOT just Land Rovers [2]READ MORE
He complained to both TomTom and Mazda, and, when he was unhappy with the non-committal replies he received, got in touch with The Register . Why, he asked us, would these companies be billing him for products he didn’t own and couldn’t use? Had his data persisted in the Mazda’s ICE suite?
Third party supplier - nothing to do with us...
We asked Mazda whether its car could have retained Rose’s data despite the reset. PR director Graeme Fudge told us in an emailed statement: “We do not hold any financial or identifiable data on our car systems. When a customer sells a car they delete their data from the car’s system, this includes previous routes, favourites, contacts, telephone numbers and call history, this ensures subsequent customers cannot access any data from the previous owner.”
Fudge continued: “Where the customer has an agreement with a third party supplier, no related financial or identifiable information is held in the car’s system. As the third party relationship is directly between the customer and the supplier, only the customer can change or cancel any services, such as cancellation of subscriptions or changes of customer information.”
When we asked Fudge if Mazda cared about the perception that one of its cars appeared to have retained onboard customer data despite a factory reset, Fudge replied: “The car holds no financial or identifiable data and if he deleted the data prior to selling the car all data stored on the car would have been deleted. The only data stored on the car system would have been previous routes, favourites, contacts, telephone numbers and call history.”
Rose had described to The Register how he used the in-car screen to set up his annual subscription to TomTom after he first bought the Mazda.
TomTom was a little more forthcoming, admitting to emailing a number of Mazda owners to tell them it had signed them up to services they may or may not have wanted, later correcting its blunder.
The satnav firm’s Zita Butler told The Register : “Last week, an email was mistakenly sent to a small number of customers registered with us as owners of a Mazda with our in-car entertainment suite installed. This included Mr Rose. The email informed recipients that their TomTom LIVE Services subscription was being renewed and would be billed for a month at GBP 9.99. As soon as we realized our mistake, we issued a refund for the charged amount, and are contacting those impacted customers to apologize. We understand Mr Rose’s frustration, and have reached out to him personally with our apologies.”
She added that when Rose sold his Mazda, he did not delete his online account with TomTom and remains registered in its customer database to this day.
Rose’s woes shed light on the amount of data collected by modern cars and the necessity of clearing all your online accounts associated with your car when you flog it on – a concept that would have been incomprehensible 15 years ago.
Car infosec expert Ken Tindell, CTO of Canis Automotive Labs, opined that it would take some time before car (and satnav) makers got their heads around the personal data problems – and “before that’s fully fed through to cars on the road”.
“Infotainment falls between two worlds: the culture of car makers is slow and conservative (not least because two tons of speeding metal can be lethal), but the culture of the tech industry is move fast and break things (worship of the MVP god),” Tindell told El Reg . “This inevitably leads to poor implementations as car makers grapple with unfamiliar issues. Cars take years to develop and then remain in production for years after, and there will be new cars rolling off production lines today that were conceived before the year 1BIP (Before iPhone).”
“Time to belt-up and prepare for more of these stories,” he concluded. ®
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[1] https://regmedia.co.uk/2020/07/09/maz_manual.jpg
[2] https://www.theregister.com/2018/08/21/connected_car_data_handover_mess/
[3] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
Re: As I read that
Yup. Sounds like he signed up for regular updates with TomTom and forgot about it, and he's trying to blame Mazda for it.
Re: As I read that
I have a TomTom Rider device for my Bike and I also use it in my car. I bought the device with [cough][cough] lifetime updates. I don't know what constitutes a lifetime in TomTom's eyes but so far I've not paid anything on top of my initial outlay.
The TomTom is heaps better than the built-in SatNav which is supplied by Here.com.
I reallu don't know why I need to download 33Gb of maps every months for the Here device. Why do I need road maps of Russia? It really is time that we were allowed to choose which maps we wanted to update instead of 'All of Europe' or nothing.
Re: As I read that
If Mazda bundled a 2nd party device on their product, they could have included a note about it in the manual, as an addendum 'partner services' (or whatever).
Re: As I read that
Then that's a UI failure. The reset screen really should list the accounts on the car and a) remind him the accounts will still exist afterwards and he may want to go to each website to tell them to stop billing him or, even better, b) send an instruction to each account to tell it to stop billing him (if it's technically possible to start billing via the in-car screen then it's technically possible to stop billing via the in-car screen).
Re: As I read that
If TomTom is installed by default in some fashion by Mazda I'd assume they had some liability, then again I'm sure the TOS and TomTom email he got when he signed up probably mentioned about having to cancel etc.
Not sure I'd assume selling my merc would stop apple itunes charging me afterwards - I'd go cancel itunes etc. (I don't have either btw.. just saying).
Re: As I read that
So when you have a problem with the brakes on your car you should take it up with Brembo directly, nothing to do with the manufacturer of the car?
