Class Action Against General Motors LLC, OnStar LLC, LexisNexis Risk Solutions [pdf]
static01.nyt.com
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> Plaintiff did not want OnStar services and so he did not push the blue button "to get started." The email provides no mention of OnStar's Smart Driver Program.
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> In or around January 2024, Plaintiff received his requested LexisNexis consumer disclosure. The report, as of December 18, 2023, had 258 recorded driving events under the "Telematics" subsection. Each driving event included trip details that show the start date, end date, start time, end time, acceleration events, hard brake events, high speed events, distance, and VIN.
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> Plaintiff had never opted into any insurance program that would have allowed his information to be shared.
Related: "Automakers are sharing consumers' driving behavior with insurance companies" - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39666976
And if you own a car made in the last ~5 years, here's how to request your "Consumer Disclosure Report" from LexisNexis: https://consumer.risk.lexisnexis.com/ . According to NYT, LexisNexis receives at least some data from GM, Ford, Kia, Subaru, and Mitsubishi.
Or from Verisk, which receives data from at least GM, Hyundai, and Honda: https://fcra.verisk.com/#/
I wrote about this after my gag order expired. GM was shipping all telematics data to a big data cluster processing 100gbps of data (with double the data once Cisco released 400gbps support). Originally it was to help price their used cars. A noble effort I supported. I didn’t know about the sales to insurance brokers, but should have assumed that was coming.
Anyway cat is out of the bag, they won’t undo this feature they will pay a fine, offer an opt-out to 5% of users who take up the offer and in 10 years time everyone will assume their driving habits are being monitored by their insurance company.
How do I know this? It’s been 10 years since the hoopla about realtime location data being sold. Last night I saw my home IP address reports my location with .25 mile accuracy. Guess that $5 check from Verizon was the fine they had to pay!
So can't the plaintiffs just request an order compelling GM and others to remove the feature forever as part of the remedies?
The real world use of Specific Performance is mostly in Real Property ie the ownership of land and this is because land is very obviously not fungible. The square meter of land I need to get my cows from the grazing field to the nearby milking shed is not in any way equivalent to an otherwise similar square meter of land on the far side of the field leading nowhere, and having the wrong one can't meaningfully be compensated with money whereas the court can just order Specific Performance (ie the wrongful owner hands over the land) to fix the problem.
But even beyond that in practice class actions are primarily about the lawyers getting a healthy pay day. $1M each for us as lawyers and each individual "participant" in the class action gets $1 and a 5% discount coupon that expires in six weeks? Sounds good. For the lawyers the incentive is that pay day and the only reason to care about their participants is that if they're treated too poorly a judge may not sign off on the deal.
The problem is that they often don't get caught, or find a way to weasel out of it. As a result the managers who do it will be rewarded most of the time, and even when they're on the wrong side of the gamble, half the time they'll already have left for another company. Raising the penalty wouldn't deter that.
What you need is a remedy that can address the offense. Order them to publish the source code to the system for 10 years, so that anyone can audit or modify it in case they try something similar again. Not only does it make it harder for them to reoffend, it's the kind of penalty that corporate lawyers hate, and then they'll be more likely to insist on policies to prevent that from happening to begin with, which puts pressure on preventing the problem from a different angle.
Courts are more than able to order parties to do things without invoking specific performance via injunctive relief, which you’ll see from the complaint is what is being sought by the plaintiffs.
Some time last year I wrote a comment here on HN about my Bolt EUV and OnStar. I can’t remember exactly what I wrote and don’t want to dig for it, but I said something like being happy with the vehicle and had disabled all of the OnStar features/tracking soon after I purchased it. Somebody replied that they were intimately familiar with the OnStar/GM project, having worked on it, and that it was still tracking me despite not being subscribed to any of their services and having turned off all the features in the car that I could. They couldn’t elaborate further, I assume because of an NDA or something. I bet dollars to donuts that this is what they were talking about now.
