(WJAR) – When you accelerate, accelerate, or brake while driving, your insurance company may simply be watching you.
An explosive report shows that some automakers are gathering knowledge about your driving habit and then passing it on to insurance corporations to potentially increase their auto insurance premiums.
“What happened in this case is that General Motors and other corporations collected the knowledge and provided it to a knowledge broker, and then the insurance corporations used it to set auto insurance costs for drivers without giving them notice or warning them of what was happening. ” said Chuck Bell of Consumer Reports.
The data is collected through your vehicle’s web features via Driver Habit Telematics, which aims to collect and analyze the driving habit to ensure safety and efficiency.
It’s then sourced through knowledge brokers, such as New York-based LexisNexis, which has a department that works with the auto insurance industry to track car injuries and fines.
Massachusetts U. S. Senator Ed Markey has questioned the use of the generation after sending questions to 14 automakers about what kind of knowledge is being collected.
Most corporations admitted to collecting this information, but did not answer whether they were making a profit from it.
In a letter sent to Markey, General Motors even claimed that it used seatbelt knowledge to know when a passenger is in the car and, potentially, who it is, if that passenger has created their own profile for the vehicle’s infotainment system.
While it might seem innocent for an insurance company to know if you have a passenger in the car, Rhode Island client coverage attorney Christopher Lefebvre said it can also end up costing you dearly.
“We’re going to see, without a doubt, that insurance corporations start to deny any liability for a policy when you don’t wear a seatbelt,” he said.
While sharing that knowledge with third parties may simply violate customer coverage legislation in some states, Lefebvre said it would be more complicated to file a legislative lawsuit in Rhode Island because of the weakness of the customer coverage law.
The state’s client coverage law was amended in 2021 to give state prosecutors the strength to prosecute client coverage cases, but Lefebvre said it does not give personal attorneys the right to sue on behalf of clients.
If the customer unknowingly approved the knowledge sharing by agreeing to an extensive privacy policy, legal action would be even more difficult to take.
NBC 10 I-Team also found that if consumers don’t agree to certain data-sharing policies, they could lose certain technologies in their vehicles.
In a letter sent to Markey, Ford said that while consumers have the option to link or share vehicle data with the company, disabling vehicle connectivity completely disconnects the driver from features such as “Find My Vehicle. “
General Motors said that if a driver opts out of a car app’s privacy statement, the ability of that permission will be diminished.
“In many cases, the automotive industry simply requires drivers to approve the collection and then sale of the knowledge collected as drivers move in the vehicle,” Markey said.
Markey fears that if there is no policy capable of saving this practice, it could be even more invasive, so he asks the Federal Trade Commission to investigate.
“We want to make sure that this very unfair and deceptive practice by the auto industry, in partnership with the insurance industry, comes to an end,” Markey said. “That’s just not true. Where there’s smoke, there’s fire. “
General Motors recently announced that it has stopped sharing telematics insights into drivers’ habits with insurance companies, but it remains to be seen whether other automakers have followed suit.
It’s still clear whether the FTC will investigate.
If you would like to request your customer disclosure report from the LexisNexis Knowledge Agent to see if your driving habit is tracked, click here.