Off Topic » GM is watching you

There was a kind of long and scary article in my newspaper today written by Kashmir Hill and published by The New York Times, titled "Autos share insurance reports about drivers". It says that new GM cars are collecting information on every movement that you make when driving your car. It is then sent to a NY global data broker company called LexisNexis who then packages your driving experience into a long report (one report was 258 pages long). That report is then sent to insurance companies that contract with them.

In the article's example, the report for a driver owning a GM Bolt included 130 pages detailing the dates of his 640 vehicle trips, including start and end times, an accounting of any speeding, hard braking or sharp accelerations. The only information that the report didn't contain was where the car was driven. The article mentioned that Honda, Kia and Hyundai also collect driver information, but it was mostly about GM's OnStar Smart Driver system.

One Cadillac owner had his insurance doubled after he was unable to get seven insurance companies to provide him with a policy. An owner of a Corvette was caught speeding on a track day at a race track and apparently ended up with a black mark on his insurance driving record.

I think BMW currently collects this kind of information on some of their latest motorcycles and I wouldn't put it past them to share it with a data broker sometime in the future - unless the EU puts a stop to this sort of data sharing.

Legally, car and bike makers will need the user's permission to share that data in the UK and EU. Connected Ride is of course collecting such data, also used for emergency call.

Zitat von wessie im Beitrag #3

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Zitat von Becksy im Beitrag #2

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Legally, car and bike makers will need the user's permission to share that data in the UK and EU. Connected Ride is of course collecting such data, also used for emergency call.

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and that is the problem, a buyer will be sold the benefits to them and sign the consent form at the bottom of a multi-clause agreement in 6 point type. They will have the nice stuff but also give consent to share data. Whilst the original owner might be happy with that arrangement, it seems that once the vehicle is sending data to Lexis Nexis it does not stop when the original buyer trades in. This will affect subsequent owners who will have no awareness that their vehicle is grassing them up to the insurance industry.

There is currently some class action court cases in the US as this could fall foul of consumer protection legislation due to a lack of disclosure about data sharing. We have had similar mis-selling stuff in the UK with the latest one relating to information withheld about commission rates on financial products. I suspect this data sharing matter will be challenged in the courts here as well. There has been quite a backlash against the black boxes people agreed to have to supposedly reduce their insurance premiums as they have turned out to be pretty unreliable with inaccurate recording and poor mapping of speed limits.

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