Edit: thanks to Stavros for finding the comment below. It looks like you were in fact the person I was talking to 11 months ago. Small world!
Edit: please report back!
The bbc or someone has had at least one article about a bird tracking device that operated via cellular and a sim that expected 5k or less data a month suddenly started charging gigs a month in their home continent just after the last natural looking flight of the bird ended, the ornithological society involved had a few shock bills.
As a consumer you can buy similar - I know my ISP (A&A) will sell you (quite reasonably) a sim that will drop straight onto an L2TP connection of your choosing.
Anyway, told this story to many people, and they looked at me like I'm a conspiracy nut. Well this will be the 1000'th conspiracy I worried about that turned out to be completely true, imagine that.
Dark patterns are the new frontier of corporate greed. Every business model now needs a “moat” (monopoly) to be considered fundable. The antitrust skirtings are built into the whitepaper these days, and having competition in your space is a bad smell. The invisible hand of the market and all that lol.
Per, "Stand Out of Our Light", we don't stand a chance.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/jul/20/stand-out-of...
That is, in short, (and I'm paraphrasing): ...Some of the brightest human behavior experts in the world are being financed by some of the deepest pockets in the history of the world to influence your (read: our) behavior... Just use will power? You don't stand a chance.
The "defeatist" to me is, "I don't have anything to hide." That might be true, but those influence super powers are going to use that "nothing to hide" against you.
Read the book. It's just over 100 pages. It's on the order of "The Age of Surveillance Capitalism" but that book is 500+ pages. THoSC is great but it's a serious commitment.
Having taken every reasonable measure I can to stop being spied on, I can concur that it does take a lot of willpower. As in, being willing to come across as a total ass to those trying to spy on you on behalf of their employers and also willing to literally walk away from the register leaving the stuff you've collected in the hopes of buying. ("But we require your name and phone number or we won't honor any of the warranties for what you're buying.") Paying cash for everything. Avoiding specific restaurants and shops that don't accept cash. Foregoing "members discounts" at the grocery market. Buying a specific phone just to install a third-party privacy-centric ROM. Buying a specific car just to be able to pull the fuse that powers the transmitter.
You can drastically reduce the amount of information that the data brokers collect on you, but I've found it's almost as if you need to adopt a new lifestyle in a lot of ways.
I did some reading when the NYT article came out, and found this, which explains how to install a terminator on the antenna to disable the cell connection: https://imgur.com/gallery/n00QKnH. If you go that route, it's probably prudent to make sure your car isn't connected to wifi, either. (Edit: looks like that guide came from here: https://www.reddit.com/r/BoltEV/comments/16h91a6/i_made_a_st...)
Apparently some Bolts newer than mine have a different fuse configuration that puts Bluetooth and OnStar on separate fuses: https://www.chevybolt.org/threads/remove-mobile-data-chip.33...
^ that Bolt forum thread also talks about some of the downsides of disabling the antenna (e.g. GPS won't work so your home/away charging settings don't work anymore).
> least right now using CarPlay they aren’t getting all the data about which books or music I’m listening to.
CarPlay absolutely reports currently playing audio metadata back to the car. I've driven multiple cars that display the currently playing song, etc in the driving instruments cluster.
Plain old Bluetooth has supported track/caller data for many years now (ex: AVRCP 1.3) so it should be no surprise that cars were made that read and display that information.
That said, if my car persisted that information I'd be rather suspicious.
P.S.: It's also not unknown to have a certain level of address-book contact sharing over BT, since people were making hands-free calls in their car long before CarPlay/Android-Auto came around.
Is the traffic through there or is it totally within the CANBUS and never hits the WiFi outbound? In that case do you need to hijack the 4G?
And even if there continues to be an opt-out, those plans will become so prohibitively expensive that you're essentially forced to allow your insurer to spy on you. Privacy is always priced out in the free market. Regulation is the only way. It's not a net benefit to society, just outlaw egregious data collection.
