Keeping tracking boxes out of your car and insurance apps off of your phone may not be enough anymore:
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/11/technology/carmakers-driver-tracking-insurance.html
Newer GMs, Hondas, Kias and Hyundais are coming from the factory with this capability.
Capability, but you have to sign up for it - which is being done by salespeople without your knowledge, or hidden behind pages and pages of EULA gibberish.
I'm okay with it, there are very few modern cars that are engaging to drive at legal speeds with the amount of mechanical grip that modern tire sizing allows for. Making it more fun to hoon older cars and making me actually less likely to speed in something modern that's actually much faster and far more capable. They've made modern cars so capable to exceed the speed limit and really even sight lines on a good twisty road with elevation and angelation, that I'm actually less likely to speed in them because it's not engaging to.
Captdownshift (Forum Supporter) said:I'm okay with it, there are very few modern cars that are engaging to drive at legal speeds with the amount of mechanical grip that modern tire sizing allows for. Making it more fun to hoon older cars and making me actually less likely to speed in something modern that's actually much faster and far more capable. They've made modern cars so capable to exceed the speed limit and really even sight lines on a good twisty road with elevation and angelation, that I'm actually less likely to speed in them because it's not engaging to.
But it's not just about speeding. Significant acceleration or braking events (autocross anyone, or even just playing on a twisty road) are taken into account.
In reply to Captdownshift (Forum Supporter) :
All true, and 100% in agreement.
And for safety, I even understand. But zero (or less 
) of the insurance companies or government agencies could give a rats azz about the public's safety. Just that hurt people cost money.
George wasn't wrong. Just a couple years early.
In reply to RX Reven' :
I had the same thought, only with this in mind.
In reply to Keith Tanner :
Remember. Just 'cause I'm paranoid, don't mean nobody is after me! 
I'm not sure if it was in the NYC article (which I can't read because registraton/paywall) or in another article referencing this one (probably on The Verge or similar), but someone mentioned that one of the affected drivers requested the details of what data had been logged (I think from LexisNexis, but I might be wrong) and it contained details of every journey they undertook. To me, that's a pretty grim violation of my privacy, especially if it's been caused by a sales drone signing one up for it without one's knowledge.
I think it was also mentioned that the "customer" - more like "they spyee" in this case - has to inform the service when they sell the car, otherwise the data will continue going onto their record. I can see this having some fun side effects a few years down the road when the car is on owner #7.
Plus taking your car to the track might have some fun side effects when it comes to your insurance.
Yes, they're collecting data that vehicle case number 23857qg034-3383b accelerated at full throttle. There is no one in a room monitoring your Corolla and saying "oh that GameboyRMH is being naughty again."
Data collecting is literally everywhere. I'm typing on a huge collection device right now. My TV tracks the shows I watch and my browser history through the wifi connection so it knows what shows to suggest, and how often I purchase a movie on Netflix vs Prime.
None of this data is mined by a person. Some big computer somewhere is compiling quadrillions of gigabites of hexadecimal characters and spitting out information that tells insurance companies that Corvette owners tend to drive slower (and straighter) than Mustang owners. It's not comparing CaptDownshift's driving with 03Panther's. I get it, data collection feels like someone peeping in your window while you're choking the bishop, but it's one of those things that is so anonymous. It has to be by law, and you know all of those times when you hear on the news "[insert company] reported a data breach," it's because they broke that law, and heads often roll because of it. A lot of people say "well, we can't know what they do with that data," and we actually can... if we ever read the EULA. We know, because it is in their best interest to follow the law and keep the data anonymous, otherwise, someone is probably going to jail.
Do I like it? Meh. I don't really care for it, but I'm not going to pay the $5 for a VPN. That's how unimportant it is to me.
BoxheadTim said:Plus taking your car to the track might have some fun side effects when it comes to your insurance.
If it did affect your insurance, it would be a federal felony and the insurance company would be dissolved, the top brass would all be charged with crimes and many would do soft time.
It is a complete violation of your rights under federal (and most state) law for insurance companies to use anything but a convicted event (speeding ticket, crash, DUI, etc) to penalize you financially for your driving. Even if they were able to isolate your vehicle from the billions of cars out there and say Boxhead's being a bad boy, they can't raise your rates a single cent without risking dissolution and jail time.
They may not use surveillance of any kind to set your rates. In fact, the law just changed again concerning the in-car nanny monitors like "safe driver." They are no longer allowed to call your lower rates a "discount," and they must be referred to as a rate adjustment. They still may not be used to increase your rates. They can only reduce them. It doesn't matter if you drive like a complete twatwaffle every day, all day, you still get a reduced rate compared to if you are not on the nanny plan.
Event Data Recorders (EDR) have been in cars for decades. They continue to evolve, and as Curtis mentioned there are strict rules around use of the data. I used it all the time in investigation of accidents, always requiring permission of the vehicle owner to access it.
Curtis, did you read the article? It is exactly about comparing different drivers and using that to determine insurance premiums for individuals.
