Is your car a snitch? What your car is telling insurers

now a follow-up to a story that we told you about earlier this month a report in the New York Times about how auto companies sell data from connected cars to data brokers who then in turn sell it to insurance companies that can use it to charge you higher premiums I looked into the data privacy settings of my own car to try and disable possible outside monitoring and I wasn't able to do it I've been trying to do this since Monday every day there are more calls back and forth it's really complica

ted the dealership can't figure it out either I've been on the phone with them every day our next guest wrote this story for the times and after her initial report General Motors actually said that it had stop sharing driving details with data Brokers joining us right now is cashmir Hill she is the New York Times Tech reporter and author of your face belongs to us and cashmir I have to say this story is one that really made me sit up and pay attention because you talked to Consumers who had eith

er had their insurance rates jacked up because data was being collected they didn't know about or in some cases they couldn't get insurance what happened yeah well this was very shocking for drivers uh I think most people assume when they spend a lot of money on this car uh what happens in it is going to stay private but what was happening to people who drove cars made by General Motors um was that information was being collected about when they sped uh how many miles they drove how many times t

hey hard break or rapidly accelerated uh because they had enrolled some say unknowingly in a program called smart driver uh and yeah it was very shocking to them and they found out about it because their insurance rate started going up and when they asked the insurance companies why they said go pull your Lexus Nexus disclosure report uh this is a data broker who works with insurance companies and when they did that they saw all this driving data and the report said where it came from and it was

from General Motors wow um every time I turn my car on it says it gives me this privacy warning that your information is being sent back and we're watching it um there are ways you can shut it off in your car but I have tried and every time I shut it off it turns it right back on um dealt with my dealership I'm I'm with the Nissan dealt with my dealership this week they can't even figure out how to do it without entirely disabling the satellite feed for satellite radio and the GPS monitoring th

ey got me to sign up for another app that basically says now if I want to shut anything off I have to call somebody fill out forms and mail them in um is this something every car company is doing You Are Not Alone Becky I mean I'm hearing from drivers across the country who are waking up to the fact that their car is a smartphone on Wheels and it's doing all this data collection and we as consumers just don't know we can't see it uh and so and you can't even shut it off when you try to I think t

hat's the bigger issue we know it you send us this thing saying we're monitoring this if you don't want it opt out it's nearly impossible to opt out of these stupid programs and by the way you may say yeah your phone already knows all that that's fine apple is not selling my information to third party data hackers well smartphones have airplane mode right like you can turn off the sending of data but with cars they're just most cars there's not an off button that says stop sending data for my ca

r like I don't want you know the automaker or anywhere else anyone else to know where I'm driving or how I'm driving and so this is just a huge problem and all the experts are telling me look we're we're kind of at with cars where we were with smartphones a decade ago when people did start waking up to the fact that they were carrying around a tracking device and so we got very you know we got granular controls and the smartphone to allow us to more easily control the information leaving it and

that really needs to happen with cars um I think GM took the right step privacy yeah I think GM took the right step by saying they're not going to sell that data anymore um you've spoken to people in Washington who are paying attention to this and if car companies don't follow suit I think there there could be some things that they take action on yeah I talked to Senator Ed Marky for this story uh uh from Massachusetts and you know he has been as many lawmakers uh across the country have been as

king car companies you know what data are you collecting how are you using using it who are you selling it to and when I told him about these programs and specifically what General Motors had done he said you know that really sounds like a violation of the law that protects consumers against unfair and deceptive business practices and yes GM after my story came out announced that they're no longer going to be sharing this this uh data with these two data brokers who were uh selling it to the int

erance industry and they said they're re-evaluating you know their pri PRI privacy practices um but yeah I mean what these companies were doing was just putting this kind of in the fine print in the Privacy policies that no one reads and that is just not how this should be done Kashmir I think you're signing shining a a light on a very important area for some of these things um what do you anticipate happens next because what I was told yesterday is that you know wait till 2025 next year you are

going to see cars that make this look like Child's Play that right now they're only collecting about 10% of the information that they'll be capable of of collecting or that you know my car is a couple years old that the ones that come out next year literally um can collect far more data chips have gotten better what happens next I mean cars have hundreds of sensors and cameras and they're doing all kinds of data collection this benefits us I mean this is why we have crew cruise control and the

ability to know that there's a car you know next to us we get all these warnings and alerts uh the fact that you can kind of control your your car with your smartphone that you can find it there are great conveniences but they do come with this downside where it's just possible to collect so much information about us and C they've G to have a camera watching you the entire time you're driving I me your car knows how much you weigh because there's sensors in the seat uh when you sit down because

they need to know if there's a child you know in the passenger seat so the car can turn off the airbags um so it's why we really do need to address uh consumer control of data because when I was talking to drivers you know that this happened to they said it felt like a betrayal they had paid so much money for this car and the data is leaving it um and you know it just is really outside of the expectations of of what people expect to happen with their car my car W not going to rat me out I don't

I don't likees the way I drive