The site is likely overloaded by interest from HN readers. Trying again in 48 hours will likely give more performant responses.
Appreciate this link! I don't have one of the listed brands (own a Mazda) but I am curious to see what info data brokers like this have on me in general.
Also, maybe this is a naive thought but I think data brokers like this are so used to operating in the shadows / being forgotten about so I think the more folks who request is at least a small signal to them that folks are paying attention.
Automakers are sharing consumers' driving behavior with insurance companies - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39666976 - March 2024 (321 comments)
That one only spent 3 hours on the front page so I guess we'll let this one have a go too...
Their attorneys are mad protective of the PII they have. Our relationship serves the public interest. We use the data to find people with open recalls where Toyota doesn't know who the current owner is.
I say this to say that we have other OEM relationships that are far more liberal with their encumbered data. This far Toyota seems to be playing it very straight.
That's not what I want! I want them not to collect it. Then I don't have to worry about what they use it for, whether they share it, or whether it will get leaked.
This isn't some dichotomy: either collect data behind peoples backs, or have no way to reach out when there are recalls.
An alternative option: provide an easy, obvious way to subscribe to such notifications.
It sounds like an interesting business though, and one of only a couple examples I can think of where telematics could be used in the public interest.
Shouldnt this be able to go through the State? My state informed me of a recall on a vehicle that I bought used.
If I really don't like LexisNexis collecting this data, or if I really just want to stay on top of my credit status, is there any reason not to script something to request a physically mailed report every day? Not sure how much they pay per mailing, but 365 of them can't be cheap.
• Violations of the Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA) due to the alleged improper sharing and reporting of plaintiffs' driving data without consent, impacting their ability to secure car insurance and leading to increased rates.
• Violations of the Florida Deceptive and Unfair Trade Practices Act, accusing the defendants of engaging in deceptive practices by sharing personal driving data without the knowledge or consent of the car owners.
• Invasions of privacy under Florida common law, arguing that the defendants' actions of tracking, collecting, and sharing personal driving data without consent intrude upon the plaintiffs' private lives and are offensive.
A fine is a price, and there are basically no laws that put financial, let alone criminal liability for people behind the corporate veil or seizure/dissolution of a corporation that consistently breaks the law on the table
Going by the EFF's latest published financials (2022), they took in $23 million vs $16.6 million in expenses. Vs literal billionaires and nation states. Some of the billionaires have more money than the nation states do. David, meet Goliath.
I care. I give them my money. They seem to do a better job at advancing these interests than anyone else. I'm more in awe of their attempts to take on issues of this magnitude given their meager resources than anything else.
The fact is, no company actually primarily exists to employ people, and people lose their jobs to this basic fact all the time, sometimes for no reason other than that some investor expects extremely marginal gains from signaling that they are serious about cutting costs
Also, the dissolution of a company and dispersal of its assets could include allocations for severance pay to cushion the blow if that's a concern, which is not always available to people who are hit by random layoffs
Currently the worst thing companies ever face is a little itty bitty fine and maybe a toothless regulator telling them “Pretty please would you mind not doing that again? If it’s not too inconvenient to shareholders that is…”
If their assets get sold and one entity buys all of them then they could just carry on operating the same company with them. The most likely buyer for something like that would be a competitor. That seems bad.
Maybe we could require the opposite. Their assets get sold, but can't all be sold to the same party. You split the company up, e.g. by delaminating vertically integrated components into separate companies. That way it's easier to enter the market and compete with any of them because you don't have to replicate the whole stack, only that one component.
You might not even need to have a vote, just some rules for when this happens automatically, like when a company has more than e.g. 35% market share, because that's too close to a monopoly and you wouldn't want a trust to form. We could call this anti-trust.
So if I want to start a small business, say a mom and pop restaurant, the public has to approve it first? You must be joking. Most businesses are small businesses. Hamstringing them is a recipe for disaster. Our regulatory system already disadvantages small businesses in countless ways. Indeed, that's part of the reason why large businesses can get away with so much.
