We have already reported on how General Motors collects and sells the data of millions of drivers to the insurance industry, but now it seems that New York Times The reporter who first broke the story also got it involved in this espionage. This is what happened to her and her husband in their lives 2023 Chevy Shop even though they took all necessary measures to stop their car from doing so espionage on them.
The couple were none the wiser until they received it Reports from LexisNexis Risk Solutions and Verisk – two data brokers working with the insurance industry and GM provided data. Her husband’s report listed 203 trips made by car since January. This included things like distance, start and end times, and aggressive driving data. The Verisk report was from mid-December and included 297 trips. There was a general summary above: 1,89.89 miles driven, 4,251 minutes driven, 170 Events with emergency braking24 fast acceleration events and zero velocity events.
This is all completely normal for people who… Opt in to OnStar and its Connected Services plan, as well as Smart Drive, a program that provides feedback and digital badges for good driving. However, the couple didn’t agree to that. From that New York Times:
It wasn’t us – and I had checked to be sure. In mid-January, again during reporting, I had our car connected to the MyChevrolet app to see if we were registered with Smart Driver. The app reported that this was not the case and therefore we had no access to information about how we were driving.
But when we learned in April that our driving was being tracked, my husband logged into a browser-based version of his GM.com account page that said our car was enrolled in OnStar Smart Driver+. According to GM, this discrepancy between the app and website was the result of a “bug” that affected a “small number” of customers. This group got the worst version of Smart Driver: We couldn’t get insights into our driving behavior, but insurance companies could.
The author of this story and her husband were not alone in this. Out of NOW:
Many GM owners have come forward with similar reports since my article was published. Jenn Archer from Illinois purchased a Chevy Trailblazer in April 2022. She didn’t have an OnStar subscription and had never heard of Smart Driver, but discovered last month that LexisNexis had her driving data.
“I was angry,” she said. In the last two years, their insurance rate has increased by 50 percent.
In 10 federal lawsuits filed last month, drivers across the country said they did not knowingly sign up for Smart Driver but recently learned that GM had shared their driving data with LexisNexis. According to one of the complaints, a Florida owner of a 2019 Cadillac CTS-V who drove it for events at a race track had his insurance premium nearly double, an increase of more than $5,000 per year.
At no time were these drivers explicitly informed that this would happen, not even in the fine print, they said. New reports reveal the cause: a misleading screen that these people would have briefly seen when buying their car – if their salesperson had shown it to them.
Back in March of this year, GM said it has stopped exchanging data with LexisNexis and Verisk, which cost them annual sales in the low millions. A new Chief Trust and Privacy Officer was also hired.
Here you can find out what happened to the author and her husband. Out of The Just:
According to GM, our car was registered with Smart Driver when we purchased it from a Chevrolet dealer in New York, during the document signing hassle that comes with purchasing a new vehicle. That this happened to me, the rare consumer who reads privacy policies and is constantly on the lookout for scary data collections, shows how little hope there was for the typical car buyer.
To find out how this happened, I called our dealer, a General Motors franchise, and spoke to the salesman who sold us the car. He confirmed that he had signed us up for OnStar and pointed out that if he didn’t do so, his salary would be reduced. He said this is an order from GM, which sends the dealer a report every month on the percentage of registrations.
GM doesn’t just want dealers to sell cars; They want them to sell connected cars.
Our Bolt automatically came with eight years of Connected Access, a feature we didn’t know about until recently. It allows GM to send software updates to our car but also collect data from it – actions agreed to during OnStar registration.
Our salesperson described registration as a three-step process that he completes every day. He chooses “yes” to enroll a customer in OnStar, then “yes” for the customer to receive text messages, then “no” for an insurance product GM offers that monitors how you drive your car. (This sounds similar to Smart Driver, but is different.)
He did it so often, he said, that it became automatic – yes, yes, no – and that he always chose no for the last option because this monitoring would be annoying for customers.
Ms. Barker, the GM spokeswoman, said dealers are not allowed to solicit customers and that the customer must be the one who accepts the terms. At my request, she provided a series of screens that dealers must show their customers when registering for OnStar and Smart Driver. A message will appear at the top of each screen: “Customer must personally review and accept (or reject) the following terms and conditions.” This action is legally binding and cannot be carried out by dealer personnel.”
The flow of screens was almost exactly what my salesperson described, except for the second screen for receiving messages, which he said he always clicks “yes” on. That screen wasn’t just about accepting messages from GM; It also made us choose the OnStar Smart Driver.
It’s a screen that my husband and I didn’t see – probably because our salesperson filled it out for us as part of his standard procedure.
Okay, I’ve already told you a lot in this story. You should really go to New York Times Here’s a full rundown of what happened, how this small screen recruited millions of people against their will, and what GM is doing about it.
Jalopnik has reached out to General Motors for comment on this story and we will update when we receive a response.