[SteveAus]

I received an interesting call from BMW yesterday telling me that I had a warning light on my car…front and rear sidelights not working.

What had actually happened was, on the day before, I re-coded my car with BimmerCode after a BMW OTA software upgrade.
An idiosyncrasy with BimmerCode after coding is that the you receive a warning that the front and rear sidelights are not working (in fact they do work, but the warning appears).
I had forgotten to switch off the car and lock it, and then unlock the car. This clears the error message. I had driven around for a few minutes with the warning message symbol on the dash.

What intrigued me is that my dealer knew that the warning message had appeared and called me the following day to let me know.

I had not realized that BMW monitors your car so closely and so remotely.

[Sierra055]

Wow. Wonder if that can be disabled. I don't need the dealer chasing me for stuff like that thanks.

[AP]

That’s interesting
I know when you switch off the car it send various data up to bmw that you can then see in your bmw app, I guess there may be more being sent than we all thought

I wonder if it’s worth doing a freedom of information request or a GDPR request to see exactly what data bmw has for you / your car?

I also wonder if info like this may help bmw know if the car has been coded?

[SteveAus]

A good thing I see about this data collection is that should you have an accident in a remote area, and are unresponsive, BMW would receive many warnings from the vehicle and would be in a position to notify emergency services to assist at your location.

The other obvious benefit, as already mentioned in this thread, is that should your car be stolen it can be located easily.

[cyam]

Go to Privacy section in the menu - you can switch off any/all of this. Or you can do what I did and take it all the way and disable the SIM. Stops everything including OTA and SOS - you need to contact BMW Australia and complete a form and they disable the SIM.

While there may be *some* benefits to sharing this information / giving access / having these features - there can be serious downsides. Like the information collected being used against you. You can figure out what I mean. It's up to you.

If you value your privacy, controlling the privacy settings and or disabling the SIM is at your option.