The public already has a way to disapprove a business: don't buy from it. If nobody buys what the business is selling, it goes out of business.
The real oversight the public should be exercising, but isn't, is to vote out of office politicians that allow large businesses to buy their way out of trouble.
This “let the market decide” approach is clearly not working. It assumes that only the direct customers of a business are the stakeholders that matter, because they have the wallets to vote with. There are many, many companies that the general public do not buy things from yet suffer their harms. There are a lot of terrible businesses, large and small, that I don’t purchase from which I’d vote in a heartbeat to get rid of if I had the opportunity.
Examples, please? I find this claim extremely dubious.
> There are a lot of terrible businesses, large and small, that I don’t purchase from which I’d vote in a heartbeat to get rid of if I had the opportunity.
Of course, because you personally don't depend on those business for anything. (At least you appear to be assuming you don't--though you might indirectly. But let's assume you don't even indirectly.) What about the people who do?
> Examples, please? I find this claim extremely dubious.
Any company purchasing my data without my knowledge and selling it to advertisers.
Also, do you buy anything that the advertisers who buy your data are selling?
If con-gress was serious, theyd ban/restrict any social media that relied on tracking. Or better yet, they'd pass a bill restricting data brokers of any sort ala GDPR.
Nope. China bad. USA good!
Why would we reciprocate on a Communist plot against our children?
Would China allow an American social media company to capture 75% of their children?
If the point of fighting our enemies is to become our enemy, then why bother fighting?
How do you think countries like Iran, North Korea, etc justify censorship of western content? That exact line is used.
I'm extremely glad that the GDPR and NOYB.eu mean that car manufacturers can't pull that shit here. If I opt out, I'm opted out, or there will be big fines for them.
But it's a long piece of legislation and some of the requirements are time-consuming to implement even if you're not doing anything nefarious. "It is bad for innocent people to incur uncompensated costs" should be a primary principle in creating legislation.
> If I opt out, I'm opted out, or there will be big fines for them.
They're getting sued. If the plaintiffs win they'll have to pay. It's not obvious why this is worse or any less of a deterrent.
I'd say it may not be obvious why, but it's obvious that it is less of a deterrent, because this sort of data trading seems to be commonplace and semi-overt in the US, and much less common (and hush-hush in the rare cases where it does happen) in Europe.
I'd also hazard a guess why it's less of a deterrent: the risk, i.e. probability of successfully getting sued * cost of successfully getting sued, is likely much lower compared to the relatively high probability of a DPA going "WTF no" in Europe as soon as someone reports it.
But that's because the US doesn't even have the law requiring express and freely given consent, so they just stick the consent in some agreement nobody reads next to a box you have to check. You could have that rule without having the whole GDPR.
In this case they apparently collected the data even if you never checked the box, which is just egregious and now they're getting sued.
> the risk, i.e. probability of successfully getting sued * cost of successfully getting sued, is likely much lower
Certainly this is not because plaintiffs would be unwilling to file claims if they could.
This is the legal equivalent of "I can write Doom in one line, import doom; doom.start()".
These have established meanings in existing law. What are you proposing as a plausible ambiguous interpretation of "declared"?
> This is the legal equivalent of "I can write Doom in one line, import doom; doom.start()".
That's two lines.
Also, it's not equivalent, because the original is actually a composition and not just a tautology. It's like saying that this one liner to find word frequencies in a file:
fmt -1 <file> | sort | uniq -c | sort -rn
...isn't a single line of bash because you haven't defined fmt or sort or uniq or '|'.
Is your argument that the GDPR can be one line because "data" already has an established meaning in existing law? The GDPR is large because all these things needed to be defined, and there are tons of edge cases, not because the lawmaker figured they'd add some extra fluff in there.
If you weren't doing anything harmful then your preexisting behavior shouldn't become unlawful.
The rest of the text is about specifying the terms of art processing, data, people, and consent.
