Your Car Is Spying on You for Insurance Companies
It turns out that the “Internet of Things” is full of automated snoops and spies. Data collection, now integrated into new car designs, is more pervasive than ever and is ushering in a brave new world of surveillance and corporate collusion.
The interior of the General Motors Cadillac during an event in New York on March 27, 2018. (Michael Noble Jr / Bloomberg via Getty Images)
Just in case you thought the capitalist surveillance network foisted on us by bandit corporations and complicit governments wasn’t dystopian enough, your car may now be spying on you — and selling the data it collects to insurance companies via LexisNexis.
Last week, the New York Times and others reported that certain General Motors (GM) vehicles were collecting driver data — in some cases unbeknownst to the owner — that insurance companies could, and did, use to adjust (that is, raise) premiums. GM’s Smart Driver program isn’t the only one of its kind. Other automakers have similar services, which may seem innocuous (in-car Wi-Fi, amazing!) but are in fact insidious, since you end up “consenting” to being spied on for automaker profit.
The Sorcerer’s Apprentice’s Snooping Widget
In 2023, the Mozilla Foundation released research in which they said cars were a “privacy nightmare on wheels” and “the official worst category of products for privacy.” Writing in The Conversation, law professor Katharine Kemp detailed the extensive data collection mechanisms in vehicles, including “cameras, microphones, sensors and connected phones and apps.” She underscored the real-time nature of data collection and its potential integration with other sources, such as other internet-connected products.
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