GM Pinky Swears It Will Stop Selling Driving Data To Insurers After Lawsuits, NYT Bombshell

Earlier this month the New York Times published a major story confirming that automakers collect driver behavior data then sell it to a long list of companies. That includes insurance companies, who are now jacking up insurance rates if they see behavior in the dataset they don’t like.

The absolute bare minimum you could could expect from the auto industry here is that they’re doing this in a way that’s clear to car owners. But of course they aren’t; they’re burying “consent” deep in the mire of some hundred-page end user agreement nobody reads, usually not related to the car purchase itself but the apps consumers now use to manage roadside assistance and other programs.

So not surprisingly, GM was subsequently sued. And now the company finds itself on an apology tour, which apparently includes pinky swearing that they will stop selling data to insurance companies:

“OnStar Smart Driver customer data is no longer being shared with LexisNexis or Verisk,” a G.M. spokeswoman, Malorie Lucich, said in an emailed statement. “Customer trust is a priority for us, and we are actively evaluating our privacy processes and policies.”

Of course if “consumer trust ” was actually a priority, GM would have done the absolute bare minimum here and openly and clearly informed consumers this was happening. Instead, like most companies, they buried it fifty pages deep in the end user agreement for embedded support and monitoring services.

And they did that because they know there’s no meaningful penalty.

The U.S still has no meaningful modern privacy law. And U.S. privacy regulators have been steadily defanged, defunded, understaffed and boxed into a corner for the better part of a generation under the pretense that this would unlock vast and untold innovative synergies. Instead, as consumer groups and privacy activists long warned, it created an environment rife for widespread abuse.

Florida resident Romeo Chicco, whose insurance rates skyrocketed after his Cadillac collected his driving data, has filed a complaint seeking class-action status against GM, OnStar and LexisNexis. Federal regulators will also likely come knocking, even if a four year investigation likely results in a fine that’s a tiny percentage of the amount of money GM made from monetizing the data.

At that point automakers (which a recent Mozilla report stated have some of the worst privacy and security standards in all of tech) will have moved on to abusing your privacy in entirely new ways (or in the same way, simply with a few new creative wrinkles). Such is life in a country that’s too corrupt to pass a meaningful privacy law — or adequately support the agencies tasked with existing legal enforcement.