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Not to dispute you primary point (auction of personal data for someone else's gains)...

I don't think this will work for gas stations. The margins are too thin to support discounts large enough to attract customers.

It might work for oil change places... but then GM would be competing with it's own dealership service centers... which it wouldn't do.

I'd be much more worried about detailed ride data being shared with insurance companies. I'm pretty sure insurance companies could figure out from the data whether someone is a safe driver (or not). Or at least they would convince themselves that they could. Might even work. But it would be a hell of a privacy invasion. And imagine the crossover uses for medical insurance... regular visits to drug areas, bam that's a price increase on you health insurance. Same for regularly being parked near bars... chance of drunk driving goes way up.

> The margins are too thin.

But if you're known to buy a large Squishee and a copy of Radioactive Man 73% of the time when you fill up between 1:00 and 3:00 PM, the margins look a little better.

But marketers will quickly see the opportunity not to offer discounts but rather to target the sale to maximize the margin. Uber already does this by increasing fares when it detects a phone battery is dying. Someone will raise their prices at night then buy ads for drivers who are running low on fuel during that time.

Do folks really get critically low on gas that often? Your phone battery lasts a day and can get drained easily in unexpected ways, so the Uber thing probably has a lot of chances to kick in. But your car holds so much gas, and gas stations are so close together, that it’s hard to see how they would actually “trap” anyone. I usually can plan a few days in advance when I am going to fill up next.

I think it’s less of an issue for local drivers, but if you are in an unfamiliar area - or more likely going on a trip, there is a ~30 min period during which you will NEED to get gas no matter what...

> Uber already does this by increasing fares when it detects a phone battery is dying.

Holy crap, everything I read about Uber just makes it seem worse and worse.

Of course, the next question we should all be asking is why your own phone is betraying you to a commercial service by providing that information to their app in the first place.

Well the idea was that an app might be able to adjust what it did to help preserve battery life.

The reality is "woohoo, free money." #enable price_gouging.

Well the idea was that an app might be able to adjust what it did to help preserve battery life.

That argument never really made much sense, though. Battery life is an issue with any mobile device, so if you could do something more efficiently in your app, why wouldn't you be doing it all the time anyway? I could see an argument for some sort of critical "this device is about to shut down" notification, but there's no reason that couldn't require explicit permission when an app asks to use it, and in any case it's much less subject to abuse than a general indicator of battery remaining.

Tradeoffs. Fewer animations, lower frame rate in videos or games, etc.

Could implement those as a permission or setting, I wouldn't mind the Uber app being in low power mode all the time.

When OnStar changed their terms of service back in April [1] it caused a bit of strife on the Volt forums I am a member of. Besides the increase in subscription fees, the lowest priced plan was $24.99 a month! However what people were most upset about was that Onstar would be collecting data for ten years but at the same time it would no longer provide remote start/stop or vehicle conditioning through the smartphone app unless paid for.

So they are monetizing in two directions. First by selling data about your habits you may not even realize they collect then subscription services to features of the car some people expect to just work. GM isn't alone, BMW charges just to use Apple CarPlay in their cars, Audi is near $500 a year for some services offered through the dash display; like updated maps and such.

I think a lot of it came down to people keeping cars longer and manufacturers needing to maintain an income stream

[1] http://www.autonews.com/article/20180430/OEM06/180439972/gm-...

> people keeping cars longer and manufacturers needing to maintain an income stream

Seems like the likely outcome of these games will be older cars, from before these "innovations", were being kept even longer and start to become sought after.

I'm one data point on that trend line. I was already planning on continuing driving my 2000 Toyota Avalon until either the transmission/engine goes (and I'm dutifully maintaining both) or I have money for a legitimate upgrade. Reading about shenanigans like this, I'm pretty sure I won't upgrade even when I have the money. My phone + tape cassette adapter + usb charger does everything I need my infotainment to do, and the aesthetic downside of having headphone and usb cables strung along my dash is a small price to pay to avoid the headaches mentioned in this thread.

