• by Tanya Gazdik , July 29, 2024

Two U.S. Senators have asked the Federal Trade Commission to investigate automakers who continue to track drivers and profit off of that data, often without the driver’s knowledge. 

“If you drive a car made by General Motors and it has an internet connection, your car’s movements and exact location are being collected and shared anonymously with a data broker,” according to The New York Times. 

The letter was sent by Senators Ron Wyden of Oregon and Edward J. Markey of Massachusetts to the Federal Trade Commission on Friday.

“Since the original reporting on the data collection, GM stopped collecting data,” according to Jalopnik. However, the letter “says the automaker still shares location data, that it did not seek consent from customers to share the location of their cars and that the only way to to stop the location sharing is to disable the car’s internet connection.”

One of the surprising findings of an investigation by Sen. Wyden’s office was just how little the automakers made from selling driving data. Honda was paid $25,920 over four years for information about 97,000 cars, which works out to 26 cents per car. Hyundai was paid just over $1 million, or 61 cents per car, over six years.

While GM wouldn’t exactly say how much it sold the data for, sources close to the matter told The New York Times the automaker sold data on over eight million cars in the “low millions of dollars” range.

"Companies should not be selling Americans’ data without their consent, period,” the senators write. “But it is particularly insulting for automakers that are selling cars for tens of thousands of dollars to then squeeze out a few additional pennies of profit with consumers’ private data.”

Unlike opt-in insurance monitoring, the manufacturers collected data of internet-connected cars without notice. 

“Carmakers offered little transparency of the practice, despite some, like Ford Motors, submitting patents for the technological practice of ‘collecting information directly from internet-connected vehicles’ via advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS),” according to Mashable. “At the time, General Motors said it ended its partnership with LexisNexis, and Verisk said it ended a program that ‘scored drivers on their safe driving habits using data from internet-connected cars,’ but recent investigations suggest the practice continues.”

The letter said that Hyundai confirmed the data selling practice, and that it never told customers their driving habit data would be for sale if they consented to enable internet access.

"That's particularly disappointing given Hyundai's high-tech focus as of late and the fact that it makes some truly class-leading EVs—all of which depend heavily on internet-connected services and features," according to InsideEVs. "GM and Honda told customers that these 'Safe Driver' programs would be used to lower their premiums if they lived up to that promise. However, aside from the murky consent issues, they also never guaranteed the data would only be used that way."