GM accused again of secretly selling Americans’ driving data

The Arkansas trial says GM has used “Dark models” to handle customers to share data without knowing it

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If you thought your car was just a mode of transport, think again, because it is a gold mine for the data brokers. The Office of the Attorney General of Arkansas, Tim Griffin, filed a complaint against General Motors and OnStar for having allegedly sold data driving to insurance companies.

This trial is only the last of a growing list of cases where car manufacturers are under fire for the collection and sale of user data. In August of last year, the Attorney General of Texas Ken Paxton continued General Motors for similar accusations, and recently, Ford, Hyundai, Toyota and FCA all faced similar combinations.

Read: Texas Ford, Hyundai, Toyota, FCA probes to sell sensitive driver data

The trial, tabled at Phillips County Circuit Court, says that GM has followed and sold detailed data on customers to third -party brokers for more than a decade. Among the data allegedly collected by GM are the speed of the vehicle, the percentage of high -speed pipes, driving habits at the end of the evening, the distance traveled, acceleration and braking schemes. He paints an image of a company wishing to know everything about the driving habits of his customers – even when they sail on empty highways at 3 am

Data collection without consent

According to the trial, GM has been selling this data for years without obtaining an explicit consent of drivers. It would have included information of more than 100,000 arkansas vehicles only.

Even more worrying is the assertion that GM did not collect data from OSTAR users, but from anyone who used a GM mobile application or has activated an internet connection in their car. In other words, if you have already had Wi-Fi in a GM vehicle, they may have followed you, even if you have never registered for the OSTAR services.

Allegations of “dark patterns”

The costume also accuses GM of using “dark models”, a design technique aimed at encouraging customers to accept terms they could otherwise reject by “taking advantage of consumers’ cognitive prejudices to keep them material information necessary to make fully informed decisions”.

It is alleged that GM has sold data behind third -party exchanges, first receiving a lump sum for the initial lot, then continuing to ratify periodic payments for additional data sent in the following years.

The Arkansas investigation occurs about a year after The New York Times revealed that several car manufacturers sold data sensitive to driving and shared them with insurance companies. GM has sold information to the Lexisnexisis Risk Solutions and Verisk data brokers.

During a press conference on the trial assisted by Eldorado NewsThe Attorney General of Arkansas, Tim Griffin, underlined the lack of transparency in these practices. “No one was informed that this happened. Even if an Arkansan read carefully each word on the screen (registration), all the disclosure, all the liaison policies, spent the time it would take to do so, and we were all faced with this, generally (when you) in a hurry, when we click and advance … This information, would not still inform the customer of GM’s real driving. »»

In other words, “small prints” are apparently much thinner than consumers do it.