General Motors Quits Sharing Driving Behavior with Data Brokers | Hacker News Reader

General Motors Quits Sharing Driving Behavior with Data Brokers

nytimes.com

76 pointstoomuchtodo33 comments

All the automakers have done this awful anti-consumer behavior. GM is only rolling it back as they got caught in lawsuit and are now facing some reputational risk.

Still...as the first automaker to stop the madness, it makes me happy and I hope it continues to the other car producers. I'd been thinking about buying a new vehicle recently, but it's hard to go give someone $30k who is literally a screwing you in 100 different ways. I'd rather buy a darn kit car at this point.

The thing that's annoying me right now is how Ford wants to sell you back features like their advanced cruise control and navigation systems. If my employment contract didn't make things legally murky I'd totally be trying to replace this shit with something less user hostile.

Now I don't really want to be on the road where people are running random self driving algorithms they downloaded from the internets on their electric deathwagons, but the automakers rent seeking behavior seems to be driving us ever closer to that dystopian future.

I am personally more forgiving of software unlocks for things like ADAS systems. My thinking is that they incurred that as a large R&D cost not a per unit cost. So, having it be an add on allows me to not pay for it if I don’t want it. If they didn’t have this option you would still be paying for it but just a little less. The low end of the market would just be subsidizing your preference.

Paying a subscription for hardware already shipped can die in a fire though.

For things where there is a significant "cloud" type cost I am happy enough paying for that. But the software cost for the code in the car at the time of purchase should be covered by the cost of the car. It's not like there isn't an R&D cost in the hardware part of the car as well.

If the concern is the lower part of the market subsidizing the upper part, just don't install the software and market it as included on those vehicles. Just make it an overpriced option like every other thing on the vehicle.

(Aside: charging $80/year for a navigation system that is objectively worse than I can get for free on my phone, why would you expect me to pay that?)

What we need is a law banning this data collection in the first place. Vehicles should be always offline, period. The job of a vehicle is to drive from point A to point B. Everything else is waste.

> “OnStar Smart Driver customer data is no longer being shared with LexisNexis or Verisk,”

Note that they haven't stopped sharing the data completely, only to those two data brokers.

That's another thing I found odd about the wording. Good grief.

And we're supposed to just believe that?

It's almost guaranteed that after a "long and thorough review" (showing consultants the local fine dining scene) they'll share "limited data" (literally everything) which has been "thoroughly anonymized" (with ROT-13) with "carefully selected partners" (anyone willing to pay) for "diagnostic purposes" (we diagnose a need for more money).

Let's be honest here, they are only sorry that they got caught.

The new program will be purely optional and voluntary, as part of the T&C users accept by using the interactive in-dash entertainment and information system. /s

That’s needlessly cynical.

They’ll use double ROT-13 to be extra sure their customers’ privacy is respected.

What new car can you buy nowadays that either has:

* No pushing of driving data to the cloud, or

* this pushing of data can easily be disabled (pulling a fuse, etc)

for privacy minded folks? It seems almost like a lost battle.

2024 Kia EV6. Go into the hidden engineering menu and disable telematics. Or purchase the vehicle in Massachusetts, where this will already have been done for you.

Any chance you happen to know the latest code to get into the hidden menu on the EV6? Used to be 19190307, though it was changed in the 231215 infotainment firmware update.

I don't, sorry. I've held off on installing updates for exactly this reason. They seem to vary based on current year as well as firmware version - you might try rolling your system clock back to 2023 before trying again.

No worries! Thanks for the hint about the date -- I didn't know that was a function in the equation. Changing the date back to 2023 actually allowed the 19190301 code (had a typo in my original post) to work, though it seems they've removed the telematics switch unfortunately. Some day, I'll have to figure out how to disconnect the antenna.

That's disappointing - thanks for the info. I guess I'll continue to avoid infotainment updates. I can confirm that the telematics toggle is present (and functional) in the variant coding submenu on version 221025. I wonder what dealers are doing in Massachusetts now.

I think the antenna connectors are accessible if you remove the lower center console trim, then reach up behind the screen. But I haven't tried this, since the software toggle works for me.

Does anyone know of list of vehicles that do this?

Chevy equinox fuse 38

Seems like this: https://www.popularmechanics.com/cars/car-technology/a24666/... :)

There are options in the GUI for my Ford Mach E to do that.

And they have clearly stated that they never send data to data brokers. The data they collect, if you agree, is to help them improve the cars. Not for them to sell to make extra money.

They claim, currently.

Only after they got caught.

And realized the potential penalty was orders of magnitude higher than what they were getting.

https://archive.today/yX2Mj

I guess my thinking is orthogonal or counter to the theme of this story, but I hate that in California I have the opposite problem. California outlawed insurance discounts from telematics, but did nothing about the telematics themselves, which is the worst possible situation.

I wonder if it’s possible to take a car offline or at what point it will become impossible to do so. Because if GM - and others can do this — there’s no doubt that at some point cars could be bricked unless they can phone home.

Semi-related FYI if anyone is a Subaru owner (with Starlink): you can opt out of all 3rd-party data sharing from their Starlink telemetry, as they've extended the CCPA rights across all of the US [0]

[0] https://www.subaru.com/support/consumer-privacy.html

How much can they make from selling this type of information?? Hundreds of billions?

It would seem to me that the amounts would be pitifully small as compared to making their customers angry. Even if it was $20 million, or $40 million, or $100 million - that's small potatoes compared to their annual revenue of $42 billion.

What a creepy world we have become!

It's as if you draw a thousand targets on your back every time you use technology nowadays.

"The only winning move is not to play."

No, the winning move is to actually make legislation that says you can’t do ridiculous creepy nonsense.

But we are not allowed to do that so we can just shame people and hope that they actually follow through for more than two months.

Next do Ford!

There's a lot of criticism of the "main-stream media", but credit to the New York Times to shedding some light on this subject. Hard to know if GM's changes are genuine, but they know they are being watched.

It's a shame that Apple cancelled their car program. They were definitely in waaay over their heads in attempting self-driving, but an Apple car would have far more trustworthy software than those from other manufacturers.

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