A routine military exercise in Norway turned into a privacy scare with a lesson for any traveller who books a rental car. During a September exercise, soldiers from the Norwegian Home Guard discovered video footage stored inside cars they had rented through Hertz Norway — and the recordings weren't innocuous parking-cam clips.
According to Norwegian business paper Dagens Næringsliv, the stored material showed who got in and out of the vehicles, the routes they drove and their locations. Worse, the footage also captured the access codes used to open gates and doors at military installations. At least two of the cars were Chinese-made Deepal models, a brand belonging to the state-controlled Changan Group. The recordings were deleted after the exercise, but nobody has established whether the data had already been sent elsewhere or shared with outside parties.
The case has landed awkwardly for Hertz and for connected Chinese-built cars more broadly. Norwegian defence officials have previously warned about data flowing out of such vehicles, and this incident gives those warnings a concrete example: a car isn't just a car anymore. Modern rentals routinely carry cameras, GPS logging and always-on connectivity, and there's rarely a clear answer about where that data ends up or who can reach it.
For holiday renters, the practical takeaway is less about espionage and more about awareness. The same sensors that logged Norwegian soldiers' codes can record your conversations, your drives and your destinations. You generally can't switch the hardware off, but you can assume a rental car is recording and behave accordingly — keep sensitive calls out of the car, avoid leaving documents visible inside, and clear any paired phones and saved locations before you return the keys.
This roundup piece also touches on a few other travel notes worth a glance. Uber's CEO has weighed in on ride etiquette, suggesting passengers ask a driver's permission before taking phone calls — a tip that drew pushback given how many drivers chat loudly on their own calls mid-ride. American Airlines is adding 50 flights at Los Angeles International as it reclaims gates freed up by construction, including new trans-Pacific routes. Travellers at JFK faced brutal customs queues, with one passenger reporting just three officers working all passport lines after a 10:30pm arrival — a reminder to budget buffer time for late-evening international arrivals. And Spokane airport has issued a request for proposals for an airport lounge, a small but telling sign that even mid-sized US airports now see premium lounges as standard infrastructure rather than a big-city luxury.
Who should care about the Norwegian story? Anyone renting a car — especially in Europe, where Chinese-built brands from MG to Deepal are increasingly common on rental fleets. You don't need to be a soldier for always-connected cameras to be a privacy problem; business travellers, journalists and anyone handling confidential material in a rental would be sensible to treat the cabin as a recording space.
View from the Wing