Keith Tanner said:Curtis, did you read the article? It is exactly about comparing different drivers and using that to determine insurance premiums for individuals.
Correct. They don't tell LexisNexus where you went, but they tell them that YOU did a full throttle acceleration, hit the brakes hard, then took a turn fast.
And yes, many people either opted in or were signed up without their knowledge and paid the price down the line.
Funny how a couple months ago we were being told that it was just coincidence when we thought Facebook was spying on us.
Oh Facebook spies on you six ways from Sunday, just not through covert voice surveillance.
Just one more reason I have no interest in newer cars. Styling is dead. Everything is a CUV or SUV loaded with nanny aids. At least they cost twice what they should and you can't fix anything on them yourself.
So long as I can get parts for my pre-spy-era vehicles I'll continue driving those, thank you very much.
So how exactly is this data transmitted to outside observers? Does it rely on your phone or do cars now transmit as a matter of course with their own transmitter? If so, who pays for the airtime?
Could this be why Toyota made a 80? year old woman go buy a data enabled cell phone before they would deliver her car? (I watched that happen).
If there is legal language in the car buying contract that covers this, can someone point me at it cause I did not do enough reading to find it while taking delivery.
In reply to Curtis73 (Forum Supporter) :
I forgot our governments and the corporations that control them were so benevolent and would never ever violate any of the laws they wrote for their own interests. Thanks for reminding me.
I just re-watched Orwell's 1984 staring Richard Burton. I could see the Ominous Parallels of what happened to Winston Smith to today's Total Information Awareness situation.
We are the most spied upon people in history. Every thing we do on a computer is subject to be recorded and filed away for future use, if necessary.
As far as data collection goes check out this.
Federal Agencies Are Secretly Buying Consumer Data | Brennan Center for Justice
The Ominous Parallels - Wikipedia
Total Information Awareness - Wikipedia
This is all way beyond Insurance companies monitoring your 4 wheel drifts and "jack rabbit" starts.
While the gathering and use of this data by companies is something that we really should be thinking through and being appropriately concerned about, that's not the biggest problem. I've had these conversations with customers in the past - law enforcement, government agencies, and run-of-the-mill corporations - and the mantra is always that it's best to collect as much data as you can now and store it. You may not know how to properly classify it right now, you may not know exactly what to do with it, you may not have the compute resources to utilize it, and you may not even really know what you've collected. But if you have it, you can always come back to it. If you don't collect and store a telemetry datum when it happens, the moment is over, the datum is gone, and there's no way to recreate it. Once data is collected and stored, the collector will find some way to utilize that data. I had the person in charge of building out the ALPR system for a major metro police department tell me that he wanted to collect and keep as much geotagged data as they could possibly find grant money for so that if a crime happened, they could question every car that drove past; if a child went missing - because it's always about the children and isn't it worth it if it saves just one life!? - they could find everyone in the vicinity; if they knew a drug shipment was coming in from a city to the west every Thursday, they could run down the owner of every car that was driving eastbound into the city on that highway. In other words, it was about setting up a giant fishing net and bringing all the fish up onto the deck of the boat for a close inspection. And we all know that the police and prosecutors absolutely never get fixated on a suspect to the point where they stop looking at other suspects and just try to go for the "win".
Once this data is collected, there will be someone who comes along and offers to buy those records. It might be in an "anonymized" fashion, it might be a processed subset of data, or it might be just the raw collection. Even when the data has been "anonymized", if you have a large enough dataset and enough compute power - which is cheaply available to anyone, really - enough correlations can be found and tracked through that data to be able to confidently identify an individual. So imagine you're a company who has bought a bunch of data like that - vehicle data recorder information, phone tracking information, fitness tracker data, social media tracking, website visit tracking information, and so on - you could stitch all that together to build an incredibly invasive profile of the life of pretty much any random individual. That information might include where you go, how you drive, what medical conditions you have, what kind of food you eat, what kind of entertainment you like, what kind of people you associate with, what your writing style is like, and more. Don't forget that the whole theory behind big data is that with a large enough dataset, we can make computational correlations between different, seemingly unrelated characteristics or datapoints that allow us to very accurately predict outcomes. If Target can accurately identify a pregnancy based just on what one person is buying in their store, imagine what we could compute out of a dataset that includes every telemetry point that you generate over a year.
And now, assume you're the company that has built that profile of millions of individuals; what do you do with that? You've got to make money, right? So time to sell that information off. How about if I got a new customer to my hot dog stand, enrolled them in my loyalty program, and then I could pay you to give me the names of the friends of that person who also happen to walk by my hot dog stand every day, and what time, so I can market to them? That's not too invasive, right? But the police and government three-letter-agencies have figured out that they don't think a warrant is required to go off and purchase commercially-available information. So why not go any buy the life story of every person who might be connected in some way to a crime? Everybody who was at the scene. Maybe even the people who spent time around the people at the scene. Why restrict yourself to a crime? Maybe you're interested in stopping the crime before it happens. Why not use that to start investigating anyone who happens to be in the vicinity of a protest of some sort? And the people that they associate with. Maybe you'll find a criminal element that is at the heart of this so-called protest.