> If you weren't doing anything harmful then your preexisting behavior shouldn't become unlawful.
Exactly. Except that you do not get to define harmful, the law does. If you weren't processing any PII, then your preexisting behaviour did not suddenly become unlawful.
The people doing regulation and oversight have been bought and paid for by these "managers and board members." Citizens united codified their right to do this into law.
If you want professional ethics, you have to create a vehicle that can enforce professional ethics or wield political power -- a trade union or guild.
No congress-member is going to wake up and be like "gee, I sure wish I would get a few less bribes (campaign contributions) today," or "I sure would like my stock portfolio to decrease in value by doing real oversight on all these companies that are making me rich."
If the legal system cannot provide consequences to these people, then it's time to start thinking about where those consequences are going to come from. Hoping for consequences is not a very good strategy. A union is one such vehicle.
How's that working with police and/or teacher's unions?
Moreover, it's unclear how "professional ethics" would interact with legal and/or business decisions. If you think it's unethical and the legal department says it's A-okay, then what? For professions like engineering you could plausibly make the case that engineers should have the final say on decisions involving safety or structural soundness, but that's less convincing for business decisions. For instance would civil engineers be expected to reject building a luxury condo on "professional ethics" grounds because the the building would gentrify the neighborhood and displace marginalized groups?
How do you stop a bad guy with a gun? Ironically, the people generally most anti-union know the answer to that question the best.
The police union demonstrates that unions work. They have completely removed police oversight and made officers exist generally above the law and provided incredible overtime pay. That is not an anti-union argument, that's a why the hell aren't you in a union argument.
Teachers unions are more complicated because teachers care more about the children than themselves and that creates a problem because in order to act in their own self interest by exercising union power they have to harm children and maybe even a generation of them. Of course one could also cogently argue that the general undesirability of being a teacher is and has been harming children for decades.
Neither of these is actually applicable here.
GM makes its money from selling cars (and financing for cars). If someone offers them a little extra for the data, they might take it, but they really don't care.
Neither do the insurance companies, except that if their competitors do it then so do they. If any insurance company has the data then they raise rates on the higher risk drivers and turf them to the ones without it, which puts them out of business. But if they're all banned from using it then they're all on a level playing field and again nobody really cares.
All you'd need is a law prohibiting insurance companies from using telemetrics and that would be the end of that. The main lobby against it would be the data brokers in this specific submarket, but they're hardly Big Auto and The Banks.
Start asking 5 whys here and see where it takes you. I'm pretty curious what your model of reality is that "5 whys" doesn't make you feel hopeless.
The whole "we'll make a TV with a $700 BOM and sell it for $600 because the viewing data is so valuable" situation. The "we'll burn valuable customer trust and loyalty for a $40k car because the insurance companies will pay us so much for the monitoring data." The grocery store desperately needing to track individual consumers rather than the aggregate "we sold 500 cans of Spam at this location today"
Civilization somehow managed to work for centuries without having to passively instrument every activity. So we can assume that what's being chased is marginal gains-- slightly better targeting and rates than we could get out of the information we were, as a society, comfortable with being public.
Does it really cover its costs? I always imagined so much of it was institutionalized FOMO-- "we must be data driven because our competitors are"-- and eventually someone's going to run the numbers.
Now, every time I get a spam call, I insist they tell me where they're getting their info from. They'll try to so "our data team", but if you keep insisting they'll tell you.
These data exchange companies are despicable.
[0] Bipartisanly supported by the electorate and bipartisanly opposed by the elected representatives of said electorate
I know otherwise smart people (in the analytical sense) who paid money to hand over their most sensitive biometrics to these companies. And they’re still like “the data brokers can have it, what are they gonna do?”
Clearly your data are more important than you
In fact, to abuse all of this stuff and weaponize it against someone, you do not need to have a court order or a warrant. As long as you find the right people, have the right narrative, companies will do all kinds of stuff to you, even if you are a customer.
