Re: [PLUG] car tracking

[Rich Freeman via plug <plug@lists.phillylinux.org>]

On Fri, Jan 15, 2021 at 2:46 PM Chad Waters <chad@chadwaters.com> wrote:
>
> How is it used in terms of warranty or lease agreements.
> Do they share that with insurance companies.
> Do they share it with other third parties.
> How is that information stored and protected.
>
> Yes, some of those questions are probably answered in EULAs we signed without reading at the dealership.

Some of that stuff is clearly documented.  Keep in mind that the ECU
logs a lot of data in a ring buffer for a short period of time, which
can be used to figure out what happened before an airbag deployment.
Police and insurance routinely pull this data - usually while you're
lying in a stretcher in no position to object.

I was just in a loaner car for a day and the agreement indicated that
the car was trackable, but the vendor only accesses this data when
necessary to recover a lost/stolen vehicle.

Insurance companies might care about the fault in a specific incident,
but they're actually less interested in everything about what you do
behind the wheel than you might think.  Progressive has their module
that lets you voluntarily have yourself monitored and the only thing
they look at is brake application.  I was listening to an interview
and they said they basically grabbed every bit of data they could from
a bunch of volunteers and the only attribute that actually correlated
with driving risk was brake application, so that is all they monitor.
If you slam on the brakes then you're higher risk.

I imagine care for personal data varies a bit based on how big a
company is.  I bet little companies don't bother to do much since that
requires work.  Large companies know they have a lot of liability
exposure so most actually try to minimize their risk.  At my employer
all sorts of things are subject to privacy assessments, and the
general principle is to minimize or anonymize any kind of data
associated with individual people.  We necessarily deal with medical
info and basically that info is kept for as long as necessary for
regulatory reasons and then tossed.  If there is consent for further
use the data is generally anonymized before being retained further.
If you don't have personal data, then you can't lose personal data.

I suspect it is the same for car companies.  They don't care about you
personally so much as how their cars are used.  So they probably strip
out the really critical info very early during data collection.

But, sure, it is a risk.  I'd still argue that your cell phone is a
WAY bigger risk across the board.  That thing follows you around
everywhere with a camera, microphone, and network access.

-- 
Rich
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