I do want a plug-in hybrid some day, but I'll likely need a house first. :P

My Garmin GPS does this already.

Whenever I've been driving for a few hours it pops up and says "need a break? - checkout these nearby gas stations".

The stations are always Caltex. Always. I'm in Southern Africa and I assume Caltex are the only ones that have paid to be featured like that. (there are plenty of other big brand-name stations around)

Could be that only this brand's gas-station POIs were ingested in your region? In my region (Central Europe) I'm getting complete list of all nearby gas stations in the Garmin's "need a break?" feature.

All the gas stations are in there (i.e. if you look for nearby gas stations it knows about all of them), but only one brand shows up in "in a break?"

At some point, there needs to be a backlash about our right to be shown advertisements. I mean, if it creates a nice discount and shows us relevant services - please DO track me.

Honestly, if I go to a website and later see a related ad to that website -- that's a good thing, right?

Maybe instead of removing tracking, we need something like an industry code where the browser has a great green bar around it saying you're being tracked and here are the benefits.

It reminds me of another situation. I play free game sometimes and I always shake my head in disbelief at the wasted opportunity when they show the interstitial ads that are uninteresting me. With a bit of intelligence, they should be showing extremely high value ads around software security (a personal example) that could lead to serious business. But no, Apple doesn't allow for that.

Do you believe information asymmetry benefits the less informed party in a transaction?

I’d love this; but only if merely gathering tracking information was opt-in, by law. (I’d never opt in, and am genuinely curious to know what percentage of the population would.)

If existing tailored advertising is anything to go by, I'm going to start getting ads for gas stations only right after I've filled up my tank. I'm not worried at all - adtech doesn't actually work.

This is sort of true and sort of not true. It definitely does currently work, but if companies like Google and MSFT decided to, they could make it not work by providing search engines that actually helped you find products that are a good fit for you. But that will never be their focus as long as they make money off of ads.

Instead they create search engines that find a series of products that are relevant, though not necessarily a good fit.

I always thought this would be an interesting product that apple should work on. An iPhone search engine that finds products for you. They have the entire market to themselves and bucket loads of money to spend on it.

Apple never was good at that kind of thing, sadly, mostly because they can't attract the best in AI because of their secretive ways. They don't value their employees enough, like Google or Facebook.

MSFT could probably jump into the market to, though, if they made it a part of their OS.

Amazon is unfortunately screwing themselves by going backwards by making money off of ads. It's the beginning of the end for them I think as they get more addicted to that money. The more they leverage it, the less useful they become. Instead they should focus more on fixing their fake review problem.

Back when I had the Circle K app on my phone it had this knack of offering me a free drink coupon right after I just stopped at one of their stores, refilled my drink cup and made it a mile or two down the road. Happened so often I just deleted the thing since that's the only time it offered me anything free and the only reason I had the app was for the free stuff.

I'm kind of liking "poisoning the well" on the customer tracking these days, when I'm not working I rarely carry my cellphone but when I do I go so many places there's no value in the data points I generate because it's so random that 8-10 hours of location data can only hinder their algorithms.

> so they can gouge you $5/gallon and you have no choice to pay it

You can, of course, buy only the minimum you need to make it to another station instead.

Fundamentally, what's happening here is a temporary very localized monopoly, that you created by letting your fuel supply get so low. If you put yourself in a situation where you can reach only one fuel supplier, the economic consequences are your own fault.

If you can only reach one supplier, then why would they bother to pay to advertise to you? They're the only option.

EDIT to clarify: I'm not trying to argue here, I sincerely don't understand how this is supposed to work.

The supplier would pay the intermediary (the operator of the tracking system) for the information that you can only reach one supplier. They pay to learn that the temporary localized monopoly exists.

It's only an abusable temporary localized monopoly if the fuel supplier is spying on me so they are aware of that fact.

The solution shouldn't be to always carry extra fuel around. That has various negative consequences: decreasing range, increasing the amount of weight I am moving around. The solution should be not letting them spy on me.

