Ian Fogg watched his car drive away on his video doorbell while abroad in March. His phone had pinged moments earlier to say he no longer had access to the Kia Connect app – thieves had broken in without keys and disconnected his phone via the entertainment system. For a short while, an Apple Airtag hidden inside let him track the vehicle, until the thieves found it and discarded it because it was making a noise, a feature introduced by Apple to combat stalking.
Yet even with Kia’s own Connect service able to see the car’s live location, Fogg has not been able to retrieve it. The manufacturer told the BBC that UK law prevents the Connect function from being used to live track vehicles, advising customers to use it for “convenience” rather than security. Kia Connect, the firm said, “is a customer convenience feature, not a certified security vehicle tracker” and does not provide live‑tracking functionality for stolen vehicles.
“Ian Fogg's stolen car cannot be recovered despite live tracking, as Kia says UK law blocks real-time use.”
Fogg, a technology analyst at FDM CCS Insight, filled out a form eight times requesting the car’s location, each time receiving the data only 24 to 48 hours after the car had been recorded there. “This car was incredibly easy to hack but incredibly difficult to track,” he told BBC News. “It shouldn’t be this easy to nick a car when they cost an order of magnitude more than a phone and have similar radio technology.”
Car safety firm Thatcham Research warned there is a “genuine and growing gap” between consumer expectation and the technical reality of so-called connected car features. Kia told the BBC that releasing location details must be done “in full compliance with all applicable laws, in particular GDPR, and the authorities to minimise risk.”
Fogg’s story, experts say, is a cautionary tale of how tech can promise security but cannot necessarily be relied upon in the event of a crisis.