When I read this NYT article I didn't find Toyota mentioned as sharing data/reporting driving behavior to insurance companies: Automakers Are Sharing Consumers’ Driving Behavior With Insurance Companies Automakers Are Sharing Consumers’ Driving Behavior With Insurance Companies - The New York Times However, when I entered my VIN in the vehicleprivacyreport.com it appears to indicate sharing. Your thoughts please! See screenshot:
I wasn't able to input my VIN to test it, can't see the whole article...I don't have a New York Slimes account and will never have one. Privacy laws seemed to have taken a back seat since covid hit and I think we need to start standing up and pushing back....privacy laws, especially HIPAA, are STILL there but are being violated all the time. Gosh, just say any item ("couch") near your cell phone and you'll see all kinds of furniture ads just about everywhere! Everybody is spying on us all the time...it's not just the gubmint anymore. I don't get a lot of car insurance offers...I drive a Prius in Colorado and we have a reputation of driving like bats out of he!! so rarely drive the speed limit!
Are they selling *your* data attributes to you to insurance? Or are they selling blocks of anonymized data to insurance companies which will help them in aggregate adjust baseline risk calculations for makes/models?
I’ve never driven for fun, so I guess I wouldn’t know. Do you mean illegal behavior? I can’t see what else an insurance company would be interested in
Oh I see the sales slogan now: "Plenty of cars can move anybody but it takes something special to move a body!" Serious question here: Is a smartphone on wheels any worse than the one you already had around you anyway? I mean, I can see where the car creates a situation where Toyota could be selling a second copy of "your data" to a different suite of brokers... but other than multiplying the outputs of "your data" does it really change much?
Your smart phone can provide all the data an insurance company would use to adjust your rate without connecting to the car. Acceleration and deceleration rates with time of the drive is all Liberty used for their monitoring program.
I saw that NY Times article this morning and requested my data from Toyota and LexisNexis. Yesterday (coincidentally) I read the fine print about data sharing on the Toyota site. What a pain! It appears that Toyota does not share as much personal data as does General Motors, but we'll see.
You can opt out of the insurance information data transmission in the app. I'm pretty sure this only applies to fleet vehicles anyway.
Our banks are the worst. They sell all our demographics and spending habits. I mailed them a letter saying I don't consent to such and I will seek remuneration for damages if they do
Quote #1 "privacy laws, especially HIPAA, are STILL there but are being violated all the time," "we need to start standing up and pushing back...." Quote #2 "we have a reputation of driving like bats out of hell so rarely drive the speed limit! " Some call this "situational ethics."
If you don't use any remote services then I suggest googling how to disable the DCM/Telematics unit in the car. The tacoma forums have good info. I've found that the Prius people are pretty complacent regarding the matter and don't seem to care much. You'll need to bridge some pins to restore door speaker and microphone (the microphone requires power supplied through the telematics unit to function). That is if you're concerned about privacy and security. Doesn't matter what the law is, doesn't matter what you agree to or do not agree to, if you allow your car to communicate remotely in the background you must assume that any data that can be collected from you (including from the pairing of your phone to the car) will be transmitted out to Toyota and whoever they deem fit. "oh we can sue" yeah and enjoy that $5 check while your data is still out there.
In Germany Toyota just offers its own insurance - if you want even directly with telemetry scoring to get a few % off via Toyota connect (or how this integrated service is called). So in these cases they really know very well what customers are doing.
The Europeans have data privacy laws. Americans don't, except HIPAA, which only covers medical information. Under the American system once a company gets information about you, they own it and can monetize it as they please. So they do. You are not a person to them, you are just a data field somewhere out in the cloud. If they make fifty cents selling your information, and it winds up costing you $500, well that's just business.
Oddly enough back in ye olde times when I actually used the old imprint machines to submit credit cards they used extremely aggressive language of the consequences of keeping consumers data without destruction for more than 60 days. So I’m not sure about that, storehousing consumer data is and has always been mostly illegal in the US, we just don’t care or enforce formerly settled law. This is similar to usurpery law not being enforced when it’s a hedge fund or private equity firm, prior to 1975 these entities could not take out loans to pay themselves (usurpery), they had to actually act in good faith and make the business work to claim wages from the profit. Most of what these firms do would have resulted in the leaders of the group loosing all worldly goods and jail.