General Motors Is Banned from Selling Driving Behavior Data for 5 Years

This is largely the work of Lina Khan and the people reporting to her. She's fairly new to the FTC still (Biden appointee) and has been intentionally pushing on all of this.

Protecting it is difficult since the house/senate and scotus are all determined to roll back pro-consumer laws but that's not really something the FTC can fix, only voters can fix that.

Voters don't seem to see these things as important though based on how they voted most recently. They have other priorities I suppose.

They don’t give a shit about privacy directly but GM was egregious in collecting this data

- confusing consumers

- sneakily signing up consumers to “smart driver” as part of onstar

- data brokers subsequently building profiles on users and selling this data to _insurance companies_

- consumers later finding out their insurance doesn’t get renewed because of this secret driver profile that was built without their explicit consent

If GM followed the rules by disclosing this directly, allowing consumers to opt out. They probably wouldn’t be in this embarrassing position.

It’s in the FTC release: https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2025/01/...

[flagged]

Probably a class action lawsuit in the future, if one does not already exist.

Jail time? Probably not, we let health insurance companies get away with taking away critical needs from patients and delaying care in the name of delivering shareholder value. The best they get is a slap on the wrist from the government, let alone jail time.

Yes I don't understand the "5 Years" part at all.

Either it's illegal or it isn't.

No judge ever says "I ban you from burgling houses for 5 years!", like after 5 years it would be okay again.

Yeah and it’s simple to reidentify anonymous location traces. The simplest way is to buy cell phone location data from apps, which is generally intermittent, but even with just 5-6 location/time pairs, you’re going to be able to positively identify someone, with the small caveat that there will be some ambiguity with members of a household that share a car.

Every new car has a SIM card. Apparently in Europe used for emergency automatic calls. But having SIM card in the car is not mandatory. All the information in other cases is saved in the car. And when you bring the car to the dealership the information is transferred over the wire in old fashioned way. Safest thing is to have an older car without much electronics, that can be repaired outside dealership network. Some cars like a Teslas have very normal cameras filming interior. Apparently to monitor the driver. But who knows.

Tiktok's being banned while Meta is more or less able to do the same thing but worse. It's pretty much about who can line pockets rather than the fact that selling user data is wrong.

I guess GDPR is a good idea, but in practice it has limited value. I suppose all that is needed is that the user accepts (consents) by answering yes to a popup question. It can be asked over and over. If you answer yes by accident at some point you are screwed. You can maybe(?) retract your answer, but maybe you don't even know you answered yes at some point when you were stressed and had to drive somewhere, while your nav/media system asked you this question.

The main problem is that this sort of thing (tracking of cars and storing the data in a central database) is considered normal by corporations and is allowed by law. Would we like to have big corporations place private detectives outside our houses and when we leave they follow our every step, take photos, record audio and track our GPS position and report all that data to the corporation in realtime? That is what they do now with their cars and phones and appliances. The reason they did not do it in the past was that it was expensive to have private detectives track each of their customers, was considered spooky and abnormal and it was probably also illegal, but now it is cheap and somehow considered normal.