Every new car registered in the EU now comes with an infrared camera pointed squarely at your face. From July 7, 2026, the Advanced Driver Distraction Warning system — ADDW — became mandatory under the EU’s General Safety Regulation. The safety logic is sound: distraction kills, and regulators project thousands of lives saved over the next decade. But the regulation demanding this camera says remarkably little about who verifies what happens to the data it collects.
How the System Decides You’re Not Paying Attention
Mounted near the steering column or dashboard, the camera tracks your eyes, head, and face in real time — and it has strong opinions about where you look.
Above 50 km/h, glance away for more than 3.5 seconds and the system triggers visual, acoustic, or haptic warnings — beeps, dashboard lights, seat vibrations. Below 50 km/h, you get a generous 6 seconds. Warnings escalate if ignored. The system activates around 20 km/h and cannot be permanently disabled; it resets every ignition cycle.
One renter described getting distraction warnings every 10 minutes in a Ford Puma — the alerts themselves becoming the hazard.
Belgian automotive platform Gocar.be tested an Xpeng P7+ and found the system flagging a driver for glancing at scenery on an empty highway. The technology meant to keep your eyes on the road apparently wants them bolted there.
The regulation requires ADDW data to stay inside the vehicle. Specifically:
- Processing must happen in a “closed loop” — no transmission to third parties
- Facial recognition and biometric identification are explicitly banned
- Data must be “immediately deleted after processing”
- No fixed retention window is defined — the regulation leaves this open
- No independent EU-wide audit mechanism exists to verify compliance
“Data shall not be accessible or made available to third parties at any time and shall be immediately deleted after processing.” — EU General Safety Regulation (GSR 2019/2144).
The principle is clear. The enforcement architecture is not.
The Industry Track Record Doesn’t Help
The ADDW camera arrived in a market already conditioned to loose data boundaries.
Roughly 84% of car brands examined in a 2023 Mozilla Foundation review share or sell driver data. GM, Honda, Kia, and others fed driving behavior to brokers like LexisNexis, which sold insurance risk scores — sometimes hiking premiums without drivers knowing. Tesla employees reportedly shared sensitive customer camera footage internally between 2019 and 2022, including crashes and intimate moments captured near vehicles. None of this involved ADDW footage specifically. The pattern, though, reads like a warning label.
The industry’s track record isn’t reassuring.
The ADDW mandate “presents more than a compliance challenge — it reshapes vehicle design and driver interaction.” — Neonode, driver monitoring technology supplier
Drivers can read automaker privacy policies closely — checking whether ADDW data ever leaves the vehicle, whether insurers or data brokers are mentioned, and what retention periods apply. GDPR access and deletion rights remain available, and complaints can be filed with national data protection authorities. Until independent audits exist, the honest answer to “where does my face data go” stays uncomfortably simple: nobody has officially checked.
