When the Vendor Adds a Feature
Hosted telematics changes underneath you, and new capabilities arrive switched on. The check that catches it.
The configuration you agreed at deployment is not permanent. Vendors ship features, and in this category the features collect things.
What can change without asking you
New capture capabilities, frequently enabled by default: driver scoring, dwell analysis, camera modules, live view.
Default settings on new accounts, which diverge from your configured ones.
Retention defaults.
Export formats, which breaks whatever you feed.
Interface changes that expose data previously behind a click.
Your impact assessment described a system that no longer exists, which is the compliance consequence and the one nobody notices.
The post-release check
Twenty minutes, after every release, by the named owner.
Read the release notes, specifically for anything about capture, defaults or visibility.
List every capture feature and its state. Compare against the configuration recorded at go-live.
Check the retention settings.
Check what a manager account can now see that it could not before.
Record the result, because "we never enabled driver-facing cameras" is a claim you may need to support with dates.
What to do when something arrived enabled
Turn it off, and note the dates it was on.
Assess whether anything was collected in the interim and whether it should be deleted.
Tell the workforce if anything was collected that the notice said would not be. This is uncomfortable and it is the thing that preserves credibility.
Raise it with the vendor under the change notification term, if you have one.
The contract term to have
Notification before feature changes that alter what the system observes or what accounts can see.
A preview window where the vendor offers one.
Export format versioning.
Ask for these at procurement, when they are a negotiating point rather than a favour.
Why this matters more here than elsewhere
Because the deployment's defensibility rests on the configuration, not on the product.
An assessment that says "no continuous logging" describes a setting, and a setting can be changed by someone other than you.
Which makes the periodic check the thing that keeps the paperwork true — and a deployment whose documentation has quietly diverged from reality is in a worse position than one that never had any.
Tell people if something was collected
The uncomfortable step that preserves credibility.
A feature arriving enabled means data was collected that the notice said would not be.
Say so, with the dates, and say what happened to it.
This is unpleasant and it is the thing that makes every future statement believable.
The alternative — quietly turning it off — is discovered eventually, and then nothing you have written is trusted.
Check the difficult case
Use the integration overview to frame one representative test for this issue. The useful evidence is the record created when a worker challenges an event, a manager reviews it and an administrator exports it.