Okay, I get it. "I don't have anything to hide". "My life isn't that interesting". "Nobody cares about what I'm doing". Sure, that's probably true. But we've spent a lot of time and court cases because we, as a society, thought that it wasn't a good idea to allow police to get a record of what books you've read at the library without a warrant. Or to make religious organizations provide lists of members. Or to open up someone's mail. Or to record someone's private conversations. Or to even fly helicopters equipped with FLIR over houses to look for grow operations. Having access to process this type of data makes those methods of data collection look like tinkertoys.
I was in cybersecurity and suppose I still am. Most of the people in this business (myself included) have a pretty good understanding of data collection and use, and don't use facebook, use search engines that provide at least some privacy, disable the hell out of every possible tracker, use browser extensions to disable trackers, etc..
I was in DC at a group meeting and was driving a couple of the guys back to the airport with me. There was some news about the Patriot Act. One of the guys got agitated and pounded on the dash yelling "1984 was supposed to be a warning, not a roadmap, dammit." Dramatic, but relevant to where we are now. Orwell could not have dreamed of this level of surveillance.
Curtis73 (Forum Supporter) said:BoxheadTim said:Plus taking your car to the track might have some fun side effects when it comes to your insurance.
If it did affect your insurance, it would be a federal felony and the insurance company would be dissolved, the top brass would all be charged with crimes and many would do soft time.
It is a complete violation of your rights under federal (and most state) law for insurance companies to use anything but a convicted event (speeding ticket, crash, DUI, etc) to penalize you financially for your driving. Even if they were able to isolate your vehicle from the billions of cars out there and say Boxhead's being a bad boy, they can't raise your rates a single cent without risking dissolution and jail time.
They may not use surveillance of any kind to set your rates. In fact, the law just changed again concerning the in-car nanny monitors like "safe driver." They are no longer allowed to call your lower rates a "discount," and they must be referred to as a rate adjustment. They still may not be used to increase your rates. They can only reduce them. It doesn't matter if you drive like a complete twatwaffle every day, all day, you still get a reduced rate compared to if you are not on the nanny plan.
And yet we live in a world where, based on a satellite image of your house and the insurance company not liking your choice of landscaping, they do have the right to cancel your home insurance with no warning or recourse.
NOHOME said:So how exactly is this data transmitted to outside observers? Does it rely on your phone or do cars now transmit as a matter of course with their own transmitter? If so, who pays for the airtime?
Could this be why Toyota made a 80? year old woman go buy a data enabled cell phone before they would deliver her car? (I watched that happen).
If there is legal language in the car buying contract that covers this, can someone point me at it cause I did not do enough reading to find it while taking delivery.
Most newer cars have built in cellular & GPS Rx/Tx capabilities even if you don't get offered on-board wi-fi and satnav on the infotainment. This allows manufacturers to provide Over The Air (OTA) updates and to collect data for future cases. Oh does your new car also offer an app to lock your car? Track it's location? And Remote start it from your phone? You can notionally disable all of those systems from the infotainment system; however, my 2023 Raptor still gets push OTA updates even though I have them all disabled. The only way I've figured out to completely disable it is to remove the cellular antenna or infotainment all together. When I was fighting Ford in my Lemon Law case for my 2022 Raptor, on-board data was brought into question. They asked "Your car was off-road on these dates, what were you doing?" Sure enough the infields at Daytona, Sebring, and Road Atlanta were considered off-road.
In Florida, the insurance companies and DMV are a self-licking ice cream cone. I once sold a car to a dealer while stationed in Texas (car was registered in Florida). I removed insurance from the car and the Texas Carmax dealer failed to report the car to the Florida DMV as being under new ownership, even though I transferred said tag to a new vehicle. A year later, I get pulled over, have my license and tag on the car I'm driving taken from me by the local constables for failing to have insurance on a car I sold over 12 months prior. I also got a stiff citation for the offense I didn't commit and had to waste time getting a new license, tag, and proving to the DMV I no longer had possession of that vehicle. All thanks to USAA reporting to the Florida DMV that I removed insurance from a sold vehicle.
@Keith Tanner - not everyone pays to read the not-so-objective & childish musings of the New York Times.
I wrote a program to collect all the comments on this board, cross-reference them with the cars owned section and the biographical data section and then send a profile to the insurance companies. OK, not really, I can't get VLookup to work, but with AI this has to be possible in the near future.
But I come back to the age-old question of "if you have nothing to hide". I saw a story about a guy whose home insurance was canceled because a drone saw piles of old cars and tires and other fire hazards filling up his yard. Sure, that's big brother spying on you, but why should the insurance company have to take that risk? And if my insurance carrier told me that I drove too fast and too aggressively on public streets, could I really say they were wrong? I'm not defending the nanny state, there are WAY too many abuses of power, but I do see both sides of the issue.
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