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I was shocked to read the story of a man named Romeo Chicco being unable to get car insurance because GM sold the driving history from his 2021 Cadillac to Lexis Nexis which insurance companies rhen used to designate him as high risk.
It looks like this has become a PR disaster for GM and they’re stopping the practice.
@carnage4life they seem to be stopping the practice but apparently they are against legislation that would make it illegal.
So: they are temporarily stopping the practice, until the shitstorm subsides.
@carnage4life also, super important and needs to be repeated any time GM gets any "credit" for "stopping the practice" — the data they had already shared is not going to be revoked/removed from data brokers' systems.
People whose data got already shared are screwed, even if GM stops sharing any new data.
They sold customers' data to insurance companies, but in return gave them "digital badges for good driving" 
@carnage4life the end result here was that an unsafe driver found it more difficult to drive. That seems good, but sharing location data with brokers is bad. We should try to have technologies which make it harder for drivers to drive unsafely (speeding, running red lights, etc.) without sharing detailed location data. Speed governors and red light/speed limit cameras could achieve that in a privacy-preserving way, but drivers tend to oppose them.
@objectObject @carnage4life I believe we do not have enough data to come to that conclusion. The only one I believe we can safely assume this was done without informed consent.
@oldgeek @carnage4life I'd be surprised if the tracking data were uncorrelated to risk of accidents. Insurers have pretty strong incentives to raise rates on unsafe drivers, though perhaps they'd push too far in one direction on the precision/recall curve. Tho I'd bet it's something simple like speeding.
My point is that no one has a privacy right to drive unsafely, and we should find tech that stops unsafe driving without impinging on other legitimate privacy rights.
@objectObject @oldgeek @carnage4life I would rather expect a lot more signal comes from hard acceleration and braking, and cornering speed. I'd also expect it to punish people who live near or on a fast road more - if you have a tough junction to come out of, where you need to accelerate hard to get into a gap, you're going to be dinged.
@carnage4life The Daily episode that pairs with this was decent as well. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/18/podcasts/the-daily/car-gm-insurance-spying.html
@carnage4life the fact that they did this in the first place is demonstrative that GM is not trustworthy with sensitive information, and probably never was.
@carnage4life I understand from the article that it was worth "low millions of dollars", and 8 million cars were involved. I guess profit for GM could have been as high as $5 a car. How could they replace that kind of revenue?
Too late to ever get my business again. Weasels