General Motors Quits Sharing Driving Behavior with Data Brokers

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/22/technology/gm-onstar-driver-data.html

by toomuchtodo • 2 years ago

76 33 2 years ago

nytimes.com

toomuchtodo• 2 years ago

https://archive.today/yX2Mj

W-Stool• 2 years ago

Only after they got caught.

pfdietz• 2 years ago

And realized the potential penalty was orders of magnitude higher than what they were getting.

7thaccount2• 2 years ago

All the automakers have done this awful anti-consumer behavior. GM is only rolling it back as they got caught in lawsuit and are now facing some reputational risk.

Still...as the first automaker to stop the madness, it makes me happy and I hope it continues to the other car producers. I'd been thinking about buying a new vehicle recently, but it's hard to go give someone $30k who is literally a screwing you in 100 different ways. I'd rather buy a darn kit car at this point.

owlbite2• 2 years ago

The thing that's annoying me right now is how Ford wants to sell you back features like their advanced cruise control and navigation systems. If my employment contract didn't make things legally murky I'd totally be trying to replace this shit with something less user hostile.

Now I don't really want to be on the road where people are running random self driving algorithms they downloaded from the internets on their electric deathwagons, but the automakers rent seeking behavior seems to be driving us ever closer to that dystopian future.

alemanek• 2 years ago

I am personally more forgiving of software unlocks for things like ADAS systems. My thinking is that they incurred that as a large R&D cost not a per unit cost. So, having it be an add on allows me to not pay for it if I don’t want it. If they didn’t have this option you would still be paying for it but just a little less. The low end of the market would just be subsidizing your preference.

Paying a subscription for hardware already shipped can die in a fire though.

chongli• 2 years ago

What we need is a law banning this data collection in the first place. Vehicles should be always offline, period. The job of a vehicle is to drive from point A to point B. Everything else is waste.

johnea• 2 years ago

“OnStar Smart Driver customer data is no longer being shared with LexisNexis or Verisk,”

Note that they haven't stopped sharing the data completely, only to those two data brokers.

7thaccount2• 2 years ago

That's another thing I found odd about the wording. Good grief.

bhhaskin• 2 years ago

Next do Ford!

Banditoz• 2 years ago

What new car can you buy nowadays that either has:

* No pushing of driving data to the cloud, or

* this pushing of data can easily be disabled (pulling a fuse, etc)

for privacy minded folks? It seems almost like a lost battle.

greyface-3• 2 years ago

2024 Kia EV6. Go into the hidden engineering menu and disable telematics. Or purchase the vehicle in Massachusetts, where this will already have been done for you.

chenxiaolong2• 2 years ago

Any chance you happen to know the latest code to get into the hidden menu on the EV6? Used to be 19190307, though it was changed in the 231215 infotainment firmware update.

sds357• 2 years ago

Does anyone know of list of vehicles that do this?

rubatuga• 2 years ago

Chevy equinox fuse 38

justinclift• 2 years ago

Seems like this: https://www.popularmechanics.com/cars/car-technology/a24666/... :)

MBCook2• 2 years ago

There are options in the GUI for my Ford Mach E to do that.

And they have clearly stated that they never send data to data brokers. The data they collect, if you agree, is to help them improve the cars. Not for them to sell to make extra money.

The_SamminAter• 2 years ago

They claim, currently.

crote• 2 years ago

And we're supposed to just believe that?

It's almost guaranteed that after a "long and thorough review" (showing consultants the local fine dining scene) they'll share "limited data" (literally everything) which has been "thoroughly anonymized" (with ROT-13) with "carefully selected partners" (anyone willing to pay) for "diagnostic purposes" (we diagnose a need for more money).

Let's be honest here, they are only sorry that they got caught.

mordechai9000• 2 years ago

The new program will be purely optional and voluntary, as part of the T&C users accept by using the interactive in-dash entertainment and information system. /s

water-data-dude• 2 years ago

That’s needlessly cynical.

They’ll use double ROT-13 to be extra sure their customers’ privacy is respected.

xnx• 2 years ago

There's a lot of criticism of the "main-stream media", but credit to the New York Times to shedding some light on this subject. Hard to know if GM's changes are genuine, but they know they are being watched.

It's a shame that Apple cancelled their car program. They were definitely in waaay over their heads in attempting self-driving, but an Apple car would have far more trustworthy software than those from other manufacturers.

eh_why_not• 2 years ago

What a creepy world we have become!

It's as if you draw a thousand targets on your back every time you use technology nowadays.

archvile• 2 years ago

"The only winning move is not to play."

MBCook2• 2 years ago

No, the winning move is to actually make legislation that says you can’t do ridiculous creepy nonsense.

But we are not allowed to do that so we can just shame people and hope that they actually follow through for more than two months.

jeffbee• 2 years ago

I guess my thinking is orthogonal or counter to the theme of this story, but I hate that in California I have the opposite problem. California outlawed insurance discounts from telematics, but did nothing about the telematics themselves, which is the worst possible situation.

_huayra_• 2 years ago

Semi-related FYI if anyone is a Subaru owner (with Starlink): you can opt out of all 3rd-party data sharing from their Starlink telemetry, as they've extended the CCPA rights across all of the US [0]

[0] https://www.subaru.com/support/consumer-privacy.html

ppetty• 2 years ago

I wonder if it’s possible to take a car offline or at what point it will become impossible to do so. Because if GM - and others can do this — there’s no doubt that at some point cars could be bricked unless they can phone home.

FrontierPsych• 2 years ago

How much can they make from selling this type of information?? Hundreds of billions?

It would seem to me that the amounts would be pitifully small as compared to making their customers angry. Even if it was $20 million, or $40 million, or $100 million - that's small potatoes compared to their annual revenue of $42 billion.

General Motors Quits Sharing Driving Behavior with Data Brokers

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