Your Carmaker May Be Selling Your Driving Data to Your Insurance Company

One thing about a country that has no federal privacy law – There are very few limits on what someone can do with data that they have legally collected.

The legal part is that you agreed to allowi your “smart car” to collect your driving data. That data may include things like your speed and braking habits, among a lot of other data. And, you may not be able to opt out of that.

The carmakers, according to the New York Times, are selling that data to third parties.

One such third party is the massive data broker LexisNexis.

LexisNexis, in turn, is selling data to the insurance industry.

All perfectly legal once you agreed to the sharing of that data.

For example, Kenn Dahl saw his insurance rates by 21%. When he shopped for new insurance, everyone else had similar rates.

One agent admitted that this was due to his LexisNexis report.

One plus of the new state privacy laws is that in many cases you can ask companies for a copy of all of the data they collected from you. In Dahl’s case, LexisNexis sent him a 250 plus page report that included every trip he made in the last six months – 640 of them.

The report includes start and end times, dates, distance and driving data like speeding, braking and acceleration.

Some insurance companies offer a lower rate if you plug a transponder into your car. Other insurance companies partner with a third party to monitor your home’s power (State Farm uses Ting, for example). Ting provides that data to third parties including your insurance provider who may raise your rates or cancel your policy as a result. Many people, as a result, will not install the sensor, even though it may mean that some threats will go undetected.

In the case of the transponder, the user is voluntarily agreeing to be monitored and for the data to be collected and sold. In the case of Dahl, while legally he agreed to the collection, he probably didn’t know that GM was going to sell the data, ultimately, to his insurance company. He also probably didn’t know the level of detail data that was being collected.

It is anticipated that over the next decade carmakers will make more money from selling your data than selling you a car. Think about that.

Credit: ZDNet

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