Technology

Car makers should not sell our driving and location history to data brokers or insurance companies,

Car makers should not have access to this information at all, except in cases when the owner chooses to give them a specific piece of it.

(Similarly, phone makers should not have access to conversations and camera makers should not have access to videos, except in cases when the owner chooses to record and give them a specific piece.)

I would support a law forbidding this sort of data collection, with stiff penalties for accidental violations and prison time for willful violations.

It's almost insulting how cheap the data is going for.

The insurance company buys your driving data for less than a dollar, then cranks your premiums potentially hundreds of dollars per year. Easy money for the insurance company, easy money for the data broker, easy money for the car company, and the little guy gets the shaft as usual.

I think the rhetoric about data gathering needs to change. The average person doesn't really care all that much about their privacy. "The government and all the tech companies are spying on me anyway," they think. "If I have nothing to hide, I have nothing to fear," they tell themselves.

But if people actually understood just how much the prices they pay are driven by data warehousing, there'd be rioting in the streets.

… and they’re passing a bill to revoke car companies access to data and make collecting and sharing data illegal and add steep fines if any are found to collect it in the first place, right? Right?

Come on, these are the people at can do something about it, but they’re just going to be paid off and nothing will change.

The senators were not the ones that exposed anything.

The "get shared and with whom" link in that article has "how to opt out" information.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2024/03/how-figure-out-what-your-car-knows-about-you-and-opt-out-sharing-when-you-can