I have a few year old Volkswagen. I'm security conscious and made sure to disable all the data collection I could find in the companion app, turn off remote access services, dig through the infotainment to turn off what I could, etc.
Last year I requested a Carfax on it, and one of the fields in the request was current mileage. I entered an estimate like 75000 miles. On form submission, that field failed validation with the red subtext along the lines of 'this is less than the last reported mileage of 75345, reported <5 or so days prior>'. Checking my odometer and looking at my past few days' trips, that was indeed accurate.
The car hadn't been to a shop or out of my possession in weeks, so I can only assume the telemetry was still dialing home and selling to third parties despite my best efforts to disable it.
Anecdotal and not unexpected in the grand scheme, but it still surprised me.
I think this is interesting because it collides my intuition from the pre-adtech world with the post. Surely collecting telemetry on nearly every mile you drive could never be a sensible use of time or money, right? What kind of insanity is that? But then of course I know that every click on every website is recorded for all time and that data must be many thousands of times less valuable.
Worked in enterprise for most of my career, uniformly the business side asks for every single piece of data possible to be collected and kept in case they need it.
They basically never need 95% of it and most of it is never looked at again.
That 5% that does gets used ends up been collapsed to a single 100,000ft view somewhere that the decision makers in the company can see it and immediately treat as gospel.
Which is fun when you are the new hire, get asked to look at that dashboard and it turns out it's not calculating the totals correctly at all.
Then you have all the people in that business who collate reports for more senior report readers who never look at them but still collate them and those more senior report readers never pass it up anyway.
Enterprise is a serious weird kafakaesque place at times, it helps to just ignore the weirdness since you can't change it.
I think reporting mileage would be one of the only usages for data collection that is ok with me.
In some countries there's a SCAM in which the owner or agency lowers the mileage of the car and sell it for much more because of the lower mileage.
It's hard to take any piece of text seriously when it contains all-caps'd emotionally charged words seemingly just to make sure we notice that they're there.
System working as intended