There exists an information asymmetry. You know you can't reach another supplier, but the supplier doesn't know that.

The supplier seeks to remedy that asymmetry.

I thought HN was usually against information asymmetry in the free market? Or does that only apply when it's not to the consumer's benefit?

Rather it only applies when there exists (and will continue to exist after the information is shared) a competitive market. All the arguments for a free market and information symmetry rely on the assumption of competition.

"Remedy" is a loaded term. The supplier seeks to gain information in order to gain an advantage in the transaction.

This is some extreme free-market populism. Granular detection and exploition of "temporary localized monopolies" possible thanks to invasive tracking and profiling will make people go bankrupt, get hurt, or die, will make the society as a whole more miserable. Victim of such manipulation is in no fault.

BTW 5USD/gallon would be actually cheap in Europe.

> Really think it'll stop there, when GM can get an extra $1/customer by telling Station A that you're critically low on gas and can't make it to another gas station, so they can gouge you $5/gallon and you have no choice to pay it?

Or maybe the station owner will demand sexual favors and your first-born child, or that you join ISIS, or that you get out of your car and do a strip-tease beside the road.

This would last about as long as it took the first customer to notice that the previous customer paid $0.01/gallon less than him, whereupon the gas station owner would get a (well-deserved) online lynching.

Not to mention that virtually every gas station I've seen in my life has the price prominently posted on a large display. You think customers wouldn't notice if that were constantly changing?

We won't even go into the over-the-top "charging $5.00/gallon more" scenario. Any station that tried that would be out of business within days.

While the amounts he mentioned were extreme, gas stations needing an extra turn or that are a little further up the road generally have to price their gas lower. Its quite possible these gas stations will have a few cents of extra pricing power for the convenience.

I'd prefer the dumb maps that do not give my supplier a price advantage even if its a few cents. It adds up significantly over time which is why they'd be willing to pay in the first place.

> This would last about as long as it took the first customer to notice that the previous customer paid $0.01/gallon less than him, whereupon the gas station owner would get a (well-deserved) online lynching.

It would cause a lot if online conspiracy theories and moderate outrage if anyone did find out.

> Not to mention that virtually every gas station I've seen in my life has the price prominently posted on a large display.

If everyone can see the prices of the closest stations on their dash, those displays might vanish because "no-one uses them anyway".

> We won't even go into the over-the-top "charging $5.00/gallon more" scenario. Any station that tried that would be out of business within days.

Like Uber is out of business becauase of surge pricing?

If only one small station is doing it, they might get repercussions. If many stations (or large chains) do it, it might become normalized.

> If only one small station is doing it, they might get repercussions. If many stations (or large chains) do it, it might become normalized.

Of course, it won't be presented this way. It'll be presented as 'discounts' (from an inflated base price) for filling up when you're over 50% full, then a lesser discount when over 20% full, etc. And, well, if you didn't bother to take advantage of the discounts then whose fault is that, eh? But it'll be effectively the same.

From what I understand if you work at a gas station, you get a phone call and they tell you to change the price on the sign, right?

If everyone can see the prices of the closest stations on their dash, those displays might vanish because "no-one uses them anyway".

At the time that I had reason to know such things, there were strict laws around gasoline price signage. Much of it, I imagine, was based around old-school versions of what folks are worried about: price transparency and accuracy. For instance, if you want to raise the price, you must first make absolutely sure that the sign is changed first. Because the state takes a dim view of advertising a price that differs from the pumps.

That was a long time ago, and laws change, but I would guess in this case that the laws haven’t changed much. Point is, the worries might come to fruition, but we’ve been down this road decades before and hopefully we haven’t lost our collective common sense in the meantime.

Source: worked at a couple of gas stations in Indiana in the 80s.

> Like Uber is out of business becauase of surge pricing?

There is a difference between raising the price of a limited resource (Uber vehicles at peak times, or oil prices during a war in the Middle East) and outright gouging.

Most people understand that.