Is your car a snitch? What your car is telling insurers

Now a follow up to a story that we told you about earlier this month, a report in the New York Times about how auto companies sell data from connected cars to data brokers, who then in turn sell it to insurance companies that can use it to charge you higher premiums. I looked into the data privacy settings of my own car to try and disable possible outside monitoring, and I wasn’t able to do it. I’ve been trying to do this since Monday. Every day there are more calls back and forth. It’s really complicated. The dealership can’t figure it out either. I’ve been on the phone with them every day. Our next guest wrote this story for the Times, and after her initial report, General Motors actually said that it had stopped sharing driving details with data brokers. Joining us right now is Kashmir Hill. She is the New York Times tech reporter and author of Your Face Belongs to US and Kashmir. I have to say, this story is one that really made me sit up and pay attention because you talked to consumers who had either had their insurance rates jacked up because data was being collected they didn’t know about, or in some cases they couldn’t get insurance. What happened? Yeah, well, this was very shocking for drivers. I think most people assume when they spend a lot of money on this car, what happens in it is going to stay private. But what was happening to people who drove cars made by General Motors was that information was being collected about when they speed, how many miles they drove, how many times they heartbreaked or rapidly accelerated because they had enrolled, some say unknowingly, in a program called Smart Driver. And yeah, it was very shocking to them and they found out about it because their insurance rates started going up. And when they asked the insurance companies why, they said go pull your LexisNexis disclosure report. This is a data broker who works with insurance companies and when they did that, they saw all this driving data and the report said where it came from and it was from General Motors. Wow. Every time I turn my car on, it says gives me this privacy warning that your information is being sent back and we’re watching it. There are ways you can shut it off in your car, but I have tried and every time I shut it off, it turns it right back on. Dealt with my dealership. I’m. I’m with a Nissan dealt with my dealership this week. They can’t even figure out how to do it without entirely disabling the satellite feed for satellite radio and the GPS monitoring. They got me to sign up for another app that basically says, now if I want to shut anything off, I have to call somebody, fill out forms and mail them in. Is this something every car company is doing? You are not alone, Becky. I mean, I’m hearing from drivers across the country who are waking up to the fact that their car is a smartphone on wheels and it’s doing all this data collection and we as consumers just don’t know. We can’t see it, and so you can’t even shut it off when you try to. I think that’s the bigger issue. You know what? You send us this thing saying we’re monitoring this. If you don’t want it, opt out. It’s nearly impossible to opt out of these stupid programs. And by the way, you may say, yeah, your phone already knows all that. That’s fine. Apple is not selling my information to 3rd party data. Hackers. Well, smartphones have airplane mode, right? Like, you can turn off the sending of data, but with cars, they’re just most cars. There’s not an off button that says stop sending data for my car. Like, I don’t want, you know, the automaker anywhere else, anyone else to know where I’m driving or how I’m driving. And so this is just a huge problem. And all the experts are telling me, look, we’re we’re kind of at with cars where we were with smartphones A decade ago when people did start waking up to the fact that they were carrying around a track. And so we got very, you know, got granular controls in the smartphone to allow us to more easily control the information leaving it. And that really needs to happen with cars. I think GM took the right people need privacy. Yeah, I think GM took the right step by saying they’re not going to sell that data anymore. You’ve spoken to people in Washington who are paying attention to this. And if car companies don’t follow suit, I think there, there could be some things that they take action on. Yeah. I talked to Senator Ed Markey for this story from Massachusetts. And, you know, he has been, as many lawmakers across the country have been asking car companies, you know, what data are you collecting? How are you using it? Who are you selling it to? And when I told him about these programs and specifically what General Motors had done, he said, you know, that really sounds like a violation of the law that protects consumers against unfair and deceptive business practices. And yes, GM, after my story came out, announced that they’re no longer going to be sharing this, this data with these two data brokers who were selling it to the insurance industry. And they said they’re re evaluating, you know, their privacy practices. But yeah, I mean, what these companies were doing was just putting this kind of in the fine print in the privacy policies that no one reads. And that is just not how this should be done. Kashmir, I think you’re signing, shining of a light on a very important area for some of these things. What do you anticipate happens next? Because what I was told yesterday is that, you know, wait till 2025 next year you are going to see cars that make this look like child’s play. That right now they’re only collecting about 10% of the information that they’ll be capable of collecting. Or that, you know, my cars, a couple years old, the ones that come out next year, literally can collect far more data. Chips have gotten better. What happens next? I mean, cars have hundreds of sensors and cameras, and they’re doing all kinds of data collection. This benefits us. I mean, This is why we have crew, cruise control and the ability to know that there’s a car, you know, next to us. We get all these warnings and alerts, the fact that you can kind of control your your car with your smartphone, that you can find it. There are great conveniences. But they do come with this downside where it’s just possible to collect so much information about us and they’re going to have a camera watching you the entire time you’re driving. I mean, your car knows how much you weigh because there’s sensors in the seat when you sit down because they need to know if there’s a child, you know, in the passenger seat so the car can turn off the airbags. So it’s why we really do need to address consumer control of that data. Because when I was talking to drivers, you know, that this happened to, they said it felt like a betrayal. They had paid so much money for this car and the date is leaving it and you know, it just is really outside of the expectations of of what people expect to happen with their car. My car was not going to rat me up. I don’t. I don’t likes the way I drive.