And my original reply before going off on a tangent was that even if you remove your sim card, even if you somehow disable emergency services, your phone is still pinging and leaking all these signals that are picked up by all kinds of scanners.
Very few people even accept this is happening at scale, let alone are able to reason about the implications of it all.
The public needs a better job of being informed about the consequences of all of it.
Don't carry a cell phone?
Seems to work just fine =D
Wait seriously? That's a wild choice.
You've Japanese, German and to some extend even Korean cars that are much better. If pick up truck is what you're looking for, then Ford is much better
The car is a 10+ year old design that was the brainchild of a CEO that is no longer there. The company does not really have a mentality of being an EV leader.
It’s a shit show.
https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/privacynotincluded/article...
If we vote with our dollars then the government just bails them out when they inevitably go bankrupt, again.
First past the post voting, which is how US dual-party system prefers to elect, is a sham/joke/embarassment.
Despite being children of an automotive family, with a deep loyalty for the Big 3, we've started to avoid their cars. While they can run forever, they just start failing apart.
What are “foreign manufacturers?” Hondas and Toyotas have been built in the states for a long time. Chrysler has been a transnational merger for a while and Ford and GM have long histories of importing their overseas products.
and consumer reports seems to love the cousin Buick Envista.
https://www.reddit.com/r/cars/comments/rshlke/why_do_gm_vehi...
https://oag.ca.gov/privacy/ccpa#sectionh https://oag.ca.gov/contact/consumer-complaint-against-busine...
LexisNexis knew exactly what they were doing and probably already factored in litigation costs to the product.
Experian should have been fined out of existence when they lost all that data. The light of their funeral pyre could have warned away companies headed down the same path.
I'd like to see a HIPAA for regular data.
My hang ups were mostly that I have a terrible memory so I had to look up info on loans to answer those questions. I was also full of rage that I have to give them my current info, but they 100% already have that from my bank, so whatever.
When thawing you log in to the account and choose what days you want it thawed for. If you apply for loans or lines of credit it's smoother to do ahead of time, but IME nobody cares if you have to thaw and then reapply.
The ability to prevent the car from spying on me was near the top of my list of desired features when I was shopping for a new car. This is one of the main things keeping me from buying another EV. So far as I'm aware there is nothing on the market where I live that won't constantly spy on you with no option to disable.
This article from Mozilla is worth a read: https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/privacynotincluded/article...
I'll have to request my info to see for sure
I'm more confident in effectiveness of pulling the DCM fuse.
Do you have any links you followed for the physical fuse?
It's different for different cars. Search for "DCM fuse" (Data Communications Module) for your model year.
A friend of mine has a Mitsubishi EV Minivan (Japanese model) and it's about as close to a perfect "dumb EV" I've seen yet. It drives incredibly well. They just don't produce a 4x4 model yet, which is important if you live in cold snowy climates.
Kia EV6 has a telematics toggle in the hidden engineering menu. Vehicles sold in Massachusetts have it disabled by default to protest the state's "right to repair" law, but in other regions you can disable it yourself.
I'll stick with my 24 year old Lexus, though.
On the other hand... to all selfish, unsafe street-racing, road-hogging Cadillac XT6 drivers out there: may your insurance rates double and may you swim forever in a sea of adverse underwriting decisions.
Maybe it would be lower relative to other people's rates, but one must imagine that any insurance prices will only ever cost more to the consumer.
(Plus uninsured motorist coverage for the other parts you can't control, which really is an insurance function.)
I believe Allstate has one that uses your mobile phone to do it.
What's the difference between a reward for sharing data on your hard stops vs a penalty for not sharing data on hard stops?
I wonder if they also share their data or if they were trying to find customers for the data.
No sane company would want to participate in such a scheme in Europe. Both the seller and the buyers would be on the hook for massive GDPR fines, and unlike a tech company where the privacy violations might be contributing 50% of the revenue and which could thus easily consider a 4% of revenue fine once every few years a (small) cost of doing business, car companies can't afford that.
