The FTC Banned GM From Selling Your Driving Data for Five Years
Your car is selling your data
The Federal Trade Commission hit General Motors with an unprecedented five-year ban on selling customer data to consumer reporting agencies and data brokers. For years, GM collected driving behavior — how often drivers sped, whether they drove at night — through its OnStar Smart Driver feature and sold it to LexisNexis and Verisk, which feed insurance risk profiles. Many drivers never realized they had consented, and some saw their insurance rates climb as a result.
More often than not, drivers were unaware of the degree to which their data was being collected.
- bitparadox
I posted a flavor of this comment on an article a few months ago, but it's relevant here:
I have a seven year old Volkswagen, not financed. I'm security conscious and made sure to disable all the data collection I could find in the companion app before removing my account, turn off remote access services, dig through the infotainment to turn off what I could, etc.
Last year I requested a Carfax on it, and one of the fields in the request was current mileage. I entered an estimate like 75000 miles. On form submission, that field failed validation with red subtext along the lines of 'this is less than the last reported mileage of 75345, reported <5 or so days prior>'. Checking my odometer and looking at my past few days' trips, that was indeed accurate.
The car hadn't been to a shop or out of my possession in weeks, so I can only assume the telemetry was still dialing home and selling to third parties despite my best efforts to disable it.
- samsullivan
Two different things are getting called "car data" here.
Facts about the car: VIN, spec, recall status, odometer. Attested by someone other than the owner. Outlives every owner and the owner is the last to have it, if at all.
Facts about the driver: speed, location, timestamp. Thats what GM sold, the fix is to not collect it but OEMs seem to take 'anonymization' approach.
The DRIVER act treats both as the same which is why it fails to fix anything. The second needs a ban. The first needs the opposite - especially as we take the driver out of the vehicle - an authoritative record of the vehicle. How do we expect AVs to have adoption when the only safety certification is the company's press release?
- tomrod
How can this be stopped, from a technical perspective? Can I wrap the comms in a Faraday cage?
Obviously it would be better to have this action be illegal. But with legal privacy protections eroding in the US and other countries, it seems prudent to have a better understanding of the systems involved in the immoral surveillance.
- cc62cf4a4f20
That‘ll happen when you don‘t have meaningful data protection laws.
- kaladin-jasnah
In my GM car I have the wonderful opportunity to pull the OnStar fuse and disable all cellular connectivity. However, I am concerned the telematics information are stored in long term storage and if I have to reconnect the fuse, all my driving will be batch uploaded. I hope not!! And the GPS still works. Maybe I can find some dummy loads as well or the antennae.
It's still better than other modern cars though? I think.
- Cider9986
Apparently Rivians can be prevented from doing this:
Can I disable all data collection from my vehicle?
- hn_submit
Like I've said here before: we need to push for legislation that bans the sale of consumer data collected by websites and manufacturers to third-parties.
We need a solution, not a Band-Aid like the "Free Car Act." I believe that legislators are deliberately coming up with legislation that mildly hinders, but in no way resolves the issue in order to keep their sugar-daddies freewheeling.
- heaney-555
I notice that not one comment here, nor the article, notes that this doesn't happen with a Tesla.