A woman warned people renting cars about turning those cars in without erasing the info that might have been left behind if they plugged their smartphones into those cars while traveling.
The “cybersecurity tip,” as she dubbed it, came courtesy of creator Kim (@travelingfarmerkim). Her video has more than 70,000 views.
“If you have rented a car and connected your phone, I want to show you what strangers can see,” she warns before showing the screen of a rental car with a hefty collection of phone names from the likes of Grace, Jenny, Sherry, and Capt. Asim, as well as a phone simply titled “Awesome.”
“So I can see all these people’s first names, [and] get some information about them,” she observes. “Depending upon the settings of the car that you’re in, you can get more information. Just might want to erase it as a little bit of extra privacy.”
Some are skeptical
Judging from reactions to the video, not everyone bought into her warning.
“This is such a non-problem,” one scoffed.
“Oh no, someone will see that a person they don’t know owns a phone named ‘my iPhone,’” said another, adding, “THE HORROR.”
Another exclaimed, “Now we all know that someone named William has an iPhone! So scary!”
“I can’t see how this makes a person vulnerable in any way,” someone else stated.
So is it safe to connect your phone in a rental car?
As much as she was mocked, cybersecurity experts revealed information in a CNBC story from last September indicating that maybe Kim’s onto something. The story quoted a source saying that 57% of rental car customers sync their smartphones to those cars. But less than half of those remember to delete their saved profiles before returning the car.
“GPS data can act as breadcrumbs leading to your home, work, and other frequented locations,” said another source in the story. They noted that if someone with nefarious motives collected enough data points, they could track that phone owner’s routines and connect the data to social media accounts.
“It would be very difficult to use this information to steal your identity, but it might be enough to identify who you are, identify where you’ve been. And that might be more than enough information to sell to somebody who is going to call and try to scam your grandma out of money by [saying] you were in an accident or you were arrested,” said Clyde Williamson, senior product security architect at Protegrity, for the CNBC story. “That’s a very common kind of attack that’s happening to people. It’s by far more common than stealing your identity and trying to open a credit card.”
It’s possible, though, that if you’ve left your info behind a rental car, some other renter took care of you.
As one respondent to Kim’s video shared, “I always delete all the phones when I get the car and delete mine out when I return it. Some systems download your phonebook to it so you want to make sure you delete everything.”
That inspired Kim to respond, “That’s really kind of you.”
@travelingfarmerkim #cybersecurity #carrentals ♬ original sound – Kim
What inspired Kim to share the safety tip?
Responding to the Daily Dot via TikTok direct message, Kim said her inspiration for creating the video was twofold.
The first? “I just passed a certification called Comp-TIA, and learned about the concept of ‘defense in depth,’” she explained. “In other words, have multiple layers of best practices; that way when one fails (because we are all human and get rushed or harried), there are other layers to help keep you safer.
“So [is] deleting your profile off rental cars the number one thing to do?” she continued. “Not reusing passwords is probably number one! But it’s about a comprehensive approach.”
And the second? She said, “I recently rented a car and started thinking about it. I never took calls or entered my home address on the car so contacts and routes did not sync.”
Internet culture is chaotic—but we’ll break it down for you in one daily email. Sign up for the Daily Dot’s web_crawlr newsletter here. You’ll get the best (and worst) of the internet straight into your inbox.
