This is the best summary I could come up with:

In response to five class-action lawsuits, a Washington appeals court has decided that Honda and several other automakers did nothing wrong by storing text messages and call records from connected smartphones.

Honda, Toyota, Volkswagen, and General Motors were all facing charges in separate but related class-action suits that all claimed they violated Washington state privacy laws.

"To succeed at the pleading stage of a WPA claim, a plaintiff must allege an injury to 'his or her business, his or her person, or his or her reputation,'" the judges ruled.

In other words, it's A-OK for your car to "automatically and without authorization, instantaneously intercept, record, download, store, and [be] capable of transmitting" text messages and call logs since the privacy violation is potential, but the injury not necessarily actual.

Per the first amended complaint [PDF] filed in the Honda case, Honda infotainment systems in vehicles manufactured from 2014 onward "store each intercepted, recorded, and downloaded copy of text messages in non-temporary computer memory in such a manner that the vehicle owner cannot access it or delete it," plaintiffs argued.

Plaintiffs accusing Honda of WPA violations pointed to Maryland-based Berla Corporation, which manufactures equipment "capable of extracting stored text messages from infotainment systems" as a reason for owners to consider the data harvesting a privacy concern.

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