GM parks claims that driver location data was given to insurers

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“General Motors on Thursday said that it has reached a settlement with the FTC “to address privacy concerns about our now-discontinued Smart Driver program.

“Those concerns, articulated in the US watchdog’s formal legal complaint [PDF] against the car maker, are that GM “collected precise geolocation data from millions of Gen10+ OnStar vehicles through a particular task that collected and transmitted precise geolocation data every three seconds.”

…and then they wound up in the hands of auto insurance companies, and rates went up! Surprise!

https://www.theregister.com/2025/01/17/gm_settles_ftc_charges/

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The 9-page complaint makes great reading…Y’know, I love my 23-year old car more and more each day…

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The proposed consent decree [PDF] – the draft settlement between GM and the FTC to avoid a court battle – forbids the automaker from disclosing geolocation and driver behavior data to consumer reporting agencies for five years.

* After 5 years GM is free to disclose drivers data.

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Nibbled To Death By Ducks

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Alex5723 wrote:

* After 5 years GM is free to disclose drivers data.

Yeah, I know…kinda makes it a Pyrrhic Victory, doesn’t it? Well, for now at least we HAVE an FTC…for the moment.

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Nibbled To Death By Ducks wrote:

for now at least we HAVE an FTC…for the moment.

Which will be replaced by Trump with new anti-net naturality / in favor of Enterprise, members.

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I would never accept a car that has any connectivity to the internet. Internet-enabled cars are much like other IoT devices, in that they have very little (if any) attention paid to security… and the privacy threat is even worse, as the carmaker itself is quite likely to be the offender, having engineered the spying right in from the start.

If the car has the technical ability to spy on me, I consider that it will do so. The temptation to join the dark side and slurp up all of that valuable data is too great.

The only answer is to have a car that has no internet connection. Its like my doorbell, my thermostat, my lights, my refrigerator, and so on… it does not have nor require WAN connectivity to do the thing I need it to do.

My brother recently bought a car that had the capability of sending all of this data somewhere. One of the first things he did was to go in to disconnect the cellular radio… and he found the previous owner already had. It wasn’t even there anymore. Had he tried to use OnStar, it would obviously never have worked.

If I ever bought a car that new, I would have to do the same, but those models that have internet capability also have other features that are deal-breakers, so I wouldn’t be buying one anyway. No touchscreens, no LCDs, no smart-fob pushbutton start. That’s where I draw the line.

I so far have begrudgingly accepted the ridiculous over-computerization of things in the car that need no computerization (like the dome light), but that’s as far as I will go, and even then I sometimes question if that’s too far. There is nothing wrong with simplicity!

 

 

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