New one on me
“1BIP” - YABATR
(Yet Another Bloody Acronym To Remember)
GDPR
Give that button a push with them and see where it goes.
Re: GDPR
Not going to be a factor, he signed up with TomTom, not Mazda and only TomTom hold this data.
Re: GDPR
...so he should now submit a "Delete my data" request as facilitated by GDPR.
Re: GDPR
Except he no longer has the service so has the right to be removed and his data.
Simpler than I expected
As I started the article I predicted another outcome.
I assumed it was going to turn out to be that TomTom billed based on an immutable identifier (say the device's serial number), so when he wiped his data from the car, it didn't change the billing identifier leading to Tomtom not knowing anything.
I think it's a bit too easy, though, to say that he should have known he needed to contact Tomtom and cancel his account. He set it up through the car's interface, so most "normal" people would probably assume it'd get killed when they did the reset, if they even thought of it. Either Mazda need to update their handbook "if you configured Tomtom, go to https://blah", or the reset should send a notification to TomTom.
Re: Simpler than I expected
You're on a hiding to nothing if you expect a company to cancel a direct debit for you. I've seen plenty of stories of utility companies and Virgin Media continue to charge when people have left them.
In fact when I moved house from one VM area to another they couldn't just change the address, they had to set up a whole new account and a new direct debit.
When the new one was set up and money debited I ended the old DD - which resulted in threatening emails from Virgin about terminating my service while under contract and to reinstate it immediately otherwise I'd be liable for penalties.
Re: Simpler than I expected
I agree with you; I always remove any direct debit mandates via on-line banking when I cancel a service. That way even if the supplier screws up (and they do so frequently in my experience) they get nothing but a shitty message from my bank.
Did have one threaten to get a CCJ against me once, but I promised them that I would turn up in court with proof that I had cancelled my contract with them. They shut up PDQ at that point.
Re: Simpler than I expected
> You're on a hiding to nothing if you expect a company to cancel a direct debit for you. I've seen plenty of stories of utility companies and Virgin Media continue to charge when people have left them.
True.
In the heady old days of Tiscali, I moved house and they failed to action the home move. After them telling me I'd now have to wait a month for an engineer I cancelled with them, and went with BT (who had me up and running 48 hrs later).
But... to my shame, I forgot to cancel the direct debit. Tiscali were still taking money 3 months later (when I noticed), then told me it might take 6 months for my money to be returned, so I used the DD guarantee to get back via my bank. Cue angry letters and debt collector threats, along with claims they could find "no record" of my home move request, or me cancelling (despite me sending them copies of their confirmation emails).
I had to take the sods through arbitration, whilst trying to ignore the constant letters saying they were going to sell the "debt". Quite aside from needing better service nowadays, I'd never go with a budget ISP again.
/anecdote
But my point wasn't so much that they should cancel it for you, as it was that Mazda could simply put "remember to contact Tomtom" in their manual to remind people selling their car. After all, you probably set the account up months (if not years) ago, so relying on people remembering for themselves instead of printing 1 extra sentence seems poor.
Hang on, a PR person called Fudge?
Maybe he has a sweet nature?
...does he have a colleague called Bodge?
Nothing new
... if you expect a company to cancel a direct debit for you.
I see this is a worldwide thing, evidently not limited to what are these days called first world countries.
Where I live it is one of the main complaints customers have.
When I was but a child and living in the US, my father puchased a car from a Ford dealer, an ugly beige two door Falcon with financing directly from the company.
I cannot recall the price but it was a relatively small amount up-front and something like 36 installments of $66.66. (late 60's)
A wife, four children and a dog meant money was always short and I recall his being very happy when he finally paid the last $66.66.
Nevertheless, the billing for the $66.66 continued to arrive at our mailbox, so for the first two or three months he called Ford's credit office and everytime they said it was OK and the problem was solved.
The billing stopped but was replaced with overdue payment notices and after that, polite letters demanding payment or legal action.
This went on for about a year or so and I recall my father actually being refused financing for something we needed from Sears thanks to this.
Eventually, when confronted by xerox copies of all the cancelled checks personally presented by my father at some office in downtown DC, whoever was responsible for billing or whatever finally managed to solve the issue.
It's not the same as direct debit was unheard of at the time, but it shows there's really nothing new under the sun.
O.
he used the in-car screen to set up his annual subscription to TomTom
Oh, how cool is that, eh!
p.s. does he own a "smart fridge"? Several alexa-linked speakers around the house? A battery of voice-activated bulbs perchance, etc, etc?
NEVER put your home address in your GPS!
Choose something like a supermarket or tourist attraction that is near where you live (and preferably near your route home) as your "destination", then you never have to worry about someone getting your address from your GPS. Once you get close enough, you ignore the GPS and just drive home.
As I read that
The problem was with TomTom and not with Mazda?