If you drive a car made in the past five years, chances are it’s collecting reams of data about your driving—things like how quickly you accelerate, how hard you hit the brakes, and how fast you turn corners.
[Continue reading below]IN THIS ARTICLE
- How Your Car Data Becomes a Treasure Trove
- How to Opt Out of Sharing and Delete Your Driver Behavior Data
But many people don’t know that this data is being amassed—much less where it goes or how it’s used. General Motors was penalized in January for allegedly using its Smart Driver program to collect and sell its customers’ driving data without their knowledge or permission. The Federal Trade Commission ordered the automaker to not sell driver data for five years to consumer reporting agencies (or credit bureaus) such as Experian, Equifax, and TransUnion. But a Consumer Reports investigation finds that nearly every automaker that sells cars in the U.S. is similarly collecting and sharing so-called “driver behavior data” with other companies and continues to do so.
The end result is that your driving data often winds up in the hands of multiple companies and can be used to influence the insurance premiums and auto loan terms you’re offered online.
To determine this, CR dug through thousands of pages of automakers’ privacy policies and asked questions of 15 different automakers—BMW, Ford, General Motors, Honda, Hyundai, Kia, Mazda, Mercedes-Benz, Mitsubishi, Nissan, Stellantis, Subaru, Tesla, Toyota, and Volkswagen. We also reviewed corporate, regulatory, and legal filings from data brokers operating in the “insurtech” industry—the technology companies and data brokers that help insurance companies set their rates. And we spoke to several car privacy experts, who, at industry conferences and in market reports, have described the profit potential of individual driving data as the “new oil.”
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