General Motors had a global revenue of $172 billion, net income $10B, and the data sales are only a small part of that.
The intermediate company that's buying the data and reselling it to car manufacturers could potentially try to get away with it, because their entire business model depends on it, so they have little to lose. Just make sure to keep no money in the company because once the DPAs learn of the business the company a) has no business model because they will prohibit continued buying/selling of the data b) is likely to be bankrupted by the fine that might well exceed their entire revenue (for smaller companies, the fine isn't capped to 4% of revenue, the limit is 20M EUR).
For the insurance companies that would be buying this data I'd imagine it's even worse.
And this sort of egregious thing is something I can see DPAs actually enforcing, because it'd be much more clear cut than tech companies using non-compliant consent banners.
Edit: And I forgot the most important thing - if they don't put it into their privacy policy they're even more screwed, and if they do put it there, a customer who finds it can get it enforced by sending an e-mail (or in Germany, letter, because some DPAs don't accept e-mail) rather than finding a lawyer willing to start a class action.
My other car with telematics was built in 2016 with a 3G modem that also no longer works.
The car has a bad habit of calling the emergency hotline on a race track if you go over rumble strips (those painted red/white strips) because it shakes the car so violently I guess. Popping the fuse will make it stop happening.
similarly it is /possible/ though a giant PITA to take apart the front of your car and make those work again, per some blog post i saw 4 years ago and can no longer find.
I think this is also true on the Toyotas, but I do not carry a phone with me so it's just me streaming tunes on the XM radio [don't think this tracks/listens].
>your music only comes from the back
However, you barely notice the single missing tweeter, and it is *but a small item on my car-care maintenance list [to add back the sound via harness jumpter/bypass].
It's easier to just disconnect both antenna from the modem OR disable power to it entirely.
Even Toyota has gone too smart with their in tune crap.
Give me a cockroach car that survives for 50 years. No other bells and whistles. Just some connectors for them.
I'm a little skeptical, this reminds me of past arguments of "blame malpractice lawsuits for exploding US medical costs, tort reform will fix it", which doesn't seem to have worked in the places where it was tried.
AFAICT most of the reasons insurers are pulling out of Florida involves the math around catastrophes like hurricanes.
My concern this might become a "be careful what you wish for"?
I believe that telematics could be a valuable tool in addressing this issue by scoring drivers based on their driving habits and adjusting their insurance rates accordingly. This would not only encourage safer driving practices but also ensure that responsible drivers are not unfairly penalized for the actions of aggressive drivers. In my opinion, telematics should be required for operating a vehicle on public roads.
... but I guess some of these people were on something, too.
Wrap your phone in aluminum foil, put it in the microwave, and give it a call. It'll probably still ring.
1. No foil, microwave - rings
2. Foil, no microwave - rings
3. Foil, microwave - doesn't ring
I feel like cell phones have to be more sensitive than w/e transmitter the car has, but your point holds - naively wrapping it in foil still probably won't work.
Tin-foil hat wearers beware.
You can opt out here:
https://subarucustomersupport.powerappsportals.com/Consumer-...
There’s ample evidence that consumers won’t pay for privacy and as most consumers opt in to data sharing programs, the non-data-sharing cohort will get seriously adverse further raising the price of privacy. The equilibrium state is that only bad actors and a handful of privacy zealots will inhabit that pool and mainstream carriers won’t even bid it.
I feel like the answer to the that would explain a lot.
I can relate in some small way to part of his ordeal - not with GM specifically, but I don't know how many times I've been stuck in a loop with companies who have no idea what happens to your data they hoover up and can't explain or answer even the most basic questions on that topic - and are confused as to why you are even asking.
I hope this gets its class action certification and jury trial, and I'm looking forward to kicking back with a bag of popcorn and watching the show. If he started a GoFundMe or something I'd be happy to make a substantial contribution to his legal fees.
It's long past the time bad actors like this who give you no real choice or control over the products you are buying start to be brought to justice.