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YOUR CAR IS TALKING to your insurance company. You aren’t part of the conversation. Suddenly, though, your insurance premium shoots up 50%. Welcome to the brave new world where your car is spying on you.
In one instance, a Florida resident drove his Cadillac around a racetrack during a special event. His insurance subsequently skyrocketed—by $5,000 a year.
Has artificial intelligence taken over? No, but automobile companies have, and without our knowing it. Carmakers are spying on drivers and passengers, and peddling the findings to car insurance companies and other buyers. About half will share information with law enforcement agencies that request it.
The Mozilla Foundation, a nonprofit that works against mass surveillance, tested 25 car brands. All 25 failed the foundation’s minimum privacy standards. Modern cars were found to be snooping on us using onboard cameras, sensors and microphones. Some even monitored phone calls. Where the occupants were going and how fast they were driving were routinely disclosed.
Of all the carmakers, Nissan was deemed the worst privacy offender by Mozilla. The carmaker even collected data about the sexual activity, genetics and health diagnoses of its customers. No, Mozilla didn’t say how the car company obtained all that information. Clearly, though, Nissan went beyond in-car monitoring in its intelligence gathering.
The daily newsletter The Morning Brew reported the curious case of a wrecked Tesla that was sold to someone in Ukraine, who proceeded to use the former owner’s Spotify account. The old owner struggled to disconnect the new driver from his account.
A reporter for The New York Times wrote a lengthy article about being spied on by her Chevy Bolt. She and her husband discovered they’d agreed to something called “connected access.” Except they hadn’t. Their Chevy salesperson enrolled them in OnStar, claiming he does this automatically with all customers, even though a GM spokesperson told the reporter this isn’t permitted.
How could this have happened to a reporter who claims she is “on the lookout for creepy data collection”? The obscure permission, which sounded innocuous, got checked by the salesman amid a flurry of document signing during the sales process.
What could the reporter do to stop the spying? GM said to “disable all data collection” by calling OnStar’s customer service line.
What might we do to prevent things like this from happening to us? Morning Brew suggests drivers may want to be “more cautious about synching data from their phones onto their cars” because carmakers may be eavesdropping. The Mozilla Foundation concluded that consumers have so little control over carmakers’ monitoring that only new government regulation can stop the spying.
What a fruitful area for a political party to take up! It reminds me of when satirist/comedian Al Franken (well before he was a Senator) wrote a book called “Why Not Me?” where he ran for president in 2000 on only one issue: ATM fees.
This is so loathsome, I hope a congressional staffer is a HD reader.
The manufacturers also have the ability to disable the vehicle if a car payment has been missed. But no worries here in our trusty ’90 Volvo 740. ACE hardware fabricated a key for it for less than three dollars.
Thanks for the alert about our car computers spying on us. Sigh.
If HD was doing a series on tech spying, my entry could be called “Own a Home, They Spy.” Earlier this year my home insurance company sent me a letter saying they were dropping us because the house roof was in poor condition. The roof wasn’t new but I wondered how the insurance company knew anything about its condition. I called them and asked for some sort of proof of the problem so I could fix it. After arguing that proof didn’t matter since they had already dropped me anyway, the phone rep eventually emailed me a shot of my roof from far away. Were insurance companies now flying drones over people’s homes?! That’s all I could surmise. And how could they tell anything about my house from that fuzzy shot?
The roofing guy I hired to check the roof (who reported that everything was fine up there) took one look at the photo and said, “That’s probably from a satellite, not a drone.” No wonder it was so fuzzy! He also asked me, “Did you make an insurance claim in the last few years?” When I said, “Yes, regarding basement flood damage during a water main break,” the roofer replied, “That’s the real reason they dropped you.”
So perhaps a “fake” spying incident, but tech was certainly an accessory to the crime.
I read an article recently about homeowners’ insurance being cancelled after insurance companies flew drones overhead to take pictures of the roofs of their houses, it seems to be fairly common now, i.e. insurance companies flying drones overhead to take pictures of roofs, Can’t find link to article unfortunately. I am sorry this happened to you.
Laura, it does get stranger and stranger, doesn’t it? I hope you were able to find a better carrier for your insurance.
Our auto insurance company (major national brand) has a program that allows customers to pay premiums based on milage. We drive very little, so we looked into it and found that we could cut our car insurance premiums by at least half. We signed up and received a “device” to plug into the car, assuming that it would monitor only milage.
We returned the “device” immediately and will continue paying double what we would have paid for car insurance if we’d been willing to be “monitored.” I guess that’s part of the cost of maintaining some inkling of privacy nowadays.
They raise your insurance if you accelerate too fast, brake too hard etc.
Interesting. We gave State Farm our okay to enroll us in their Drive Safe and Save program as it cut my rates significantly. If they are spying on me, I pity them. They would be bored stiff. I drive to church, the gym, my volunteer jobs at a hospital and a school, and to babysit our twin granddaughters. And to the grocery store once a week. And I drive the speed limit. My wife has similar habits. Boring!
Modern cars are not unique in their data collection practices. The primary issue is the car’s computer, which is connected to the Internet and monitors location data. For example, Teslas transmit various types of data to company servers for analysis.
Even driving a “disconnected” car won’t ensure privacy if you carry a mobile device when driving. Companies like Facebook and Google collect extensive location data through these devices. These companies often claim there is no alternative way to provide their services.
To genuinely address privacy concerns and protect citizens from aggressive data collection for profit, we should:
1. Pay for the services we use instead of relying on “free” options.
2. Demand that Congress repeal Section 230 of the Communications Act of 1934 and increase the data collection costs of these platforms.
If you have an Android phone just about any app demands access to your photos and files in order to be downloaded. It’s a Google thing and it’s so annoying.
How do you prevent synching data from your phone to your car? I am never asked if I want to do that. But I do connect my phone via bluetooth. It never asks permission to transfer data from my phone.
I read that it’s not just the automobile you drive that is responsible for driver data collection. The insurance industry can also obtain data via apps on your phone. Who doesn’t use Google (or Apple) Maps? Gas Buddy? Apparently our meta data is being distributed/shared without our knowledge or permission.
One reason I haven’t got around to replacing my dumb older car. Nissan and GM weren’t on my list in the first place, but doubly so now.
GM has agreed not to provide the information to the insurance companies anymore.
I knew GM, via Onstar I presume, was collecting mileage and service data but I’ve given no thought to the issues you detail here. This is truly disturbing Sonja. Thanks for sharing.
Yikes, I’m keeping my ten year old unsophisticated Mercedes. Not even car play.