https://pluralistic.net/2024/03/12/market-failure/#car-wars
'Another characteristically brilliant Kashmir Hill story for
The New York
Times reveals another characteristically terrible fact about modern life: your
car secretly records fine-grained telemetry about your driving and sells it to
data-brokers, who sell it to insurers, who use it as a pretext to gouge you on
premiums:
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/11/technology/carmakers-driver-tracking-insurance.html
Almost every car manufacturer does this: Hyundai, Nissan, Ford, Chrysler, etc
etc:
https://www.repairerdrivennews.com/2020/09/09/ford-state-farm-ford-metromile-honda-verisk-among-insurer-oem-telematics-connections/
This is true whether you own or lease the car, and it's separate from the
"black box" your insurer might have offered to you in exchange for a discount
on your premiums. In other words, even if you say no to the insurer's carrot –
a surveillance-based discount – they've got a stick in reserve: buying your
nonconsensually harvested data on the open market.
I've always hated that saying, "If you're not paying for the product, you're
the product," the reason being that it posits decent treatment as a customer
reward program, like the little ramekin warm nuts first class passengers get
before takeoff. Companies don't treat you well when you pay them. Companies
treat you well when they fear the consequences of treating you badly.'
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
